There was a really interesting article in the New York Times yesterday that had a headline attention grabbing headline of Foundations Find Benefits in Facing Up to Failures. I had two reactions: "how refreshing" and "well, sure."

Sunlight deliberately set out to be experimental - to throw ideas and projects on the wall and see if they stuck and if they didn't, to stop and figure out why. This was key to our grant making strategy as well. When you hope to be on the cutting edge you expect some things not to work. So we figured we'd win some, lose some. That seemed right to us. Fascinating how risk averse some of the truly big foundations have been and unwilling to admit, until recently, that some things just don't work.

I've been reflecting what has been working well and what not so well at Sunlight because I've been asked to present at a conference next week in Boston — The Internet as a Public Good (co-convened by the Mozilla Foundation, Harvard Business School and The Berkman Center for Law and Society at Harvard Law School) a real-world case study where we took seriously the potential of the Internet for a project and then ran it right up to the edge of what's possible, but a project in which we had not quite gotten to our goal (a failure?). Obviously the point of this exercise at this upcoming meeting is to help the larger group look at what works and what doesn't work on the ‘Net and to try to contemplate what's next in the 'Net's innovation.

So my presentation is going to focus on how far the Internet-based feedback loop can be extended to effectively influence our elected representatives, using our "What's McConnell Hiding?" campaign as an example. We have found that sometimes collaborative online organizing has worked brilliantly to produce results — think how citizens, urged on by an active blogosphere drove the passage of the Coburn-Obama bill — and how in the case of the secret hold on legislation that would require Senators to post their campaign finance information electronically - it has stalled.

The ‘Net appears to work best as a system for focusing a disparate community of concerned individuals on a common goal. It's clear that people online enjoy the scavenger hunt game of digging out some kind of hidden fact and that the new age wisdom that "many hands make light work" definitely holds when you look at a political task, like gathering attention around a bill. But the feedback loop to incumbent politicians is still a weak one.

Is there a technology solution to this problem? I'll report back what those who attending the conference have to say.

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Yesterday the Sunlight Foundation and the Berkman Center for Internet & Society hosted the Sunlight-Berkman Conference on Political Information. Our new intern Andrew MacRae attended the Conference in Boston and wrote up this review of the day:

On January 15^th, 2007, the Sunlight Foundation in cooperation with Harvard’s Berkman Center for Internet & Society held an all day workgroup entitled “Local Political Information in an Internet Era”. The session brought together bloggers and organizations, in an attempt to share data, goals and thoughts. For addition coverage see what other participants had to say, Ethan Zuckerman, Jake Shapiro, John Palfrey, Dan Gillmor, David Weinberger and more.

If you measure success in terms of question answered or problems solved, this weekend’s conference held at the Berkman center was nothing short of astounding. The impact of bloggers and citizen journalists has not only increased in the last election cycle but with all of the new tools and data sets that are increasingly available it is impossible to imagine their influence waning any time soon. While there will always be room for improvement, the progress in making public information/data transparent has been enormous in such a short period of time. Web 2.0 empowered citizens are increasingly able to stand up and answer the question, “Who are my elected officials?”, “How are they getting elected?” and “How are they governing?”

Another measure of success is in terms of new questions generated. As we went around the room at the end of the day, it was obvious that many questions involving the sharing of data within this community are being answered. Equally difficult however, are the questions: “How do we continue to fund these endeavors?” “How do we bring this information to a more demographically and ideologically diverse audience?” and “How do we provoke these citizens to not only inquire about it, but also to act upon in?

In the words of Martin Luther King Jr., “Through our scientific and technological genius, we have made of this world a neighborhood and yet we have not had the ethical commitment to make of it a brotherhood.” The Sunlight-Berkman conference entitled, “Local Political Information in an Internet Era", couldn’t have been on a more appropriate day.

A special thanks to the Berkman Institute for all of their collaborative efforts in making this conference a success.

 

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