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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Check out your peanut butter here
This morning I visited the U.S. Food and Drug Administration’s (FDA) website to check, in the face of the current salmonella outbreak, if the Kroger “natural creamy” peanut butter that had been sitting in our cupboards was safe to feed my four-year-old son. I typed in the UPC code from the jar into the search bar on the page and discovered that it was not part of the recall. That was great—easy and quick. And Leo got his peanut butter and jelly sandwich.
Here at the Sunlight Foundation, we’re often critical of the government’s forays into internet communication. But this is an occasion for praise. In the weeks since the salmonella outbreak occurred, sickening at least 550 people in 43 states and contributing to eight deaths, the FDA has harnessed the internet and social media to get the word out to consumers.
The main agency web page about the outbreak summarizes the situation, gives helpful health information and provides links to congressional investigations and testimony. A “widget” that allows people to paste a recall search box on their web pages was used 1.4 million times in nine days, and the website itself was searched 20 million times. The FDA also made use of twitter (@FDArecalls), blogs, mobile alerts, and online videos to alert the public about the danger.
The FDA also offers a feed of the recall information in a variety of formats—the underlying raw, structured data on which products are affected by the outbreak—so that inventive programmers can mash it up with other information should inspiration strike. Over at the blog “Development in a Blink,” Doug Finke took the information and ran it through a social mapping program to come up with this visualization on the relationships among the companies and brands involved in the recall.
There’s certainly more the agency could do. For example, it could create a way that people could text the name of a product to them from their cell phones and receive back a text saying whether the item is affected by the recall or not.
And there’s another long investigation to be told in how we’re in this salmonella mess in the first place. The food processing industry has long lobbied against giving the FDA stronger authority to regulate food safety, contributing $11.5 million in the 2008 federal elections alone and spending $29 million on lobbying last year. But with the salmonella crisis upon us, we commend the FDA for taking advantage of what the internet can offer in getting the word out.
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The Open Secrets Effect
The man who really introduced me to the power of Internet (long story, see his explanation here) — Gavin Clabaugh — reminds us what shining a light into hidden corners of Washington, and mixing the data with a bit of technology and a handful of the Internet (with a little Miller and co-conspirator pixy dust thrown in) can do. He says that the combination may result in nothing short of the power to save democracy from itself. I promise you, Gavin was not sitting at the table when we hatched the idea for Sunlight (though his wife was my communications director when I headed the Center for Responsive Politics, so maybe there’s something in the bloodline).
It was a long-time reporter of Washington’s hidden secrets who said to us "Many members of Congress do what they do, because they can get away with it." We responded, "Sunlight is the best disinfectant." And sunlight in the age of the Internet means something far more powerful than it’s ever meant before.
The mere act of opening the kimono changes behavior and changes the balance of power. …So too, the inherent "connectedness" of the Internet is also changing the relationship of money to power as well. Big money is still there (by the bucket-full in this particular election season), but it is being somewhat counterbalanced by so-called Internet campaigns, campaigns that are using the ‘net’s ability to aggregate lots of small things, in this case small contributions.
Nevertheless, today’s innovative (dare I say social) uses of technology have had a liberating effect. Instead of robbing us of rights, they have increased our participation, restoring power to the formerly powerless. It has strengthened our democracy, not undermined it. To paraphrase Al Gore in his (absolutely terrific) book, The Assault on Reason, "a connected citizenry" is our greatest hope. The new internet is all about connections and the open secret effect…
Gavin give us several other examples of how transparency, in the networked age, is changing the power dynamics – in the relationship between funder and grant seeker, passenger to airline (please say it’s so!), and the news media.
Transparency can make a difference.
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Enter our Sunshine Week Mashup Contest!
Next week (March 11-17) is Sunshine Week, during which journalists, activists, and bloggers raise awareness about the importance of open government and advocate for more transparency.
To celebrate, we are hosting a contest! We will give a $2,000 prize for the best “Web 2.0 Mashup” (wikipedia) that displays information about Congress:
Our judges–Esther Dyson, Jimmy Wales, and Craig Newmark–will select the winning mashup based on creativity and how effectively it displays Congressional information.
We are not looking for something complicated — simplicity is often the best transparency tool. Entries should have been created in the last six months.
The deadline for entries is April 15.
Confused? Wondering what a mashup is? A mashup is a website or web application that combines content from more than one source. You’ve probably seen a mashup even if you don’t realize it. Sunlight Labs made this mashup last year, taking an excel spreadsheet of earmarks in the Labor, Health and Human Service BILL and “mashing them” onto Google maps so that people could locate earmarks designated for their zip code:
Hundreds of citizens used that mashup to learn more about earmarking in Congress.
