This week’s Paris Summit comes at an important moment in the growth of the Open Government Partnership (OGP). With the recent passage of an official legislative engagement policy, the OGP Steering Committee has more clearly outlined rules for legislative participation, clearing the way for deeper parliamentary engagement in OGP. This Summit provides an important opportunity to share information about this new policy, identify community priorities for the coming year, and develop a more concrete strategy for fully realizing the potential of legislative engagement.
If you are attending the Summit and are interested in legislative openness issues, please find an agenda for the Summit’s legislative track here.
As in previous years, the Summit program will include a number of sessions dedicated to legislative openness. These sessions will focus on a range of technical issues, from open legislative data, to the creation of “hacker spaces” and other institutional innovations, to efforts in France to facilitate co-creation of legislation. Other sessions will focus on the role of parliaments in the Open Government Partnership, including sessions on boosting legislative engagement in OGP and engaging political leaders and parliaments. Most of these sessions are intended to be interactive and inclusive and we hope that many of you will be able to attend and participate.
To complement main conference programming and ensure robust opportunities for those interested in legislative openness, the French National Assembly and Senate are both organizing open parliament side events. The National Assembly event will take place the morning of Thursday, December 8, followed by the Senate event that afternoon. These events will be valuable additions to the main conference program. In particular, these side events will expose conference participants to the French legislative branch’s innovative initiatives and projects, including efforts to provide open access to legislative data and to create new avenues for citizens and civil society to engage in the legislative process.
The Paris Declaration provides yet another opportunity for legislatures and civil society organizations to get involved. Rather than simply a collection of principles, the Declaration is intended to show that governments and CSOs are working together to push open government forward. All interested governments, parliaments, and civil society groups can indicate their support for different portions of the Declaration, and must list specifically what they intend to do to support progress, either at home or around the world. The Declaration includes a section on inclusive lawmaking, and we encourage all open parliament champions to show their support for inclusive lawmaking in advance of the December 5 deadline.
We look forward to seeing and hearing from many of you at the Summit. If you’re interested in getting involved in the Legislative Openness Working Group, please get in touch and follow our website for updates.
