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
-
This Week in Transparency – August 21, 2009
Here are some of the more interesting media mentions of Sunlight and our friends and allies over the past week:
Last Saturday afternoon, C-SPAN broadcast an interview of Ellen Miller, Sunlight’s executive director, discussing how the Internet is being used to provide transparency in the workings of government.
The Associated Press used data from the Center for Responsive Politics Chevron Corp. spent more than $12.8 million lobbying the federal government in the first half of this year, in an attempt to influence pending climate-change legislation and taxes targeting oil producers. So far this year, the oil giant has almost matched the $12.9 million they spent lobbying in all of 2008. (Continue reading…)
-
Technology Isn’t Ancillary or Extraneous
Jimmy Wales ,Wikipedia founder and Sunlight advisor, and Andrea Weckerle, attorney, communications consultant and blogger, wrote an interesting column last week at CNN.com, on how we should create a more tech friendly government.. The duo say that “technology isn’t ancillary or extraneous to governance, and instead that it’s an integral part of the effective running of a democratic superpower.” In anticipation of President-elect Obama’s appointment of the country’s first national chief technology officer (CTO), they provide five recommendations for core components of a structurally sound, technologically savvy federal government. Their points, in brief:
1. Ruthlessly modernize: Conduct a survey of the technology used by the federal government, keep what works and replace what doesn’t.
2. Create openness of information: This will allow transparency and accountability, as well as inspire innovation and collaboration.
3. Single sign-on across all government Web sites for citizens: Make it so citizens need only to input a single username and password to access all federal Web sites and databases, creating more user-friendly interfaces for citizens that in turn encourage frequent use and participation.
4. Commit to open-source software and open standards: Such a commitment by the feds would end the practice of adopting closed proprietary software sold by companies with political ties to government.
5. Create a single government-wide wiki: Large private enterprises have achieved substantial efficiencies by allowing their employees to rapidly share knowledge and disseminate information. The feds should create a single, massive government-wide wiki, which would serve as a cornerstone of a modern federal knowledge management system.Read their whole column here.
-
New Sunlight Advisors
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.
