Making Government Transparent and Accountable
The Sunlight Foundation uses cutting-edge technology and ideas to make government transparent and accountable. Underlying all of our efforts is a fundamental belief that increased transparency will improve the public's confidence in government
The Sunlight Foundation Blog
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Transparency Around the World
It’s Sunshine Week again, and in that spirit I want to share a recent story about open government. Two weeks ago, the chief of staff for a member of the Republic of Korea Assembly looked over at me and, through a translator, said he was going to tell me why their political system is better than America’s.
It was an interesting moment for me. At the meeting were three additional National Assembly staffers, and I listened attentively as the translator related the gist of the argument:
- Corporations in South Korea are prohibited from spending money on political activity.
- Individuals can spend up to $5,000 per year on Assembly races, and they can only give to four candidates per year.
- Any spending above $3,000 must be disclosed.
How did I find myself in this situation? For starters, it wasn’t the first time! One of the many pleasant aspects about working at the Sunlight Foundation is the simple act of talking about open government with other interested parties. In this case, it was a delegation of staffers from Korea. The trip was arranged by World Learning, as part of the International Visitor Leadership Program administered by the U.S. State Department. Yesterday’s was the fifth such meeting I’ve participated in since I started at Sunlight—previously, my colleagues and I discussed transparency with a delegation of Dutch officials, an activist/videographer from Australia, a political science professor from Colombia, and officials from Latin America.
I was a little playful in that last paragraph, but the meetings are more than just “pleasant.” (Continue reading…)
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Making Public Information Available Online: Rep. Israel Introduces the Public Online Information Act
Today, Representative Steve Israel introduced the Public Online Information Act, which if enacted would free a vast treasure trove of government information. All too often, information that the law requires be publicly available is hidden behind stone walls and paper barriers. POIA tears down these walls by:
- Requiring Executive Branch agencies to publish publicly available information on the Internet in a timely fashion and in user-friendly formats.
- Creating a multi-branch advisory committee to develop government-wide Internet publication guidelines.
This 24-page legislation has many details, which are nicely summarized in a 1-page description of the bill, a plain language version of the legislation, and in this video. In essence, POIA requires the Executive Branch to follow commonsense rules in making public information available online, and encourages all three branches to work together with the public to develop online disclosure best practices.
My colleague Bill Allison blogs about some of the information that POIA will make available online and why doing so is important, and Clay Johnson, the head of Sunlight Labs, breaks down why POIA is important to the technology community.
POIA is the result of a lot of effort from many people. Representative Israel’s staff have been working on this legislation for months, with assistance from Sunlight and others. Those efforts have paid off, as a coalition of more than 25 organizations today is calling for Congress to hold hearings on POIA.
We at Sunlight have long believed that for information to be truly publicly available, it should also be online — our reform agenda lists as one of its principles “public means online.” The idea for this legislation comes directly from a panel discussion at the Personal Democracy Forum conference in 2009 where Andrew Rasiej (co-founded of PDF and a senior technology advisor to Sunlight) asked Rep. Israel about turning this idea into legislation.
Full resources on the Public Online Information Act are available at ThePOIA.org. Also, follow the conversation on Twitter at #thePOIA – you can use the short link http://bit.ly/thePOIA as well.
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Transparency Is Trending
This week is Sunshine Week, a lot of people are very excited and are taking the time to write about why open government is important to them. Here are just a few of the great posts people are writing, explaining why transparency is important.
The Cleveland Plain Dealer wrote an editorial about the need for government transparency:
“…some federal agencies require citizens to travel to Washington or to regional offices to examine files. Sometimes, these files are available for review only on old, slow computers and only during standard business hours. Such hoops diminish the usefulness of the information to the very citizens in whose name — and on whose dime — it was collected.
In the news business, we know all too well that this frequently is not the case. It is why this newspaper has repeatedly pushed government officials to open their meetings and, even in an era of tight budgets, has not flinched from going to court when our requests are denied. When we do so, we act not just for ourselves, but for every other news organization or individual with a right to know.
The fundamental importance of that right is why our industry, along with allies such as the Sunlight Foundation, observes Sunshine Week beginning today. Our nation’s founders understood the importance of openness. Having experienced a very different reality as colonists, they knew that closed doors invite suspicion and tyranny. And so they enshrined principles such as freedom of the press and public court proceedings in the Bill of Rights.A government based on the consent of the governed must open its doors to them — to you. It was true in 1789. It still is today.”
The Asheville Citizen-Times has an article addressing how transparency alters a political debate:
“When people get bad information, they will make bad decisions. When they get real information, it’s a whole new ballgame.
And when election time rolls around, they might start throwing a few beanballs themselves.
All I can add to that is …
Buy me some peanuts and Cracker Jack.”The Kansas Watchdog has an article about Sunshine Week:
“Open government isn’t the work of any one organization or of government alone. The Sunlight Foundation illustrates the point with the Transparency Cycle which illustrates the process of creating a government ‘more deserving of our trust, and ultimately, a government that allows its citizens to fully participate and hold government accountable as our Founders intended.’”
NM Politics. Net has a post about “Giving thanks for an open, accountable government”:
“Even better, we’re doing something about it. ‘Transparency’ is the new buzzword across public agencies and in nonprofit and business sectors. Political candidates jockey to be the most open, pro-sunshine contender. And in the Roundhouse and in city and county chambers throughout New Mexico, policymakers are embracing modern mechanisms for getting information to the people.”
The Kansas Wichita Eagle has a great post on why Sunshine Week Matters:
“It’s about making sure the public has access to information that affects lives and communities.”
The Depot Dazed wrote about how people can make open government a reality:
“ ‘Sunshine’ may make it possible, but it is only YOU, the people who can make open government a reality.”
This week Sunlight will be keeping track of posts like this from all over the Web. You don’t need a newspaper to take part in the conversation about how to make government more open and transparent.
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C-SPAN Posts Full Archives
Serious geek-out moment. C-SPAN has posted their full archives online in embeddable format. I could waste a few days watching this. Since this is crazy health care reform week, I’ve decided to post the following video I found in the archive. First Lady Hillary Rodham Clinton testifying before the Senate Finance Committee in 1993 discussing President Bill Clinton’s health care reform plan (the video may take a minute to load): (Continue reading…)
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Read the Bill Becoming the Norm
Check out this line from Jay Newton-Small’s Swampland blog post on the way forward for health care reform in the House:
Once they have a bill, Dems need to post it online for at least 72 hours for members to review before a vote.
The fact that reporters covering Congress are stating that the Majority “needs” to post the bill online for 72 hours shows how far the Read the Bill effort has gone. As this policy has become the norm it is increasingly clear how important legislative information is to both individual members of Congress and ordinary people.Congress should still pass a rules change to require the 72 hours reading time to make the policy enforceable. Still, you’ve shown Congress that people out there want to be able to read legislation and be assured that their representatives have enough time to read and study the bills.
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Earmark Transparency Makes More Sense Than a Ban
The recent policies imposed by the House Appropriations Committee and the House Republican Caucus to ban for-profit earmarks and all earmarks respectively will reduce the ability of the public to track directed spending and do little to stem this type of spending. Perhaps this is counter-intuitive to some people, but, as the late, great Bill Hicks would say, “I know this is not a very popular idea. You don’t hear it too often any more … but it’s the truth.“
First of all, the obvious, the for-profit earmark ban and the House Republican earmark ban both only apply to the House of Representatives. The Senate refuses to follow suit. With the Senate earmarking precious appropriations dollars, House members will take to lobbying their state’s senators for earmarks in their respective districts. The money isn’t drying up, so why not try to get some.
Second, tons of not-for-profit earmarks go to colleges, universities, non-profits and state and local governments that then contract out to for-profit firms. Here are some examples: (Continue reading…)
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Budget and Deficit Transparency
Earlier this week, the Senate passed an amendment to the unemployment extenders bill that would require the Secretary of the Senate to post information related to the debt effect of each bill that passes the Senate. The vote was 100-0. Unaminous votes are pretty rare in the Senate. This one highlights both the significance that the debt is playing in lawmaker’s minds and the general support for transparency as an idea in Congress.
The bill itself has some issues, which I’ll address here.
First, what does the amendment do? This is the legislative language (which, unlike most legislative language, is pretty straightforward):
(a) In General.–The Secretary of the Senate shall post prominently on the front page of the public website of the Senate (http://www.senate.gov/) the following information: (Continue reading…)
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The future of libraries
This article in the New Republic by Lisbet Rausing takes a look at the future of libraries and knowledge and the obstacles preventing scholarly knowledge and research from reaching the wider public over the web. I’ll just selectively quote below. The whole article is worth the read.
Look at JSTOR (if you can). There you find the evidence-based, source-critical foundations of sociology, anthropology, geography, history, philosophy, classics, Oriental studies, theology, musicology, history of science and so on. They are all closed to the public. It is wonderful, of course, that high-energy physics and string theory are open to all. But is it not ironic that we have opened the gates only to that scholarship which few professors, let alone members of the public, have the cognitive capacity and appropriate training to grasp?
The opportunity costs for society are self-evident. But what about the opportunity cost for scholars? For example, the public has set itself the task to rewrite knowledge for the public domain through Wikipedia and the like. Should not these sites be hyperlinked with JSTOR? By excluding the public from their scholarly literature, academics make it impossible for amateurs to use sound research methodologies, critically examining evidence by cross-referencing and source analysis. Scholars then critique the public’s output for not being sufficiently academic. Academics commonly refer to the occasionally wobbly scholarly standards of Wikipedia as proof the public does not wish to pursue scholarship. Might it not instead prove that they do not let them? (Continue reading…)
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The Transparency Campaign: Who We Are
A few weeks back, we asked members of our community to tell us a little about themselves: What are people looking for from our government? When it comes to transparency, what is the most important priority? What’s the best way we can build movement for open government at the state level?
The first thing we asked was “What is the single most important political issue in your state?” Followed by the same question for “our country.” Many of the responses were what one might expect considering the state of the economy and the political climate—the economy, heath care, government spending, education and immigration all topped the list. In addition to the responses we might expect, though, were also a wide array of opinions on other important factors to make government more transparent like copyright reform or financial deregulation. There were some as well, who share our aims of improving access to government information and ensuring our elected officials are accountable:
“Lack of transparency in government (legislation created behind closed doors) and personal agendas.”
“TRUST in the political process and politicians again.”
“More objective, trusted and transparent information about how money is spent and decisions are made in government.”
“Our government does not represent the citizens’ interests first.”
As an organization, the Sunlight Foundation has spent more than three years trying to show not just the public, but lawmakers, reporters and opinion leaders as well, why a more open and transparent government is a good thing. But this movement is much larger than just one organization, so we also asked respondents to explain simply why “government transparency” matters to them.
Again, the range of responses was broad, but here are some that I wanted to share: (Continue reading…)
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Massa, Maf54 and the Ethics Committee
And now to totally contradict my previous post stating why no one needs to talk about tickle-monster Eric Massa.
The House voted today 404-2 to recommend that the House Ethics Committee reopen their probe into Massa’s misconduct and examine whether House leaders were aware of his misdeeds and whether they failed act quickly enough. This follows on the heels of reports that an aide in Speaker Pelosi’s office was informed in October that Massa was living with aides, hired too many aides, cursed around staff and appeared to be going on dates with openly-gay male staffers from other congressional offices.
On first blush these don’t exactly rise to the level of ethics investigation material — congressmen have been known to live with aides in the past and if he wants to cheat on his wife with adult men, that’s his prerogative. Either way, the Ethics Committee should look into whether there was any more information relayed to leadership prior to the reported receipt of complaints about harassment in February and whether they responded properly or not.
Already, this case is being compared to the 2006 Mark Foley scandal. I’m not really sure that it rises to that level for a number of reasons. That being said, let’s take a look at what made the Foley scandal toxic for the congressional leadership who covered it up. (Continue reading…)
