At 2 p.m. today, we are launching the Public=Online campaign to put public pressure on government to be more open and transparent. This is our new website where all the information about the campaign will be:

http://PublicEqualsOnline.com

It’s a completely non-partisan campaign with the first goal of making government transparency a major issue in the upcoming mid-term elections.

Ultimately, Public=Online is focused on getting government to pass the transparency laws we need – laws that put government information online in real-time where we can use it – and we’re going to do that by building a demand for transparency that is so large it cannot be ignored by politicians.

We are going to ensure public officials answer to us for making government open and transparent by telling them just how important it is to us as we consider who to vote for in November.

This will only work, though, if hundreds of thousands of people make this bold statement across the country – in every city, state and congressional district.

What we need first and foremost is for as many people as possible to make this statement with us by signing the Public=Online pledge, and asking others to join as well.

It is through the pledge – and the number of people that sign it – that this campaign will build political clout strong enough to move government. When it comes to making government transparent, we need that clout to be as big as possible.

In the months ahead, we will send letters to the editor and make calls to congress; we’ll organize days of action around such legislation as the Public Online Information Act, and we’ll ensure that our representatives Read the Bill.

We’ll ask candidates for office questions about their positions on transparency at town halls, we’ll scour earmark requests, write blog posts diving into campaign data or post video of important events.

There are a thousand things we can do together – many of which we don’t even know yet – but first, we must come together with a powerful voice, and that’s what this pledge does.

For the first few weeks, that is our focus. And if we have anything to say about it, it will also be a lot of fun.

This is just the beginning.

If you’re on Twitter or Facebook, this is the message we’re asking people to put in their status:

Help me get government information online in real-time. We CAN make government more transparent. http://publicequalsonline.com #opengov

If you can be more creative than that… we’re excited to see what you come up with!

Last year, we made suggestions about how the U.S. Supreme Court should redesign its website. Today, the Court unveiled a new website. The new website is a small but important step towards increased openness and accessibility, although it needs serious work.

Notable improvements include making recent Court decisions available from the homepage, a somewhat more logical design, and an interactive Court calendar that allows you to see what cases are scheduled for argument. According to the Court, additional enhancements include docket files going back to 2000, a new case citation finder, and enhanced search and navigation abilities.

Sunlight’s mock-up

There are several areas where important improvements should be made, all of which focus around providing context to the information it provides.

• The webpage needs to provide more information about what the Court is doing, explaining legal terms of art, and grouping relevant information together (such as information pertaining to a particular case).
• It should incorporate a user-friendly advanced search engine.
• Use machine-readable formats (not just PDFs).

Old Site

We strongly encourage those redesigning the Supreme Court’s website to talk to members of the user community to get a better feel for the kinds of improvements that would be helpful. Certainly, we would be willing to engage in that conversation.

Additional Resources:

• Blog of the Legal Times (3/18/2010): Supreme Court Unveils New Web Site Design
• SCOTUSBlog (3/18/2010): Changes for Court’s website
• SCOTUSBlog (10/1/2009): A proposed redesign for the Supreme Court
• Sunlight Foundation (8/27/2009): The Supreme Court Website: An Updated Redesign
• Sunlight Foundation (6/2/2009): Redesigning The Government: The U.S. Supreme Court
• A compendium of resources from Sunlight (wiki page)

2) The New York Review of Books’ Michael Tomasky has a run-down on the process that led to the health care bill. (In the self-serving department, this article features quotes from myself.)

3) More reasons why an earmark ban won’t work via The Hill: “Another appropriations lobbyist said he expected that for-profit companies will step up efforts to try to partner with his nonprofit clients to secure federal money. Universities and other nonprofit entities would then pay out money from the earmark to the company.” Kind of like a Citizens United for for-profit earmark recipients.

4) The top 10 lobbying fights in financial reform.

5) PhRMA comes back with a $6 million ad buy in favor of health care reform.

The other Conan.

Today, 6 months after our letter to CRS and GPO, which asks them to publish the XML file online, and regularly update it online (just like on Congress’ internal website, which is up-to-date), the public still does not have access to CONAN in XML. The American people deserve access to an authoritative explanation of the Constitution, especially when it is prepared by public servants and is required by law to be publicly available.

Senator Feingold, the Chairman of the Constitution subcommittee of the Senate Judiciary Committee, agrees with us. He wrote a letter to GPO and CRS in November asking for “the Constitution Annotated to the published online in XML format … with updates be made available to the general public at the same time they are made available to Congress.”

And yet here we are, six months later, on the Constitution’s half birthday. Has anything changed? As always, GPO continues to publish limited updates to CONAN every other year, in plain text file and PDF formats, and updates the full treatise once a decade. That’s not enough.

CONAN is updated as the Supreme Court issues decisions — and yet, we’re still stuck in 2008. A lot has changed since then, including a new Supreme Court justice and several landmark decisions. CRS generates the file in XML, but that detailed meta-data is stripped out. GPO recently (and admirably) started publishing the Federal Register and the Code of Federal Regulations in XML. (This video explains why XML is useful.) So why not this?

In July 2009, the Public Printer, the head of GPO, gave a speech recognizing the importance of the federal government “provid[ing] complete legal and regulatory information online in an electronic format that is fully visible by the American people free of charge. We should start with the Constitution Annotated.” So how do things stand now?

When we asked CRS for a comment on the status of CONAN last week, their spokesperson, Janine D’Addario, had a three-word comment: “discussions are continuing.” This adds to their comment from last September: “The Congressional Research Service and the Government Printing Office plan to discuss publication of the Constitution Annotated and possible future enhancements.”

GPO was more forthcoming. Their spokesperson, Gary Somerset, said, “GPO serves the needs of our customers and is committed to providing the American public access to federal government information in an electronic format this is usable and free of charge. In all facets of GPO’s information dissemination, the agency acts as the ‘printer’ under the direction of the publishing agency. In the case of CONAN, that is the U.S. Senate. GPO is currently awaiting direction from the Senate on this issue.”

Over the last several years, Congress and the President have made government transparency a priority. They have urged agencies to conceive of their missions in ways that maximize transparency. Allowing for the re-use of government-held information — which is owned by the public — is fundamental to transparency. It should not take an Act of Congress (specifically, of the Senate) demanding that CRS and GPO fully open CONAN to the American people to get these agencies to do what is already within their power.

We have heard some rumblings of progress, like thunder in the distance. We hope this rumbling will grow into a roar. Publishing CONAN online, in XML, as it is updated, would be an easy win for CRS, GPO, and the American people.

* As usual, I have to disclose that I served as a legislative attorney with CRS. More information about the Constitution Annotated is available here.

I’ve always loved zombie movies, although I’m almost exclusively particular to those made by George Romero. The slow-moving zombie representing the real imminence of death in all of our lives is a resonating image, whether you get the metaphor or not. One morning in 1999, I was awoken by a scene out of a Romero movie. The front and backyards of my parent’s Takoma, D.C. house were filled with members of the press moaning and creeping ever closer to the doors. For months, I had been greeted every morning and followed home every afternoon by these ravenous creatures who sought to devour the brains of every man, woman and child in America. They would appear on the television in the form of talking heads or politicians as I ate dinner and would call, incessantly, at all hours of the day (“Braaaaiiins,” they would mumble). Zombieland isn’t a movie, it’s the culture spawned by the political elites and the media that covers them. Looking back at that moment, while we waited for the police to arrive to clear the undead from our lawn, I can’t help but think that that brain-dead media swarm was ripe for a Romero metaphor–which I’m sure you can figure out on your own. I couldn’t exactly pick up a sawed-off shotgun to kill these rotting corpses, but there turned out to be other ways of helping out.

Wanting to reorient Washington away from it’s zombified state–and the desperate need for a job–led me to the Sunlight Foundation. In 2006, I was brought onto this crazy ride by Sunlight’s Executive Director Ellen Miller. Over the last four years I’ve cut out a role doing two important things to try and keep the zombies off of our lawns in the days ahead: (1) advocate for more information and data be released to the public and (2) use that information and data to report on and “data-jam” politicians and the media. I’ll try to explain both of these things and why they matter below (be forewarned, inexplicable references to the 18th century may occur).

Let’s start with number (1): Advocating for transparency

The truth of the matter is that the proper way to dispose of the carrion in Washington isn’t to necessarily send new bodies in, but to expand the voice of those coming from without. And this isn’t solely about amplification. Higher decibel levels seem to feed the zombie virus. What is important is creating better informed voices, not louder ones. Doing that requires connecting people who want information about their government to the information they seek. The best way to change Washington is to open it up to the people. This doesn’t mean a direct democracy, but an informed democratic polity where people have the same access to information as their representatives. What I’m talking about, and why I work here, is to promote and create egalitarian access to information.

The ideal of an informed society has a long and important history in the United States and it is what animates the transparency movement. In 1792, Congress made one of the first legislative moves to open information flows to the public by passing the Post Office Act of 1792. The bill provided federal subsidies through reduced charges for newspapers to travel through the postal service. Senator Elbridge Gerry argued, “However firmly liberty may be established in any country, it cannot long subsist if the channels of information be stopped.” And since then, there has been a long strand of connected efforts, many of them political, to open government to the people and disclose government information and information about government operations to the public. These efforts have continued to shape American society as they did in early days of the Republic.

In his book The Creation of the Media, Paul Starr describes how society changed as more people experienced the liberty to express themselves, “Republican ideology held up a new standard of good conduct: The responsible citizen was informed and kept up with the times. Self-government, in other words, generated greater demand for information, particularly for news and newspapers. … [B]y legitimating the idea that ordinary people could govern themselves, the Revolution dignified their right to speak up—literally, without self-consciously bending and averting their eyes while addressing people of higher status.” As Starr paraphrases James Madison, “liberty granted power in America.” That was power to the middle and lower classes who now, due to the liberty granted them, could voice their opinions on anything, including deriding the upper classes. In The Radicalism of the American Revolution Gordon Wood writes, “In contrast to pre-revolutionary America, the society of the early Republic had thousands upon thousands of obscure ordinary people participating in the creation of this public opinion.” Opinions crave for information.

That’s what animates me to advocate for more transparency in government. Providing people with the kind of data necessary to information opinions. You don’t want a bunch of opinions without any information. To self-govern you’re going to need informed opinions based on factual data and information. And often times not just factual information, but relevant and useful information. That’s why data quality and the type of information we ask for is so important. It also requires that a lot of data and information be properly placed into context.

Which brings us to number (2): Data-jamming

Data-jamming often involves taking information about politicians and putting it in context. More specifically I described it in a previous post as such, “[Data-jamming] helps to disrupt the pre-packaged image that politicians want to transmit to the audience, which is mega-phoned through the television media. In effect, “data-jamming” aims to make the system transparent by putting it into context. This is a different type of transparency than what we tend to advocate for regularly. But it is ultimately the type of transparency that is enabled by efforts to make the information in and about government more open, available and transparent. Transparency begets transparency.”

Let me try to explain this more clearly. Think of a politician not as an individual actor, but as an entity. This entity has many properties that make up the public image projected into your television screens, onto the printed page and through the Internet tubes: campaign contributors, in-state interests, staffers, former staffers turned lobbyists, personal finances, family connections and so on. This entity also has a public record of statements, op-eds, videos, policies and more. Data-jamming aims to take these data points to reveal the sum of the entity’s parts to the public to help explain what appears to be an individual actor. This requires the disclosure of data and information and thus relies on transparency to make the political entity transparent. Data-jamming works through writing, reporting, infographics, videos, remixes and visualizations.

It’s what David Cross meant when he joked about, “These —-ing guys out there on their computers compiling cold, hard, irrefutable facts; —- those —holes!”

This helps to provide people with a window into the real influences and points of interest that surround politicians while also placing the data and information into context. Furthermore, this helps to explain why we need the data and information to be transparent. Thus the data-jamming exercise is recursive.

So, what have we learned here? It’s time to kill some zombies.

Happy Sunshine Week!

It’s Sunshine Week again, and in that spirit I want to share a recent story about open government. Two weeks ago, a government professional from the Republic of Korea looked over at me and, through an interpreter, 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 South Korean professionals, and I listened attentively as their interpreter 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 National 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 professionals 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.” According to the State Department, almost “300 IVLP alumni are current or former Heads of Government or Chiefs of State.” Alumni include British Prime Minister Gordon Brown and French President Nicolas Sarkozy. Last year alone, more than 4,400 people visited the U.S. through the program, and 190,000 have participated since 1940.

Ambassador Kenton Keith is the Senior Vice President of Meridian International Center, one of seven program agencies that facilitate IVLP for the State Department. He told me U.S. embassies around the world select participants: “These people are selected because the embassies regard them as people of either present or near future importance to areas of interest to the United States.” They then spend 2-3 weeks in the United States for meetings with counterparts and for general orientation.

“They have a several-day presentation in Washington with government, NGOs and appropriate bodies, and then they go to other cities in the country,” Kenton said. “When visitors go out into the country they are hosted by a network of volunteer groups under the umbrella of the National Council of International Visitors. They help them to get appointments with the people they need to see, and to get a feel for the society, the culture and the values of the United States.”

Kenton describes IVLP as one of the “most valuable kinds of programs that we operate as a country.” He told me participants can be anything from journalists to scientists, teachers, politicians and museum directors. “They obviously become familiar with the United States,” he said, “an important country to most anybody in the world, and are often able to seize important networking opportunities with people in the same field and who have the same interests.”

Not every meeting I attended was part of the IVLP, but they all have provided an incredible array of benefits for our organization. Most notably, we learn about the ways officials practice open government in different countries. When we met with the delegation from Latin America, for example, we learned that some countries have FOIA laws that are significantly better for citizens. In Mexico, all requests for public documents (think FOIA) are posted online. In other countries, all requested documents are posted online. Here in America, you can use the FOIA process to see what others people have requested (a nice little trick of journalists to avoid getting scooped), but the only person who can see the results is the person who submitted the request in the first place.

Aside from the policy perspectives these meetings can bring to light, they also provide the basis for some incredible best practices discussions and allow participants to forge collaborative partnerships. I met last year with professor Monica Pachon Buitrago of the University of the Andes. She was developing a Web site to track members of the Colombian legislature, something similar to OpenCongress.org. The site, CongresoVisible.org, is now up and running. We can learn from one another, by sharing which site features are most useful to readers or swapping code modules. When an open-government advocate from Australia was in D.C., we discussed some of the challenges he faces in that country: Generating interest among citizens, convincing officials that that a transparent government is good for them, and creating partnerships with other organizations and the media in Australia. Turns out, those are very similar to the challenges we have here in America.

As we prepare to launch our campaign, we’re having similar discussions with individuals across the country. Activists, bloggers, and citizens are asking how they can help make their local and state governments more open, accessible and accountable. One of the best ways of figuring that out is to see how others have succeeded.

Which brings us back to the gentlemen from the Republic of Korea. The delegates were genuinely interested in the way members of the U.S. House of Representatives disclose office expenditures, and any impact that disclosure has had on Members or staff. We discussed the White House visitor logs, and Paul’s story last month using the logs to examine the PhRMA deal. Finally, I answered some questions about the Citizens United decision: What it means for our movement, what the proposed legislative responses might be, and how we look at campaign finance disclosure in the future.

That led into the exchange I described at the beginning, and a more in-depth dialogue on disclosure. We spoke about the differences between our two systems of government, and I hope they learned as much from me as I learned from them.

From what I understand, that’s the whole point.

Author’s note: At the request of the U.S. State Department, we’ve removed the specific titles of the individuals from the Republic of Korea. We were informed, in the course of reporting this piece, that IVLP meetings are supposed to be off-the-record. While this was not conveyed to us until after the meeting took place, we don’t want the delegates to experience any repercussions for what was said during the meeting.

• 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.

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.