Wikipedia is the world’s most successful model of citizen engagement and collaboration. It began ten years ago as an experiment in information that challenged the top down approach to developing encyclopedias and now boasts millions of active users with 400 million visits a month. Its staggering popularity ultimately proved the power and wisdom of the crowd in developing online resources well beyond simply creating an encyclopedia.

From the very beginning of the Sunlight Foundation, we were impressed by the philosophical ideals of Wikipedia and sought that kind of access and collaboration to government information. This shared ethos brought Jimmy Wales, the founder and public face of Wikipedia, to our advisory board and soon after our founding we pursued a wiki model for Congressionally oriented research.

The first project the Sunlight Foundation launched in April 2006 was Congresspedia, a collaborative wiki project with the Center for Media and Democracy that was designed to shine more light on the workings of the U.S. Congress. It was an explicit homage to Wikipedia and operated on the belief that a healthy democracy is built on a public informed about the inner-workings and connections of government and its officials. The Congresspedia project followed relevant public figures and tracked special interests in the wiki collaborative writing format that Wikipedia popularized ten years ago. That project eventually became part of Open Congress (which Sunlight proudly supports as its core funder) where the Transparency Hub page is a great collection of resources coordinated by Sunlight’s policy director John Wonderlich and our policy counsel Daniel Schuman.

Happy 10th birthday Wikipedia!

Here are some of the more interesting media mentions of Sunlight and our friends and allies over the past week:

Last Saturday afternoon, C-SPAN broadcast an interview of Ellen Miller, Sunlight's executive director, discussing how the Internet is being used to provide transparency in the workings of government.

The Associated Press used data from the Center for Responsive Politics Chevron Corp. spent more than $12.8 million lobbying the federal government in the first half of this year, in an attempt to influence pending climate-change legislation and taxes targeting oil producers. So far this year, the oil giant has almost matched the $12.9 million they spent lobbying in all of 2008.

The Foreign Lobbying Influence Tracker, the searchable database that allows users to easily follow the money and connect the dots within records of the Foreign Agents Registration Act (FARA) database, launched this week. ProPublica and Sunlight teamed up on the project that allows anyone to quickly learn what foreign governments are lobbying whom, how often and about what. Alex Knott with CQ Politics covered the launch and quotes Ellen saying how information contained on the site shows how effective lobbyists can be. "While it brings needed transparency to these filings, it raises the question of what lobbyists for health care, energy and other interests -- who disclose far less information -- are up to in Washington," she said. In this morning's "In the Loop" column, The Washington Post's Al Kamen highlighted the Tracker. "What? You don't have a registered foreign agent working for you?" he asked. "Everyone's got one. Even the Dalai Lama!"

Katherine Mangu-Ward, senior editor of Reason magazine, writing at The Wall Street Journal, penned a column titled "Transparency Chic," where she highlights several efforts by private groups and individuals to pry open government information. "Tech celebs like Craigslist founder Craig Newmark and Wikipedia founder Jimmy Wales have flocked to the Sunlight Foundation, which uses the Internet to improve meaningful access to government," she wrote.

ABC News' David Wright reported on the health care debate and includes a quote from Bill Allison, Sunlight's senior fellow, about the special interests attempts to influence the health care debate. Bill explained who's working for who: "Insurance companies battling providers. Drug companies battling insurance companies. Hospitals going to war against nursing homes. All kinds of institutions are looking to protect their interests."

McClatchy Newspapers editorialized about how the Obama administration is continuing some of the opaque practices of the Bush administration despite promises to the contrary. They cite Ellen's blog post from last week about the need for the White House to list presidential signing statements on its Web site in an easy-to-find manner as an example. A number of McClatchy papers ran the editorial, including The (Colorado Springs, Colo.) Gazette.

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.