Massachusetts residents could soon gain new insight into where state lawmakers stand on the bills they review and what arguments are being made to sway those lawmakers.

House and Senate Democrats announced Monday that, for the first time since 2019, the two chambers have reached an agreement on a shared set of rules shaping the flow of legislation through Beacon Hill.

The deal would newly require State House committees to make public both the written testimony they receive on bills, and the votes committee members cast on whether to advance or kill bills.

The Massachusetts Legislature is exempt from the state’s open meeting and public record laws, leaving it up to lawmakers themselves to determine how accessible much of their business should be.

Few of the thousands of bills filed each session make it to the floor of the House and Senate for livestreamed debate. Many quietly die in committee without explanation.

Scotia Hille, the executive director of the progressive advocacy group Act on Mass, told GBH News in a recent interview that Massachusetts is one of the only states where committee votes are not made public.

Before the final rules package was unveiled, Hille said opening up more of the committee process to public view would mark a “huge change, a favorable change for transparency right now.”

“For most of the lawmaking work that our legislators do throughout the legislative session, we have no clue of how they stood on a particular bill, why a bill that has popular support dies in committee,” Hille said. “That is a complete black box.”

Once formally adopted, the new rules will allow joint House-Senate committees to set limits around the disclosure of written testimony containing sensitive personal information or obscene material.

Committees would also need to give more notice when scheduling hearings — the current 72-hour notice window would expand to 10 days — and they would need to post bill summaries online before those hearings.

The lead negotiators on the rules package, Senate Majority Leader Cindy Creem and House Majority Leader Michael Moran, said in a statement that their plan has “strengthened public access, streamlined the legislative process, reduced the potential for legislative logjams, and laid the groundwork for a transparent and effective Legislature that will continue to deliver results for the people of Massachusetts.”

House Speaker Ron Mariano and Senate President Karen Spilka kicked off the two-year session in January with pledges to work toward a more open and efficient Legislature.

Those promises came after the resounding passage of a ballot question authorizing a legislative audit by state Auditor Diana DiZoglio, a slew of headlines about power and secrecy in the State House, and a chaotic all-night session and policy bottleneck that left many major bills to be finalized weeks after lawmakers’ self-imposed July 31 deadline for finishing their formal business.

“We were both committed to getting this done for a number of different reasons,” Mariano told reporters. “Neither one of us liked the way it ended July 31st of last year, so it was pretty easy to get our attention. And our commitments early — they were independent of each other. We just knew it was time to make this thing work.”

The accord lands almost six months into the two-year term. Lawmaking is off to a slow start, with just six bills signed into law so far this year.

“Even though the House and Senate were working to resolve the joint rules, the joint committees have been meeting for months and holding hearings, hearing bills, reporting bills out, so work has started months ago and continues to move forward,” Spilka said. “And progress has been made. Bills are coming to the Senate, coming to the House, so we have continued to get our work done.”

The new rules would also make changes aimed at speeding up the legislative process and preventing backlogs.

The biennial July 31 deadline for formal legislating would lose some of its weight, as the House and Senate would be able to meet in formal sessions after that date to consider compromise bills and vetoes and amendments the governor may hand down.

Committees would also face earlier deadlines for advancing bills for potential consideration by the full Legislature.