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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EPA’s Wiki
It’s a welcome change of pace to be able to say something nice about the federal government. Federal Computer Week reports on the Environmental Protection Agency’s use of the Web 2.0 style to help local citizens in Washington State working to clean up Puget Sound.
Last November, EPA held its 2007 Environmental Information Symposium where they activated its Puget Sound Information Challenge wiki. Participants were asked to supply information that could help local groups working to restore the Sound. The Web site was up over the two days of the conference, and received 18,000 page views, 175 entries with everything from documents to decision support systems and a significant volume of e-mail, the magazine reports.
Molly O’Neill, EPA’s chief information officer, wrote earlier this week about the wiki at EPA’s Flow of the River blog.
One of the many important lessons we learned from this Challenge is that Web 2.0 technologies pose incredible opportunity for collaborative work at EPA.
Hopefully more federal agencies and elected officials will soon see the potential of the Internet to engage citizens in similarly meaningful ways.
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“Wiki the Vote” on Congresspedia
We’re launching something new over at Congresspedia.org today — "Wiki the Vote," a project to build citizen-written profiles on each and every candidate for Congress in 2008.
This project gives you the tools you need to research candidates and share your knowledge on the records, agendas and influences of congressional incumbents and challengers. We started with nearly 300 basic profiles to be expanded and updated by citizens, journalists and even the campaigns themselves (or those of their opponents). Unlike Wikipedia, people connected to the subjects of articles are free to add to them as long as their contributions are rhetoric-free and comprised of fully documented, verifiable facts. The citizen editors are assisted and fact-checked by professional editors.
The first set of articles is based on confirmed candidates according to 2008racetracker.com and will eventually expand to cover every candidate on the ballot in the primary and general elections next year. When the OpenSecrets.org 2008 congressional campaign contributions database goes online in a few weeks, the candidate profiles will also display live feeds tracking the money race and who is funding it.
Check out the site and start updating the profiles. Any technical questions should be addressed to Congresspedia’s Managing Director Conor Kenny at conor AT sourcewatch DOT org.
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Trying to Keep Up
The Senate took some steps forward last week to make its activities more transparent, but honestly, some of the most innovative and exciting stuff to make government more transparent is coming from individual lawmakers themselves (and in one case government) and enterprising organizations and citizens.
First, take a look at Freshman Senator Jon Tester posting of his daily schedule. How refreshing is this!? I hope others will pick up on his efforts to be really transparent about how he's spending his time, and on those of Rep. Kirsten Gillibrand's too. (Sen. Tester's schedule and Rep. Gillibrand's can be found on their pages on Congresspedia too.) We hope that some of our readers will send what these two lawmakers are doing to their representatives as models for what it means to execute the public's business in a public way.
Rep. Steve Urquhart, The Republican Majority Whip of the Utah House of Representatives, has launched a new wiki that is focusing on improving access to legislative information. His wiki is called Politicopia, and through it he wants to make available information on "urgently-relevant" issues. He writes: "In just 5 minutes, my constituents will be able to look up actual issues that are moving through the political process, read a synopsis of the proposed action, see pro and con arguments, review comments and links, and check out the bill and its status. If they then want, they can jump into and shape the debate. In other words, they can be active, informed citizens. And I guarantee you, the policymakers will take note, because we are as starved for unfiltered, informed dialogue as the people are." See more details at the Personal Democracy Forum.
Next take a look at the distributed FOIA research tool that Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics has launched in beta form (Full disclosure: Sunlight is a funder of this project.). It's a really neat combination of easy design, nifty tool and just plain fascinating stuff to look at. (OK at least fascinating to me – I admit to enjoying looking a raw documents). As blogger Tim Hooker has said "for anyone who is nosy, this is like dying and going to Heaven." Indeed.
And DoWire.org posts about an effort by the Korean government that's intended to "encourage citizens to discuss policy issues so that their opinions can be reflected in government policies…. One topic is selected every month and is discussed for the duration of one month."
Frankly, it's hard keeping track of everything that's going on to help make government more transparent. Help me by letting me know the new sites I am missing.
