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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Happy Birthday FOIA
Steven Aftergood at Secrecy News reminds us that Friday July 4th is the 42nd anniversary of Lyndon Johnson signing the Freedom of Information Act into law. Interesting, but frankly, FOIA hasn’t aged well. Meant to be “Democracy’s X-Ray,” allowing journalists and other citizens to ferret out waste, fraud, abuse and corruption the reality is that FOIA plays into the notion that government shouldn’t automatically provide information. I think it should.
This spring, I wrote an essay The Merciful Death of the Freedom of Information Act and the Birth of True Government Transparency: A Short History that was published in Rebooting Democracy, a compendium of some 44 essays, was released last month at the Personal Democracy Forum conference. In the essay I keyed off a Jeff Jarvis blog post where he called for the abolition of FOIA. “Why should we be asking for information about and from our government?” he wrote. “The government should have to ask to keep things from us…Government information-every act of government on our behalf-should be free by default.” Digital technology and web-based tools now allow business transactions to be digitally captured, stored, and opened to search and analysis, he argued. This was not possible when the information was stored on paper in file cabinets.
But to get there, there has to be a sea change in the attitude of government. I think we are moving in the right direction but it will take time. But citizens are getting used to getting more information via the Internet and it makes them want more.
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Rebooting Democracy
Rebooting Democracy, a compendium of some 44 essays, was released earlier this week at the Personal Democracy Forum conference. It virtually – and for real (there was actually a real book produced. You can download it too) — seethes with the hopes and possibilities of re energizing, reorganizing, and reorienting our government for the Internet Age. It focuses on some fundamental questions: Is it possible to redesign our government with open doors and see-through walls? How can we leverage the exponential power of many-to-many deliberation for the common good? It’s a really terrific collection with a remarkable group of authors. My contribution is about what real government transparency means as FOIA dies.
The Merciful Death of the Freedom of Information Act and the Birth of True Government Transparency: A Short History
Looking back, maybe it was inevitable. Perhaps the well-intentioned yet fatally compromised Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) was doomed from the start, well before it died this year, in 2015. And yet, while FOIA was dying, true government openness was emerging to take its place.
