Craig sez:

ProPublica launches.

The site has some nice features: Scandal Watch, 7 different RSS feeds, and a nice “breaking on the web” feature. Definitely keeping my eye on this. And I am preparing for Google Reader overload.

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Consumer Reports WebWatch and the Center for Media and Democracy (our partners on Congresspedia) joined forces to launch Full Frontal Scrutiny, a blog-driven, wiki-based site dedicated to exposing fake, corporate-funded front groups that are pushing agendas, while hiding their true identity or agenda. Full Frontal Scrutiny will give consumers, voters and citizens a resource for investigating organizations they run across in the media or elsewhere that have popped up to promote a particular opinion or bill in Congress. We love the banner on the site that include this quote from Jonathan Adelstein, commissioner at the FCC: "The American public deserves to know when someone is trying to persuade them." The organizers say it’s this spirit that is their motivation for exposing "hidden persuaders." This is a new battle being waged in the spirit of transparency.

Earlier today, for instance, the site posted a report titled Tricky Wiki, an expose of how public relations pros spin the online encyclopedia Wikipedia.

 

"Workers at an array of corporate titans have altered their firms’ Wikipedia entries, in apparent violation of the site’s ideals," including ExxonMobil shining up their environmental record, a pharmaceutical giant making claims that their cancer drugs are better than a rival’s, and PepsiCo deleting references to potential health problems caused by its soft drinks, to name a few.

Craig Newmark, Sunlight board member, has checked it out and is impressed. "I’ve taken a good look at all involved, and they’re for real, CU and CMD have outstanding records for integrity and accuracy," Craig writes at The Huffington Post.

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We are making two annoucements this afternoon: a second round of grants for 2007 (including two grants from our Mini-grant program), and a new member of the Board of Directors — Craig Newmark. Craig is the founder and customer service representative for Craigslist, and one of the initial members of our Advisory Board. Craig is a visionary, and he has an understanding of power of the Internet technology that is nearly unrivaled. We couldn't be happier to have him assume a more formal role in guiding the Sunlight Foundation.

We are also very excited about the grant making opportunities that have come our way. The groups we are helping to fund are on the cutting edge of Web 2.0 technology, and are among the best at using the Internet to open up Congress. In this round, we have made grants to the Capitol News Connection for a "Ask Your Lawmaker Widget," and the Metavid, a video archive of U.S. House and Senate proceedings. We also made two mini-grants — WashingtonWatch.com and to OpEdNews.

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We are very excited to annouce today that we are expanding our Board of Directors and our Advisory Board, adding some extraordinary people — Esther Dyson, Jimmy Wales, Charles Lewis, Yochai Benkler — to an already distinguished group that includes Craig Newmark and Kim Malone. As Sunlight moves into our second year of operation we are pleased to be joined by some who are most on the cutting edge of technology and investigative journalism.

Esther Dyson (www.edventure.com) has been elected to serve a one-year term on the Board of Directors. Dyson is a leading expert on emerging digital technology and business models. She is the author of “Release 2.0: A Design for Living in the Digital Age,” (1997) which explores the impact of information technology on people’s lives, and produced the Release 1.0 newsletter for more than 20 years. Currently, she is an active investor in start-ups around the world and blogs for Huffington Post as Release 0.9.

Joining the Advisory Board are:

Jimmy Wales — Wales is the founder of Wikipedia and the founder of the Wikimedia Foundation, a non-profit corporation that operates Wikipedia and several other wiki projects, including Wiktionary and Wikinews. He is a member and Chairman Emeritus of Wikimedia's Board of Trustees. He is also the co-founder, along with Angela Beesley, of the for-profit company Wikia, Inc.

Charles Lewis — Lewis is the founder and former executive director of the Center for Public Integrity, a position he held for 15 years. During his tenure at the Center, Lewis wrote or co-wrote several of the Center's books and studies that systematically track political influence, including The Buying of the President series, The Buying of Congress series, The Corruption Notebooks, and The Cheating of America. Described by the Village Voice as "the Paul Revere of our time," Lewis was awarded a MacArthur Fellowship by the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation in 1998. He now is the president of The Fund for Independence in Journalism.

Yochai Benkler — Benkler is the Joseph M. Field '55 Professor of Law at Yale Law School. He is the author, most recently, of The Wealth of Networks: How Social Production Transforms Markets and Freedom, which examines how new forms of decentralization and networked collaboration could change economy and society.

Wales, Lewis and Benkler join Craig Newmark and Kim Malone on the Sunlight Foundation's advisory board.

Craig Newmark is the customer service representative and founder of the wildly popular craigslist.org, which allows Internet users from all over the world to write and search free classified advertisements. Newmark has a long-standing relationship with the Sunlight Foundation as an informal advisor, and has donated $10,000 to NewAssignment.net, a distributive journalism project headed by New York University professor Jay Rosen, which Sunlight is also supporting.

Kim Malone is the director of online sales and operations for AdSense at Google. In that role, she is responsible for supporting Google's worldwide network of partner publishers. Prior to joining Google, Kim was the CEO and co-founder of Juice Software, a business intelligence start-up based in New York City.

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Our Advisory Board member, Craig Newmark just told me that BBC Radio is looking for five citizen journalists to help tell the election night story from around the country. Here’s an incredible opportunity!

BBC Radio Five Live’s  late night international news programme Up All Night would like your help telling the story of the US midterm elections. We’ll be visiting Connecticut and Pennsylvania and on election night Washington DC - but we can’t be everywhere and there many other fascinating races we’d like to cover. So we’d like your help in reporting the election.

Polls and the results on the night of the race will only give us half the story. We’d like to know what it looks like from the ground. If you’d like to be a Five Live "Citizen Reporter" during the election read the information on our blog and if you are still interested drop a note to upallnight@bbc.co.uk. telling us a bit about yourself.

Our hope is that by enlisting your help we’ll have coverage that isn’t just about pundits and experts but gives us a real flavour of what the race is like for ordinary Americans that cuts through some of the stereotypes about politics in the US.

So cool. If they needed someone in Washington I think I’d apply myself!

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One of the great delights of my west coast trip was meeting Craig Newmark, the genius behind Craig’s List. Having been introduced to Craig’s List by my daughters, and used it myself to rent an apartment and sell a car, it was a personal treat to meet this Internet celebrity.

He’s been a huge fan of our Congresspedia. I took notes as he rattled off ways to expand it.

First, he recommended that we develop a "tool kit" for citizens on how to learn more about what their lawmakers do in Washington. (This is already on Larry Makinson’s "to do" list. When we have an initial outline, in another week or so, we’ll throw it up here for a real public brainstorm.)  Second, he recommended that we add C-SPAN and Comedy Central clips to the Congresspedia. (Already assigned to Conor Kenny, Congresspedia’s Editor). This thought was expanded by Zack Rosen who suggested links to the Crooks and Liars clips. Third, check in with Brooks Jackson’s Factcheck.org to see if there are connections we can make to his fact-checking of issue ads. Fourth, scour others’ websites — like DailyKos, HuffingtonPost — for more substance for the Congresspedia. Bloggers are writing every day about lawmakers and if someone pulls their substance onto the Congresspedia site we’ll get more of their readers involved. Fifth, make connections to journalism schools, particularly to get them involved in fact checking what’s added to the Congresspedia site.

Great ideas. Great guy. We’re more than pleased he’s joined our Advisory Board.

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Mike Klein, Micah Sifry and I just returned from a few days in Seattle and San Francisco — a trip well worth the range of discussions we had about Sunlight’s goals and how to achieve them. We had simulating meetings with Martin Collier at the Glaser Progress Foundation and with Bill Gates, Sr. in Seattle. And our conversations in San Francisco were chocked full of advice out of the thinking of some of the great pioneers in the technology world, namely Mitch Kapor, Craig Newmark, David Sifry to name just a few. Chris Nolan hosted a terrific evening event for us.

The longest conversation of the trip that we had was with Mitch Kapor at his Open Source Applications Foundation. Before the meeting we knew we were pretty much on the same wave length on the issue of transparency because at a conference a few years ago, Mitch talked about the issue:

Transparency is not a new concept to self-government. In fact it’s an essential component. Yet our government practices have become increasingly opaque. For example did you know the final draft of the Patriot Act was introduced simultaneously with the vote?

Do we see with who and when are Congresspersons and their staff are meeting? Are transcripts of lobbyists meeting with government officials made public? No, too often the real reasons for legislation, the real beneficiaries are obscured behind thicker doors. And in recent years, government information is increasingly less available in the name of security.

Our politics is not transparent and it needs to be. I am heartened by the community of bloggers who have begun to hold politicians and the big media which cover them more accountable.

So, yes, I think technology can help in the form of decentralized tools, greater transparency, and principle-based communities which use them. The challenges are to develop both the tools and the community practices in a synergistic way.

And that was the topic of our meeting — how to develop both the tools and community practices in a synergistic way. More to come on this and on other meetings.

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Congresspedia now has links to the Colbert Report for each member interviewed in his "Better Know a District" series. You would never know that learning about your member of Congress could be so entertaining. Check it out, like Craig Newmark has, on the home page of Congresspedia.org.

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