Italy, Serbia, the Czech Republic, Ukraine and France are among the countries that participated in the third Global Legislative Openness Week (GLOW) on 12-18 September.

This event, coordinated by the Legislative Openness Working Group in OGP, highlighted and celebrated the open and participatory legislative process around the world.

GLOW “is an opportunity for diverse stakeholders—in parliaments, governments and civil society—to collaborate and make progress toward adopting and implementing openness commitments”, the website said.

Eighteen events around the world were included in GLOW to highlight local projects. For example, Serbia presented its Parliamentary Openness Index campaign – “Serbia and the Region”; Italy promoted a “Legal Open Document and Open Data” event; and Ukraine promoted an event called “Open Parliament: from Declaration to action” during the International Democracy Day. France organised a Hackathon on Open Democracy.

This third edition of GLOW was an online-only event rather than an in-person event as it was in 2015 and 2014.

Capture activities related to Open Parliament

During a community webcast, organisers said that “If we can’t know clearly what our politicians are doing in their areas, this is just a huge gap in accountability and transparency in our society”. They noted some progress in many countries to engage civil society and members of parliament around Open Parliamentary principles. GLOW is a way to highlight good projects around the world on this issue, “capture this kind of activity” and “show it is a broad movement”, said Greg Brown from the National Democratic Institute, who co-organised the event.

During the webcast, the legislative Openness Data Explorer was presented. This is a comparative platform which collects crowdsourced data dealing with openness in parliamentary processes. It is focused precisely on what parliaments publish. Countries can also add their own data.

Among other initiatives, Johann Richer from Etalab, the French governmental agency for Open Data and Open Government said that France is developing an “OGP Toolbox” to help people make use of public data, participate in political life and promote citizens’ participation in the law-making process. This toolbox will officially be presented during the OGP Summit in December in Paris. This toolbox will compile a number of initiatives and concrete examples around transparency and accountability, he explained. An open source platform to promote public consultation will be included in this toolbox.