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
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Tweet Success! Boxer and McCaskill to Support 482
Yesterday, we announced a campaign to pass S. 482, the Senate electronic filing bill. There are two tacks to this campaign: one involves calling your senators and seeking support for the bill and opposition to a potential poison pill amendment, the other involves “tweeting” to the 17 senators on Twitter to try and secure their support for the bill or thank them for cosponsoring. After one day, we have already received positive responses from both Sen. Barbara Boxer and Sen. Claire McCaskill. Both stated their support for the bill over Twitter:
clairecmc: I’ve supported electronic filing of campaign reports for a long time. It’s embarrassing that we are not required to file electronically.#482
Barbara_Boxer: Thanks to all who tweeted me about e-filing of campaign finance reports. I was a cosponsor of S. 482 before and will do so again.
In less than 24 hours,
2 out of 15 of the senators on Twitter who had not cosponsored are now cosponsors. (UPDATE: Sen. McCaskill has not yet officially cosponsored the bill and simply stated her support, Sen. Boxer officially cosponsored the bill yesterday. We hope that McCaskill turns her support into being an actual cosponsor soon.) In terms of grassroots outreach that is an amazing turn around. (See also, Clay’s post at Sunlight Labs.) In both the Boxer and McCaskill responses we can see that Twitter is a great way to communicate with constituents. Thanks to everyone who helped “tweet” these senators.We still your help in making telephone calls to Senate offices. So far, 67 calls have been made. We need to keep the pressure on to make sure that this bill finally passes. Go to the Pass 482 site and follow the instructions to call your senators. It’s very easy.
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Help Lobby Congress on S. 482!
Update: Please send your thanks to @Barbara_Boxer and @clairecmc (Sen. Claire McCaskill) for agreeing to cosponsor S. 482.
The legend of lobbying in Washington, DC states that President Ulysses Grant would take a jaunt over to the Willard Hotel to smoke cigars and enjoy a glass of brandy. Waiting in the hotel’s lobby for the President would be agents of all the big industries and causes seeking an audience. Today, you don’t need to come to Washington or wait for politicians to leave their security bubbles to get a word in edge wise, all you need is to connect with them on Twitter and keep the lobbying to 140 characters or less. In our quest to pass S. 482, a bill to require senators to file their campaign finance reports electronically, we are taking our lobbying, with your help, to Twitter.
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TransparencyCamp Lives On
TransparencyCamp, the unconference event that iStrategyLabs and Sunlight co-sponsored two weekends ago, was a huge success.
We made a highlight reel of the weekend – interviews with many of the participants, including me and Craig Newmark, scenes from various sessions. We want to share with those who attended and those who couldn’t make it :
The spirit generated 10 days ago lives on.
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SocialGovernment.com and the States
Earlier this week, Alexander Muir at SocialGovernment.com wrote an interesting post about social media in the states; how they are using new media to interact with citizens and what are some of the best programs. Much like the federal government, he found that the states can and should be doing so much more.
Muir found that states were starting to use maps to inform their residents about traffic and other similar issues. He gives Maryland “extra credit” for the Old Line State’s interactive map displaying environmental initiatives having to do with the Chesapeake Bay. He notes that many states should do more with safety alerts. Currently, Amber Alerts are the most used new media app. He suggests a tornado watch system would be appropriate use of new media.
With the federal Recovery.gov up and running, many states are building their own version. He sites Illinois’ site as a “great start,” but added we’ll have to take a “wait and see” approach to see how transparent and useful these sites end up. And I would add we must take approach the states much like we are the feds by prodding and demanding that they are as open as possible.
States are starting to experiment with Twitter, but few are fully realizing its potential. He sites California Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger as an exception, who has set up a Twitter group on Buzzable to discuss what’s going on with the state government. He adds that states should embrace widgets much more, with Virginia doing the most with ones on wine, traffic and emergency notices. He also credits Virginia for setting up a YouTube channel, podcasts and a flushed out stimulus site.
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WriteToReply.org
Last week, Stephen Carter, the U.K. government’s minister for communications, technology and broadcasting, released an interim report on the state of Britain’s digital capacity with recommendations for enhancements. The report, “Digital Britain – Interim Report,” is the result of a review Carter launched in October with the mandate of providing a comprehensive analysis of Britain’s digital economy.
Bill Thompson, BBC technology columnist, criticized Carter and his agency for producing a report lacking public engagement and that “reflects an approach based around control and secrecy.” Thompson points out that it’s 72 pages into the report before the authors added an invitation with an email address (digitalbritain@berr.gsi.gov.uk) for interested citizens and organizations to offer suggestions and join the discussion. Thompson added that it would be up to Carter and his Digital Britain team to follow up on these expressions of interest, “which is nice of them, and we must just hope that Carter and his expert panel will be carefully reviewing every blog post and online comment to ensure they don’t miss anything important.”
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GovTwit Directory
Enamored as I am by Twitter these days, here’s a useful item, a government twitter directory. BearingPoint, the McLean, Va., -based management and technology consulting firm, is compiling lists of Twitter links to state and local government, federal government, contractors , journalists and industry/academics. Might be nice to see this all in a widget.
And along the idea of sharing good information…over the weekend, John Wonderlich , Sunlight’s Policy Director, wrote about several lists he and his team have been compiling. For instance, they’ve just posted at Congresspedia a list of access points for House of Representatives Web publications and primary source information that affects the House, with a description of the content each one provides. He’s working on a Senate version too.
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Freshmen Lawmakers Have Wealth of Tech Experience
A number of newly elected lawmakers have serious experience with Internet technology and used the Internet in the campaign more than any previous class of incoming congressmen. According to TechCentral,
Freshmen lawmakers are not only eager to use the latest technologies to communicate with constituents — many of them come from tech and telecom backgrounds. Most used some type of new media tool on their campaign pages, and nearly half provided links to online blogs, according to a National Journal analysis. Almost half also linked to YouTube videos, followed by Facebook, Flickr, MySpace, Twitter and Blip.tv sites.
Thanks to the lifting of restrictive franking rules from online content, these new congressmen can start off their legislative career with a free hand to operate online.
It’s great to see so many lawmakers coming into their new jobs familiar with the variety of online communications sources available to them. I’m also very interested in seeing how these freshmen used online communications, rather than what they used. Were they engaged in conversations online, through blogs or Twitter? Did they blog openly at other online venues? What is their history of engagement online?
I think that the answers to these questions will better help to gauge how they will use online technologies and communications – and how transparent they will be about it – than simply recognizing that, as a class, they used technology more than previous incoming groups of freshmen.
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Kentucky Tweets
Kentucky is using twitter to share election day information to voters.
So if you’re voting in Kentucky follow the assistant Secretary of State at twitter.com/KYTrey for the latest in election day news.
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Congress can Tweet, Follow Them with Capitol Tweets Widget
On Friday, we told you about the happy ending to months of negotiations to modernize the Franking rules that govern how members of Congress can use the Internet to communicate with us about their work. The new rules just passed by the House and Senate allow members of Congress to communicate with us on sites such as Twitter, YouTube and Flickr without recrimination. (We advocated for these rules changes through our bipartisan collaborative effort, the Open House Project, and through our popular Let Our Congress Tweet campaign, the first Twitter-based petition to Congress, which hundreds of you joined.)
Before these new rules were passed, lawmakers could not officially embed a YouTube video on their official Web site, nor could they join us in political conversations around the popular virtual water cooler that Twitter has become.
To celebrate this historic precedent, we created Capitol Tweets, a widget you can embed on your site that updates you every 10 minutes with the latest tweets from members of Congress who use Twitter.
Download the widget, and while you’re watching the tweets fly, check out this effort by David All (who co-wrote the Open House Project chapter on Franking reform with Sunlight’s Paul Blumenthal) to grade them on their tweets.
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Senate Changes Franking Rules for Web Sites
Last year, the Open House Project proposed the loosening of rules governing what lawmakers can post to their official web sites. Last week, the Senate Committe on Rules and Administration approved new rules to allow lawmakers to post content from third party sites such as YouTube, Flickr, Twitter, and so on.
The new rules, while not immediately available for public review, appear to be far different from the ones proposed earlier this year. Earlier, Rules and Administration proposed to “keep a list of “approved Web sites” that agreed to provide pages free of advertisements or partisan leanings.”
In contrast to this proposal Republicans on the Committee offered a plan to allow lawmakers to post at their discretion, and in accordance with long-standing standards, with review by the Committee if necessary. The approved plan mirrors the Republican plan.
Kudos to the Senate for taking a step forward by allowing senators to more freely communicate across the Web.
