The Open Knowledge Foundation and the Sunlight Foundation are teaming up to convene a new global group on lobbying transparency.
We want civil society organisations, journalists and citizens around the world to be able to use information about lobbying to understand and report on the influence of big money on politics and to push for reforms in this area.
To this end we’d like to connect and support campaigners working to improve lobbying transparency around the world so that they can:
- Learn about what each other are doing – including sharing updates and asking for advice about ongoing policy and advocacy work
- Coordinate advocacy around lobbyist registers – to push for better lobbyist registries, and to ensure that they are published as machine readable open data, as per the Open Data Charter
- Collaborate around shared areas of interest – from campaigns to mapping activities to tracking lobbying across borders
We’ll both be raising the importance of lobbying transparency in discussions and sessions around the Open Government Partnership Summit in London later this week. The Sunlight Foundation will also soon be releasing guidance on lobbying disclosure, based on their experience in the US and their in-depth research into global lobbying regulations.
If you’re working on lobbying transparency or interested in seeing what you can do in your country then please do come and join us on the lobbying-transparency group and introduce yourself.
Dr. Jonathan Gray is Lecturer in Critical Infrastructure Studies at the Department of Digital Humanities, King’s College London, where he is currently writing a book on data worlds. He is also Cofounder of the Public Data Lab; and Research Associate at the Digital Methods Initiative (University of Amsterdam) and the médialab (Sciences Po, Paris). More about his work can be found at jonathangray.org and he tweets at @jwyg.
