Late last week, after the Sunshine Week Lessig lecture, the always thoughtful Beth Noveck — law professor and director of both the Institute for Information Law and Policy and Democracy Design Workshop, and friend — compared the Lessig speech to a June 2007 speech, by open-source-licensing crusader Eben Moglen.

Beth said Moglen is an optimist who is inclined to trust people’s ability to collaborate and work together. She wrote that his take on government is revolutionary and evolutionary. Lessig is a pessimist, she says, full of dismay at the state of the body politic, yet wants to preserve the status quo ultimately. (I’m not sure I completely agree with the assessment of Lessig as pessimist but that’s not the point I want to make right now.)

Beth says that the best approach is a mash-up of both approaches:"Lessig’s orientation toward action and pragmatism with Moglen’s boldness of vision." She advocates that we take a whole new look at government institutions and governance, and start using technology to empower citizens in order to fundamentally change the way government works.

We need to stop viewing our institutions of government and governance as static and reified in their current form and, instead, start asking, not how to use technology to make Congress more transparent but how to use technology to make us more powerful.

I don’t want to blow up Congress (well, I do but that’s for another day) but to extend its intelligence by connecting the power of the network to the structure of the institution and to change fundamentally the way government works.

The idea that all we are good for is to blog about what happens in Washington or even to make maps and mash-ups of when and with whom the politicians went to lunch is to ignore the larger opportunity to get involved with making the science that contributes to our understanding of public health and obesity, analyzing the data about global warming, participating in the drafting of policies about these and other fields and overseeing the work of those who implement them through citizen juries assigned to every official.

Even though Sunlight is doing mashups of earmarks on Google maps and lobbyist meetings with lawmakers, and developing fun ways to visualize data, Sunlight is already heading in the direction that Beth suggests: experimenting with ways to engage citizens in research and in the shaping of government policy. We have a major new launch scheduled in this arena for next week.

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As promised, here’s video of Lessig’s Sunshine Week lecture, sponsored by Sunlight and Omidyar Network:

Official Footage from National Press Club:


Sunlight Footage:

Audio from the Change Congress lecture (mp3, 34mb)

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If you could treat information about your work the way information about Congress is treated, it would be the equivalent of going into a job interview with a nearly blank resume. A resume is information that a potential employer uses to hire you for a job. And because members of Congress work for us, how can we evaluate their job performance if we don’t have meaningful access to information about what they do and who they do it for?

Congress should put information, which relates to the business of lawmaking, online in real time. All their required filings (such as reports about their personal financial investments and their campaign finance reports) should be posted on the Internet in real time and in a way that people can easily search them. The legislation that lawmakers are going to vote on should be posted online three days before the vote so ordinary people can read and evaluate it. The correspondence between Congress and the executive branch should be put online. Congressional earmarks in both the Senate and the House should be fully disclosed with the who, what, where, and why before they are decided on. (For more information click here.)

These measures - and there are no doubt others — can help create a more open and accountable Congress. The purpose of Sunshine Week is to partake in dialogue about what it means to have an open government and how we can achieve it. The events of the past week are a call to lawmakers to be more transparent and accountable. The image that this week provides is of a united citizenry asking government to be more open so we can trust them again. Let us in because we can help each other run a great nation.

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Lawrence Lessig, Stanford University law professor and world-renowned expert in intellectual property, is announcing that he’s going to invest a significant amount of his time and energy confronting the pervasive and corruptive influence of money in our democracy. You may have heard of the recent Draft Lessig movement that almost convinced him to run for Congress. He ultimately decided not to make the run, but he’s not retreating from the fight.

Today, at a lecture here in Washington, sponsored by Sunlight and Omidyar Network, he’s launching the ChangeCongress project where he’ll focus his academic interests on the issue of the systemic corruption of American democracy. Lessig will outline his hopes for ChangeCongress and how it will help citizens reclaim their democracy from the culture of corruption.

Lessig will give his lecture at 1:30 p.m. (Eastern Time) today at the National Press Club. We are very proud that Lessig recently joined Sunlight’s advisory board, where he’s helping us stay on the vanguard of using technology to promote a transparent and open government. If you can’t make it to the lecture you can watch the Web cast.

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We’re continuing the Sunshine Week festivities with two events dedicated to promoting a more open government. We invite you to join us, and for those of you who can’t make it to Washington, DC, we encourage you to watch the webcasts of the events.

Today at 1pm EDT, in conjunction with Open the Government, Greg Elin of Sunlight Labs will moderate a panel to demonstrate new ways nonprofits have made government data open and useful to the public. Panelists include:

• Sheila Krumholz of Center for Responsive Politics
• David Moore of OpenCongress.org
• Sean Moulton of FedSpending.org
• Daniel X. O’Neil of EveryBlock

The event will be held in the Holeman Lounge of the National Press Club in DC, but you can watch it live online. (You’ll need to register first. The registration page is the same page you’ll visit to view the webcast.)

Then tomorrow at 1:30 EDT, Sunlight and Omidyar Network will host a press briefing featuring Lawrence Lessig, who will announce the launch of his new Change Congress project. Lessig, renowned expert in intellectual property, founder of Creative Commons and Sunlight Advisory Board member, recently changed his mission to combat the influence of money in American democracy. The event will be held in the Murrow, White and Lisagor rooms of the National Press Club in Washington, and will be webcast here.

Hope you can join us!

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It’s Sunshine Week here in DC and, well, the sun is shining which is an auspicious beginning. This is a hugely important national initiative launched six years ago about the importance of open government and freedom of information. How important? According to a Scripps Howard News Service and Ohio University survey released today just 4% of the surveyed Americans believe the federal government is very open — and 44% believe it is very secretive.

Participants in Sunshine Week activities which are held throughout the country include print, broadcast and online news media, civic groups, libraries, non-profits, schools and others interested in the public’s right to know. Here in D.C. there are two panels on Wednesday at the National Press Club plus a lecture by Professor Lawrence Lessig that Sunlight and Omidyar Network are sponsoring on Thursday. More details tomorrow on both of these.

In honor of Sunshine Week one of our grantees, the National Institute on Money in State Politics, has launched its Legislative Committee Analysis Tool, or CAT, which organizes campaign-finance data by the major legislative committees in each state. Here’s an example of what you can find. This new tool uses Project Vote Smart’s APIs for committee assignments. (The Institute’s own APIs are here.) You’ll NIMSP also links to candidate biographies. Look for links to candidate scorecards and bills shortly.

Next up for these folks who focus on money in state politics: zip code lookups paired with Legislative District Boundary Maps and analyses; a 50-state Lobbyist Link tool that will show where lobbyists are focusing their giving.

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Speaking of the Center for Responsive Politics, it’s probably worth noting that they’ve issued some useful suggestions to increase government transparency and the ease of accessing government records, all in time for Sunshine Week. Also worth noting that they provide a list of contacts at the bottom of the page so you can pass on their suggestions.

They’re all good, but here’s one that I think is tremendously important:

Politicians might call it party-building, but the contributions they make from their personal political action committees (a.k.a. leadership PACs) seem more like career-building, as they collect chits to secure a committee chairmanship or leadership position.

Leadership PACs and their sponsors aren’t required to disclose their associations. So when a committee with a name as vague as “Campaign for America’s Future” registers with the Federal Election Commission, there’s no way to know who controls it (Utah Sen. Orrin Hatch). All leadership PACs should be required to report which politician they’re associated with, saving the public and watchdog organizations from playing detectives.

If a politician is in charge of a pot of money raised from contributors, you ought to know about it. And you also ought to know who’s collecting that money. Though it’s not on the Center’s list, I’d certainly add it: Politicians should also be required to identify their fundraisers (like the Bush Rangers) who are responsible for bringing in buckets of money to the campaign.

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