Sunlight Foundation

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

• A Watershed Moment in Transparency and Accountability

  By Ellen Miller on 12/11/09 @ 5:48 pm | 1 Comment

  I was out of town earlier this week when the Open Government was released and so I am just now weighing in with a few thoughts. Without being too over the top (OK maybe I am) I think this Directive potentially represents a watershed moment for democracy, the likes of which can forever change the relationship between the government and the public it serves.

  This Directive acknowledges that the Internet is the right, proper and primary medium for communicating information to the public, and that “the public” is key in helping determine the policies, directions and priorities for government’s work. In doing this, the Directive requires each executive agency to create an online portal designed to promote important agency data and provide a place for citizens and agency officials to work together.

  Every citizen –  from web developers to journalists to a real estate agent in Kentucky or mother in Colorado — has something to gain from this new initiative. If you care about the health of your children, the safety of your workplace, the crime in your streets, or corporate accountability you will have new information to inform yourself and discuss with those who represent you.

  Business will have a lot of new data to base their decisions on. Real estate agents and developers will be able to see migration patterns by income when the Internal Revenue Service releases their database of tax-filer migration from county-to-county or state-to-state. This will aid in decisions on where to build, what kind of market to expect and what type of people live where. Similarly, data released by the Department of Housing and Urban Development on public housing will not only help reveal slum lords, but also help renters or buyers locate Section 8 density when deciding on a neighborhood to move into.

  Here are some more examples:

  •    The Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) plans to release a real-time online database providing up to date information on flight delays and cancellations. This database will take existing FAA data and combine it with data from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) to allow the public to be able to easily access online the status and causes of airport delays and cancellations.
  •    The Department of Homeland Security (DHS) is creating Virtual USA, an information-sharing system that will reduce lag time in responses to emergency situations. This system will likely save lives and empower local authorities with better information to reduce the costs of emergencies and disasters.
  •    The Department of Veteran’s Affairs (VA) will release raw data and “report cards” on Veteran’s Administration hospitals empowering current and former military service members and their families to know the quality of care that they are getting when they go to a given VA hospital.

  The Directive will also help citizens hold their government accountable through new avenues of government disclosure and citizen engagement. For example, the Department of Justice is collecting and publishing agency reports on their Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) compliance. Each agency report will include information on how long it takes to process FOIA requests and which agencies are most successful at fulfilling FOIA requests from the public (and consequently which agencies are not as well).

  The Directive also requires each agency to allow citizens to request data to be released by agencies and placed online. This process will enable citizens to continue to press officials to make their data as open as possible, and that call for more information will have an affect far beyond the executive branch.

  The General Services Administration (GSA) will be releasing a full database of all federal advisory committee members that can be mashed up with lobbying records and contribution databases to show the influence that resides on these important bodies – and we can similarly expect Congress, states and municipal governments nationwide to feel pressure to release information. That is, if the public demands it.

  It will be our responsibility as citizens to monitor the data quality reported by agencies and the timeliness of the reporting requirements. Just like all previous open government moments, this one will require constant public engagement to ensure that will be all that it can be.
  Sunlight is bullish on this Directive because we believe it will make permanent the idea that open government means an online government. In the digital age how can it mean anything else?

  Even if you don’t realize it yet, the plan laid out in the Directive will impact you, so we hope you’ll join us during this exciting to begin a this new dialogue with government. What we have now is a plan. And it is a plan that will require public engagement to ensure that the policies it lays out are enacted and undertaken to make our dream of an open government a reality.

  

• Technology Isn’t Ancillary or Extraneous

  By Ellen Miller on 01/14/09 @ 10:29 am | 0 Comments

  Jimmy Wales ,Wikipedia founder and Sunlight advisor, and Andrea Weckerle, attorney, communications consultant and blogger, wrote an interesting column last week  at CNN.com, on how we should create a more tech friendly government.. The duo say that “technology isn’t ancillary or extraneous to governance, and instead that it’s an integral part of the effective running of a democratic superpower.” In anticipation of President-elect Obama’s appointment of  the country’s first national chief technology officer (CTO), they provide five recommendations for core components of a structurally sound, technologically savvy federal government. Their points, in brief:

  1.    Ruthlessly modernize: Conduct a survey of the technology used by the federal government, keep what works and replace what doesn’t.
  2.    Create openness of information: This will allow transparency and accountability, as well as inspire innovation and collaboration.
  3.    Single sign-on across all government Web sites for citizens: Make it so citizens need only to input a single username and password to access all federal Web sites and databases, creating more user-friendly interfaces for citizens that in turn encourage frequent use and participation.
  4.    Commit to open-source software and open standards: Such a commitment by the feds would end the practice of adopting closed proprietary software sold by companies with political ties to government.
  5.    Create a single government-wide wiki: Large private enterprises have achieved substantial efficiencies by allowing their employees to rapidly share knowledge and disseminate information. The feds should create a single, massive government-wide wiki, which would serve as a cornerstone of a modern federal knowledge management system.

  Read their whole column here.

  

• Memo to Obama: 10 Ways to Use Web Video and Multimedia

  By Ellen Miller on 11/14/08 @ 3:51 pm | 0 Comments

  After my post this morning about how the next Administration can make their communications more interactive, I ran across a nice piece by Dan Manatt, founder of PoliticsTV.com and TechPresident contributor, who wrote the Obama Tech Team a memo giving advice on what Web video programs they should create and implement to better govern.

  Dan says:

  Your campaign platform on digital democracy, ethics and transparency, lays out an excellent roadmap to begin bringing the Presidency into the 21st century. And of course the speculation has already begun on how change.gov will morph into whitehouse.gov – and what becomes of barackobama.com….

  The technological transformation of the presidency – and its use of technology to make the executive branch more responsive, interactive, and transparent – can, from day one, be the first great achievement and legacy of the Obama Presidency. It can also be a means to continue togenerate political good will and capital – commodities that often evaporate quickly after a typical presidential honeymoon. So it not only makes good policy sense, it makes good political sense.

  Here’s the short version:

  (1)   WhiteHouse.gov/TV; (2) Weekly Obama Webcast; (3) GovTube; (4) Video Content on Non-Governmental sites; (5) in every executive branch agency, create New Media, Transparency, and Technology offices; (6) have cabinet members/agency heads give monthly Webcasts; (7) Webcast the Inauguration; (8) make the State of the Union an interactive, multimedia event; (9) make the President’s annual budget a digital, multimedia document; (10) enact all of this and more first by executive order, then through legislation, so future Administrations can’t just hard reboot your digital legacy.

  Check out the full post.

  

• Excellent Local Wiki Resource

  By Nisha Thompson on 10/09/08 @ 2:23 pm | 0 Comments

  Loudoun County in Virginia just launched a new wiki to collect community news and information. Loudounpedia is run by the Loudoun county library system and has sections for local government information, blogs, job board, recreation and other community related activities.

  The government section now has all information regarding the election including a Google map of polling places. This is an excellent resource for the community and the choice of a wiki allows people to edit it with their own knowledge making it a resource that is owned by the community.

  h/t to the Municipalist

  

• Kentucky Needs Your Help!

  By Nisha Thompson on 10/09/08 @ 1:28 pm | 0 Comments

  Government Technology reports that Kentucky just launched a draft of its E-Transparency Web site and is asking citizens to comment on it. The Web site will be fully operational by January 1, 2009 and will offer all kinds of information related to state spending, from a government spending database to a game that will allow citizens to see if they can balance the budget. So go check out the site and submit your feedback! They are collecting comments until October 17^th.

  A government body giving an opportunity to citizens to have an influence over a government Web site is a rare occurrence. This will hopefully create a site that is not only informative but also user friendly.

  So kudos Kentucky! I can’t wait to see the final product.
  

  

• C-SPAN Jumps to 21st Century for Conventions

  By Paul Blumenthal on 08/13/08 @ 1:46 pm | 2 Comments

  C-SPAN announced today that it will host a large amount of convention coverage on its web site and on other platforms, including credentialed blogger posts, special Twitter hash tags, and embeddable video from both the Democratic and Republican convention. C-SPAN’s efforts will include:

  — Real-time tracking of credentialed state and national political bloggers, aggregated on the websites, to enable users to follow the latest online convention news and analysis;

  — Video clips from the network’s convention coverage, embeddable, to facilitate use by political bloggers and other convention watchers;

  — Linkable access to the complete C-SPAN Video Library, allowing interested users to fully search all C-SPAN video content;

  — Live coverage of C-SPAN television and radio networks;

  — Blogger Tips and Online Convention Video Finder tools;

  — Real-time feeds from Twitter users using the hash-tags #RNC08 and #DNC08

  This is a huge turnaround from two years ago, when C-SPAN ordered the removal of all of their clips from YouTube, claiming copyright infringement. The copyright purge began after viewers posted the Washington Correspondents Dinner notorious routine by comedian Stephen Colbert. The clips were viewed nearly a million times before C-SPAN claimed copyright. Soon after they ordered all videos removed from other content providers, including Metavid.

  It wasn’t until Nancy Pelosi became Speaker and started posting YouTube videos of congressional hearings (which use C-SPAN cameras) to her blog that the controversy truly erupted. Pelosi and group of technology, right wing, and left blog activists all pressured C-SPAN to liberalize their policy. On March 7, 2007, they acquiesced, allowing for all non-commercial sharing, posting, and copying of C-SPAN videos past, present and future.

  The convention announcement marks a new moment for C-SPAN as a modern Internet information provider. Once a small cable channel with a dream; now with embeddable web video, Twitter hashtags, and aggregated blog posts.

  

• Reporters With Their Own YouTubeChannels

  By Ellen Miller on 09/06/07 @ 5:30 pm | 0 Comments

  Jose Antonio Vargas, politics and technology reporter from the Washington Post has stepped up to the plate. He’s created his own YouTubeChannel and he says he’s doing it in part to break down the barriers between reporters and his readers just as the Internet has done for candidates and voters. He’s asking for story tips and ideas as well as telling us a little bit about what’s on his mind. I watched his first installment and really liked what he had to say about how even he feels like an outsider in lobbyist/lawmaker haunts like The Palm (a well-known hang out for lavish dinners and deals).

  What a brave new world this is. Candidates are certainly figuring this out and we’re lucky that some reporters, like Vargas are there to help us sort through it all.

  

• Congressional Technologic

  By Paul Blumenthal on 08/22/07 @ 12:56 pm | 0 Comments

  “Buy it, use it, break it, fix it, Trash it, change it, melt – upgrade it.” If only fixing and changing the technological infrastructure of Congress would be as simple as Daft Punk would have us believe. At the beginning of the month Republicans were up in arms over a seemingly nefarious move by Democrats to gavel out a vote on an amendment to the Agriculture Appropriations Bill, a move reminiscent of the 2003 Medicare vote and 1989 incident where Speaker Jim Wright held the vote open for more than the required time. It seems, however, (a special House committee is looking into this) that the error made was possibly the fault of an outdated, outmoded electronic voting system employed on the floor of the House.

  The Hill reports that two incidents of electronic voting malfunction, including the aforementioned controversial under-vote, in the past month have infuriated lawmakers. Aside from the under-vote on August 2 the voting machines blacked out the very next day. Frank Ryan, the former head of the House Information Systems (since renamed House Information Resources), voices surprise that these machines, which he helped install in 1973 have not been upgraded since. Count me as one who is not surprised. Technological changes and adoption in Congress have always required political will and strong personalities for any thing to happen.

  Just take a look at the history of electronic voting, the origins of which do not begin in 1973 but in 1869. A young Thomas Edison came to Washington in 1869 to offer Congress the use of a new invention of his, the automated voting machine, which he felt would help reduce from hours to minutes the amount of time spent on each individual vote. Congress rejected Edison as they felt that automated voting would reduce the ability of the leaders in Congress to corral the necessary votes to form winning coalitions. Numerous attempts were made over the years to institute some form of electronic, or automated, voting system to no avail (most notably in 1914). Electronic voting did not come to Congress until the Legislative Reorganization Act of 1970, a massive bill that required intense political pressures and passions, mandated that the House create an electronic voting system.

  It’s great that these malfunctions (if that’s what occurred) happened to make Congress reevaluate its spider-webbed technological infrastructure. Congress, however, will always make excuses as to why they shouldn’t do anything, as they are with upgrading the voting system, without heavy pressure from both inside and outside. The Open House Project, along with other groups both partisan and nonpartisan, are making technological change in Congress politically possible by showing that the need exists and constituencies care. There are definitely champions of technological innovation and improvement working inside of Congress as well. Changing congressional technologic doesn’t happen overnight; hopefully this time it won’t take 130 years for them to upgrade it.

  

• Trim Tab Factor

  By Ellen Miller on 04/06/06 @ 11:33 am | 0 Comments

  On Tuesday night, Mike Klein and I (along with our consultants Micah Sifry and Andrew Rasiej of the Personal Democracy Forum) had the incredible opportunity to brainstorm with some of the best and the brightest from the New York tech community about the Sunlight Foundation’s initial plans. The group, which dubs itself "The Trim Tab Conspiracy," is a collaborative conversation that happens regularly to explore, debate, and improvise on the latest uses of technology. I’m not sure I’ve ever been in a meeting where the creative ideas flowed as fast, where the collaboration was so genuine, or where the energy level was so high.

  They’re right to name their group after the “trim tab” concept. The world in which these fellow co-conspirators operate has already proven itself as the leverage that is turning the ship of state. Think of the millions, if not tens of millions of people who are now more engaged in advocacy and accountability work because of the ease of access that the Internet offers. Now sit back and imagine that the Internet is still effectively in its infancy. Wow! I wonder if your head spins, as mine does, with all the possibilities!

  Lots of good ideas generated. Expect to see them on this site in the future.