Sunlight is thrilled to celebrate Global Legislative Openness Week, calling for increased legislative transparency and parliamentary open data around the globe.
Continue readingOne Year of Monitoring the World’s Parliaments
It has been just over a year since the PMO Leaders Conference convened an ever-growing community of activists working to open up their national and local parliaments. It has been a year since numerous individuals and groups participated in drafting the Declaration on Parliamentary Openness. It has been a year full of promise and success for the PMO community, but that’s not to say that we couldn’t do more to work together.
Continue readingInternational Declaration on Parliamentary Openness
Tomorrow morning, I'll be joining a number of other organizations in addressing a broad gathering of parliamentary officials at the World e-Parliament Conference. We'll be formally announcing the Declaration on Parliamentary Openness, a joint document prepared and drafted by the growing movement of Parliamentary Monitoring Organizations, or PMOs, operating throughout the world. This is the clearest, most broadly representative effort yet to represent global norms for legislative transparency. It's intended to create common goals and expectations for a representative branch of government that is transparent and accountable, increasingly by using new technology to represent citizens better. Sunlight is participating as both a PMO, since our advocacy, reporting, and technology are so often about political influence and substance in Congress, and also as a convener, joining with the National Democratic Institute and the Latin American Network for Legislative Transparency to connect PMOs from around the globe. We created OpeningParliament.org to serve as a resource for the group and our activities, and since our kickoff meeting in May 2012 (adjacent to TransparencyCamp), the community has grown dramatically, and worked together to shape and sharpen the declaration. Over 80 organizations have now endorsed the declaration, and we're proud to be presenting it to officials from the world's Congresses, Assemblies, and Parliaments tomorrow.
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