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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Berkman’s New Media Cloud
Earlier today, Harvard’s Berkman Center for Internet and Society, teamed with Thomson Reuters, launched Media Cloud, a new project that tracks news content comprehensively with free, open and flexible research tools.
It’s the brainchild of Berkman fellow Ethan Zuckerman and Berkman Faculty Co-Director (and Sunlight advisory board member) Yochai Benkler. The goal is for the site to be an open research platform that allows unprecedented quantitative analysis of media trends by automatically downloading, processing, and querying the full text of stories and blog posts from thousands of media outlets.
Berkman’s announcement quotes Yochai, “While daily newspapers struggle for survival, political, niche and special interest blogs continue to thrive. In the midst of this upheaval, it is difficult to know where stories begin, who sets the agenda, and how these dramatic changes impact news coverage on the whole. We created Media Cloud to help researchers and the public get quantitative answers to these challenging questions.”
The hope is for Media Cloud will help map the interaction between mainstream media, citizen media and blogs to give a more accurate and comprehensive view of how people influence, shape and interact with the news.
The Nieman Journalism Lab put this video of Ethan describing and walking us through Media Cloud on their site:
Ethan Zuckerman on Media Cloud from Nieman Journalism Lab on Vimeo.Dave Weinberger calls it of Berkman’s most exciting projects, and Doc Searls notes that the Berkman folks are looking for feedback. So go check it out.
Congrats to Ethan, Yochai and the Berkman community on this great new tool.
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Globe and Mail’s Public Policy Wiki
Mathew Ingram, the communities editor at the Toronto-based Globe and Mail, writing at the Nieman Journalism Lab’s Web site, recounts how he’s been experimenting with new ways of interacting with their readers online. Several weeks ago, he launched their Public Policy Wiki, a social-media mashup to encourage opinions from their readers about Canadian public policy issues. It’s a combination of a traditional, publicly-editable wiki and a public discussion forum, with comments and voting features.
Using TikiWiki software, Mathew was able to pull it together rather quickly. The first issue the wiki approached was the pending Canadian economy and federal budget. They posted several opinions of economists and other policy advisors, as well as “briefing notes.” Then they asked their registered users to comment, edit and vote on them using the wiki tools. In two weeks they attracted over 100,000 page views, with 800 individuals signing up to vote, comment and edit. They then sent the Canadian finance minister the two most popular notes. Mathew adds that the vast majority of comments and participation has been serious and well thought out. Who says the public doesn’t care about policy?
