Micah Sifry (our strategic consultant and editor of techPresident) highlights another government transparency experiment coming out of the UK. The Power of Information Task Force is a British government agency working to improve the way government shares information with its citizens.  Yesterday, the Task Force launched “Show Us a Better Way,” a contest that asks citizens to identify what they would like to see done with public information. If they like the idea they will help fund it, to the tune of £20,000 to develop the idea to the next level. Here are some examples of ideas they are looking for.

The Task Force itself just launched in March, largely because of the vision and efforts of Sunlight friend, U.K. Cabinet Office Minister and Member of Parliament Tom Watson. As Micah wrote back in April, “Watson is part of a new vanguard of political leaders who understand that the real gains are to be had in enabling people to connect to each other to identify common concerns, come up with solutions, and organize on their own behalf.”

Can you imagine a similar task force in operation in our federal government?  This is such a terrific idea. The whole sentiment is so different from that of the US Government where the burden of getting information from government rests with citizens. I really  like what the contest site says, “Public data is your data.” Congress and the Executive Branch could learn quite a bit from the likes of Minister Watson.

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Micah sez: 

Go read British Cabinet Officer Tom Watson’s speech on the "Power of information" and imagine a Member of Congress making a similar speech on how technology can radically reinvent government. Imagine one of our presidential candidates making it (even Barack Obama, who has done the most thinking on this topic.) You can’t. But maybe, if we pay more attention to our cousins across the pond, soon someone will.

I have a meeting with Watson in the middle of April. Can’t wait.

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That’s what Micah Sifry, Sunlight’s senior strategic consultant and executive editor of the Personal Democracy Forum says today, about an E-Tech on a panel on "civic hacking" — online activists taking government data in its raw and user-unfriendly state, and making it accessible and helpful to citizens.

Sounds familiar.

The panel discussed a number of British sites launched by our colleagues at mySociety.org as well as the hacking of the UN at UNDemocracy.com, where you can now get easy access to the transcripts of the U.N. General Assembly and the Security Council in structured formats, information that was previously very hard to get your hands on. Neat stuff.

"When an institution is broken," Micah writes, "more scrutiny can only help fix it."

Yup.

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Congratulations to our good friends over at techPresident for winning the 2007 Knight-Batten Award for Innovations in Journalism Grand Prize. The University of Maryland-affiliated J-Lab organized the award. Andrew Rasiej and Micah Sifry, Sunlight’s technology advisors, founded techPresident to focus on how the campaigns are using the web, and how the web is using them. They are encouraging ordinary citizens to be their own Woodsteins, covering the candidates using all the new tools of the new web. The site covers campaign websites, online advertising, and postings on YouTube and has a must-read group blog and daily digest. Their tracking of which candidate has the fastest growing group of friends on MySpace and Facebook supporters has become a political bellweather.

Andrew and Micah have collected a couple dozen veterans of the 2004 and 2006 elections, both Republicans and Democrats, to blog on the site. This powerhouse stable includes the likes of Patrick Ruffini, former eCampaign Director for the Republican National Committee and webmaster for Bush-Cheney ‘04; Zack Exley , director of online organizing and communications for Kerry/Edwards ‘04; Morra Aarons, former director of Internet marketing for the DNC, and Chuck DeFeo, general manager of Townhall.com.

Micah and Andrew and the rest of the (very small) techPresident team are the innovators of the ongoing mashup of politics and Web 2.0. As the campaign heats up, techPresident will increasingly be an essential resource for journalists and average citizens alike. Congratulations guys!

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Sunlight's senior strategic consultant, Micah Sifry, has a really nice op ed in the NY Daily News today, that pretty much summarizes my thoughts about CNN's YouTube debate two nights ago. (He has taught me well.) A big step forward BUT….

Imagine if the next time there's a presidential candidates debate on TV, you could go online to vote beforehand on which questions should be asked, and the top choices from the public were included in the mix. Imagine that during the debate you also could grade the candidates' answers, and see how your peers and the rest of the public were grading them, in real time.

Go even further, and imagine the debate's host turning to one of the candidates and saying, 'Hold on, senator. Three-quarters of the people watching right now on the Web have just said that they'd like you to go back to the question they just asked you, because they feel you didn't answer it at all.'

As Micah points out, all of this is possible now. Maybe with an initial success under its belt, CNN and others will go further next time. (If you missed the debate, check out TalkingPointsMemo's 10 minute video recap.) We'd certainly like to see some of this tried in some Congressional debates too.

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Micah Sifry — half of Sunlight’s technology guru team — has a very thoughtful post at his home base, Personal Democracy Forum, about his take-away from this year’s PopTech 2006 conference.

Instead of thinking of political resources (money, information, people) as scarce and vital to control from the top down, what happens if we think about using the internet to open politics to much larger networks of involved citizens, either when we participate in our interactions with government representatives or when we participate in campaigns for issues or candidates? How can we use the abundance of people who want to contribute something to making government work better, or getting a person elected or an issue moved, in better ways?

Read the whole post.

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In the rush to our launch this coming Wednesday – stay tuned for how to call in to our telephonic press conference – I want to just take a moment to reflect on the extraordinary amount of strategic thinking and planning and real work product that has been undertaken in the 4 months since the Sunlight Foundation was incorporated. What we will be announcing on Wednesday – the awarding of grants to create new databases and our discussions about how to mash information together to make it even more robust, the launching of a Congresspedia, establishing three new blogs, our initial efforts in distributive journalism and on-line tutorials – is work that might have taken another organization a year to put together! Kudos to all of us.

But kudos especially to two key consultants to Sunlight – Micah Sifry and Andrew Rasiej. Micah and I have known each other since my days at Public Campaign where he served as a senior communications fellow. Andrew and I met later, and we always harbored an interest in collaborating in something big down the road. Sunlight is it!

Two years ago Andrew and Micah insisted that I come to the first Personal Democracy Forum conference (their third one will be held on May 15^th in NY.) It was literally an eye-opening experience.  Andrew founded the Personal Democracy Forum as a venue to explore the intersection of the world of politics and technology. Micah is its co-founder. Read their bios.

They have an extraordinary range of experience and they are, quite simply, extraordinary colleagues. Without them, what we hope will be Sunlight’s cutting edge approach to the uses of technology, would have been a longer time in coming, or perhaps, not even part of our plans.

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