To mark today’s International Day of Democracy, the National Democratic Institute is helping to organize around issues of legislative openness.
The Global Legislative Openness Week (GLOW) is being organized by the Legislative Openness Working Group of the Open Government Partnership (OGP), which is co-anchored by NDI and the Chilean Congress. The full calendar of activities, which will run from September 15 to 25, is listed here, although a few events are still being added by additional partners.
Mobile technology and social media are changing the way that citizens engage in politics. At the same time, however, many tradition-bound representative institutions have been slow to harness the power of technology to improve legislative transparency or to open the legislative process to greater citizen participation. GLOW is intended to help highlight this issue and to share information on good practices around legislative openness. Parliaments and civil society organizations in more than a dozen countries are participating in GLOW through in-country events or by helping to share information online regarding their legislature’s efforts to become more transparent and to better engage citizens.
Several organizations are also using GLOW to advocate for greater legislative transparency in their countries. The Sunlight Foundation is coordinating a number of advocacy efforts to coincide with the event, including this letter which has been translated into multiple languages and will be sent to presiding officers of legislatures and parliaments around the world. NDI has not signed on to the letter because it is not a parliamentary monitoring organization, but it is supportive of the effort. To date, the letter has been endorsed by more than 80 organizations in more than 40 countries.
While there will be a fair amount of activity on the hashtag throughout the week, there are several “tweet talks” being held using the hashtag at specific times throughout the week:
- Sept. 19, 10-11 AM EST/ 6-7 PM Tbilisi: Money in Parliaments, Best Practices for Financial Disclosure, moderated by Sunlight Foundation and Transparency International Georgia.
- Sept. 22, 10-11 AM EST: What Commitments Can Your Legislature Make? Expanding Open Government Partnership Action Plans, moderated by the National Democratic Institute.
- Sept. 23, 3-4 AM EST/ 9-10 AM Prague/5-6 PM Sydney: Analyzing and Visualizing Parliamentary Data, moderated by KohoVolit.eu.
Please feel free to follow and participate in these discussions and to follow the hashtag throughout the week.
More information on the week’s events can be found at openparl2014.org, or by contacting Sarah Welsh on NDI’s governance team at swelsh@ndi.org.
