Global Legislative Openness Week

News | Publications | Open Government | Article 13 August 2015

Global Legislative Openness Week is an annual event about transparency and participatory parliament. It is an addition opportunity for government, parliament and civil society representatives to share knowledge and seek new commitments.

First Global Legislative Openness Week took place in 2014. Over 45 activities were held in 30 countries. In 2015, under the GLOW, there are many activities planned globally.

The Western Balkans OGP Dialogue – “OPEN GOVERNMENT, ENGAGED CITIZENS: A LEARN-AND-SHOW INITIATIVE TO MAKE OPEN GOVERNMENT PARTNERSHIP WORK”, to be held on 10-11 September, in Tirana, Albania. The main objective will be to launch a Forum where participants will reflect on effective initiatives to further open government and on challenges and obstacles to open government, and how to overcome them. Moreover, the forum intends to strengthen the ways of communication between the government and the civic society within the frameworks of the OGP. Finally, the activity will promote the Regional Cooperation, sharing of best practices and effective initiatives. An estimated number of 150-200 international participants and around 100 participants from Albania will participate from government, civil society and international organization background. Institute for Democracy and Mediation and the Ministry of Innovation and Public Administration are the hosting organizations. The event has several regional and local partner organizations. The donor organizations are the European Union, UNDP, USAID and the German Marshall Fund.

Sunlight Foundation’s annual “TransparencyCamp” will be held on 11-12 September in Washington D.C., USA. The conference will be about OGP - to share the knowledge about the use of new technologies to make the government more transparent. The schedule of the conference is not structured and most of the issues will be set during the event by participants with their suggestions. This is a platform for government representatives, journalists, decision-makers, students and generally active citizens to share new approaches to open government.

The last “TransparencyCamp” was organized on 30-31 of May, 2014, at George Mason University and over 500 participants from 20 countries were present. Some of the key issues were sharing the knowledge and doing better to connect non-tech and with tech inside government, civil society and academia.

On 14-15 September the Open Government Partnership’s Legislative Openness Working Group meeting will be held in Tbilisi, Georgia. The meeting will be chaired by the Congress of Chile and the National Democratic Institute. The meeting will unite the focused group of legislators, parliament staff and civil society representatives to share experience advancing legislative openness and explore ways to advance public access to legislative information and process. The Parliament of Georgia is a host organization. The partner organizations are: European Union, UN Development Programme, National Democratic Institute (NDI), Institute for Developing of Freedom of Information (IDFI), Transparency International (TI), German Federal Enterprise for International Cooperation (GIZ) and US Agency for International Development (USAID).

On 15th of September Inter-Parliamentary Union (IPU) will celebrate the Democracy Day. IPU works to promote democracy through its member parliaments in 164 countries around the world. Since the United Nations General Assembly declared in 2007 that every 15 September should be observed as the International Day of Democracy, hundreds of events have been held to mark this day in over 100 countries. Therefore, the main supporting organization of this event is the United Nations Organization.

If you are willing to look for more detailed information about these events, you can visit the official web-page. Also, on the same web-site, you can check the GLOW calendar and other useful resources.

 
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