Welcome to OpeningParliament.org, a forum intended to help connect the world's civic organizations engaged in monitoring, supporting and opening up their countries' parliaments and legislative institutions.
Parliamentary monitoring organizations (PMOs) are working to create strong, open and accountable parliaments, through enhancing citizen participation in the legislative process and bringing parliaments closer to the people they represent. OpeningParliament.org provides a forum for international collaboration on efforts to improve access to parliamentary information and share experiences and good practices among PMOs. It also serves as the home of the Declaration on Parliamentary Openness, a set of shared principles on the openness, transparency and accessibility of parliaments developed by the international PMO community.
OpeningParliament.org and the Declaration on Parliamentary Openness are outcomes of a conference of PMOs co-hosted by the National Democratic Institute, the Sunlight Foundation, and Latin American Network for Legislative Transparency, in Washington, D.C. The conference, held from April 30-May 2, 2012, brought together PMOs from 38 countries worldwide to facilitate discussion of international strategies for improving access to useable parliamentary information and sharing good practices in advocating for parliamentary transparency and in monitoring parliamentary performance.
The gathering was supported by the Omidyar Network, the Open Society Foundations, the National Endowment for Democracy, the World Bank Institute and the Embassy of Mexico to the United States. For more information, please see a full conference agenda and links to presentations, and the joint press release issued at the conclusion of the conference.
For more recent information about the initiative, see our Timeline of Events and the OpeningParliament.org blog.