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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Mo’ Money
At the end of last week the Sunlight Foundation made a number of new grants. We’re really excited about the potential of each of them.
The work of ReadtheBill.org (which I’ve talked about before) is a hugely important effort. It could end the practice of ramming bills through Congress in the dark of night — bills that are filled with favors for special interests, earmarks, and heaven only knows ((truly) what else. And think of what activists can cook up (particularly online) if they have 72 hours to read legislation and get citizens to weigh in. We think that ReadtheBill.org will make a huge difference in making Congress’ work more transparent and in engaging citizens.
The other grants we made, though not as large, have potentially big impact too. The Institute on State Money and Politics‘ is plowing ahead into the Web 2.0 world by developing an API – the first of its kind – to disseminate massive amounts of its campaign-finance data, open source style, on the Internet. We hope they will pave the way for other organizations into the brave new high tech world. We’re pleased to have had a role in stimulating their interest in this through conversations initiated by the folks running Sunlight Labs.
A third grant is to WashingtonWatchdog.org which is developing one of the most comprehensive and powerful internet-based research tools we’ve seen. Our grant is to help with them an immediate hardware upgrade so they can finish their prototype. When this site is ready to be launched, it will provide a way for citizens to stay on top of legislative and regulatory developments — in real time — and provide a law research library (think Code of Federal Regulations, Executive Order, all Public Laws) relevant to over 100 issues. What you see on the site now isn’t user-friendly — the interface is still down the road a bit — but we think that tranparency effort can be transforming to the way citizens participate in lawmaking.
And our fourth grant is to Room Eight, a very popular New York state-focused blog. The grant will allow them to expand their coverage to their Congressional delegation. We are excited by their work and the work of hundreds of other bloggers who cover state politics, and we feel like this grant will allow this blog to develop a prototype of how other state-oriented bloggers can expand their own work to federal office holders. Noone is a better watchdog that the citizens who lawmakers represent.
That’s all for the moment.
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Good Stuff
Posting’s been light this week. I spent a few days in New York meeting with other funders (JEHT Foundation and Open Society Institute), brainstorming with our far-flung staff and consultants (a virtual workplace is good, but sometimes you just have to meet face-to-face!), and talking with groups about their work. I’ve also been doing interviewing for new staff.
I’m quite fascinated by several groups’ work that we’ve looked at recently. Rafael DeGennaro has created a potentially powerful populist movement over the simple notion that lawmakers ought to actually read a bill before they vote on it. His ReadtheBill.org (BTW you can find him at the YearKos convention this week), presents a positive agenda — every piece of legislation must be posted for 72 hours before it’s voted on — that will enable citizens, activists, journalists, indeed everyone, to know more about what is going on in Congress and to express their opinions about it. Certainly one of Sunlight’s goals is to not only make information available, but also to make it available in "real time" so that democracy is enlivened by civic engagement. Seems to us that DeGennaro has singled out a pretty basic element to making that happen. Following his "Mystery Bills" feature is a must.
We’re also intrigued by a project marshaled by Les Blomberg — WashingtonWatchdog. (Alas, not much of a web presence yet.) His effort offers a powerful Internet-based tool that would allow people to stay on top of current legislative and regulatory developments on specific issues.
The scope of the information already in their databases is mind-boggling. It includes a federal law library that has all the laws (from the U.S. Code and Public Laws), rules and regulations (from the Code of Federal Regulations), and Executive Orders. It contains a research library of some 280,000 federal documents, more than one million citations linking related documents to each other, and more than 3.7 million votes cast by Senators and Representatives. For each issue, researchers could customize the library containing all the documents concerning their specific issue in the Congressional Record, Federal Register, Presidential and Executive Documents, House and Senate Bills, House and Senate Roll Call Votes, House and Senate Committee Reports, House and Senate Committee Hearing Transcripts, and Government Accounting Office Reports.
The group also plans to build into the system the ability to analyze these bills and documents and voting records; the ability to create customized action alerts, a Wikipedia-like encyclopedia for various issues. What an incredible resource this might be.
There’s a lot of good work going on.
