If you read Monday’s New York Times story about how many lobbyists are de-registering in the face of new filing requirements and how some may still be lobbying without technically violating the law, I can understand if you came away confused about a) the general value of transparency, b) the effectiveness of making lobbyists disclose their activities and c) my own role as a one-time lobbyist for Sunlight, since the reporter used my own personal experience as the peg for his story. I suppose the point was to suggest some kind of irony—transparency advocate hiding her activities from the public?  Well, let me give you some more background than was included in the Times piece.

Although not required by law, when Sunlight was founded in 2006, I registered as a lobbyist to demonstrate that the public good is served by lobbying disclosure. I didn’t have to do this since I was at most spending 2-3% of my time meeting Members of Congress or their staff, and the law only requires people who spend more than 20% of their time on lobbying to register. But, since I was occasionally having meetings on Capitol Hill to discuss our transparency agenda, I thought I should err on the side of more rather than less disclosure. I still believe that but I figured out pretty quickly how meaningless current lobbying disclosure law is – I was never asked who I met with, what I discussed in my meetings, or even how much time I spent with a lawmaker or her staff. The information I filled out didn’t really tell anyone anything substantial. There was little real public good served. Anyway, I had almost nothing to report—perhaps a handful of meetings at most.

Then along came the Obama Transition team with their strong disposition against holding meetings with registered lobbyists. Talk about irony. For the first time in my decades in Washington I actually found an Administration sympathetic to my long-held agenda about government transparency. The last thing I wanted to do was have being a registered lobbyist become a barrier to talking to the administration about improving transparency. So, since I was under no legal obligation to register (because I spent so little time on Capitol Hill directly), I deregistered in the last quarter of 2008. (Sunlight has two registered lobbyists on staff – John Wonderlich, our Policy Director and Nisha Thompson, our online organizer. Our third lobbyist is Lisa Rosenberg who is a consultant to us.)

This might look like a case of perverse consequences—tougher rules against lobbyists leading someone who was doing a modest amount of lobbying to unregister as a lobbyist in order to have more lobbying-type conversations with decision makers! But here’s the point: When I was registered, the filing requirements were so weak you had no idea who I talked to on the Hill or in the White House, what I talked to them about, or what my positions were. Lobbyist registration and disclosure as it is currently structured is pretty much a joke. All kinds of people in and around Washington buy and sell influence over the process; the 14,000 registered lobbyists are just the tip and shoulder of the iceberg. Big campaign contributors, corporate and union executives, celebrities, and my favorite, “strategic advisors” like Tom Daschle who use their long careers in Congress to guide lobbying firms without actually going up to the Hill to lobby themselves, are all players in the influence-peddling business. The current disclosure laws—which exempt anyone who spends less than 20% of their time lobbying—hide more than they expose.

So let me state here and now. When, as we advocate, the lobbying disclosure laws are reformed to cover all lobbying, and require prompt disclosure of who is lobbying whom for what and for how much, I’ll be the first to sign up.

Our lobbying laws should be detailed and timely enough to keep pace with the influence peddling they are designed to track. We need to amend the Lobbying Disclosure Act of 1995 (LDA) to require that all individuals engaging in direct issue advocacy with lawmakers, staff and the executive branch, as well as those who bundle campaign contributions to federal candidates above a threshold amount must report within 72 hours of their first lobbying contact under the LDA. If you lobby, you lobby. No more of this ridiculous 20 percent exemption.

All registrants should be required to disclose all legislative contacts with a member of Congress, staff or executive branch employee. Disclosure should include all legislation and regulations discussed and all requests for specific services or government funding. Right now the reporting is so general you have no idea who lobbyists are actually meeting with, or what is being discussed.

All legislative contacts should be reported within 24 hours of any meeting.  A reporting template should be set up so that we can report from our iPhones and Blackberrys. Reporting lobby contacts should be a simple and seamless as texting.

And finally, all campaign contributions made and bundled by lobbyists should be reported within 24 hours of being made. All such disclosures should be made electronically, published promptly and maintained online in a downloadable, searchable, sortable format.

And the White House needs to get real.  Real time, on line transparency is key to holding lobbyists at bay—not bans on one group of special pleaders while another group gets to waltz in and out of 1600 Pennsylvania Ave.

Who else wants to sign up with me?

Sunlight's John Wonderlich gave remarks before the Federal Communication Commission yesterday. I'm posting his full remarks below:

8/6/09 -- Remarks to the Federal Communication Commission

Good Morning.  Thank you for the opportunity to appear before you today.  My name is John Wonderlich; I am the Policy Director for the Sunlight Foundation, a non-partisan nonprofit dedicated to using the power of the Internet to catalyze greater government transparency.

At the heart of all of the Sunlight Foundation's work is a deep appreciation for the transformational power of online technology.  Our pairing technology with a vision for government transparency is visible in our organization, which digitizes data and creates tools for presenting information, engages communities in advocacy for more information, and makes sure tools and information are in the hands of journalists, citizens, government employees, and everyone in between.

Technology's role as the driver of disruptive change has become culturally familiar, as our roles as consumers, family members, and businesspeople have evolved over the last few decades. The Internet's role in shaping governance and citizenship, however, is only just starting to develop.

As technology redefines how we interact, our government now has an opportunity to help redefine civic life -- to live up to President Obama's vision for a technologically empowered society, by creating a more transparent, connected democracy.

There are two primary constraints that will determine just how connected and transparent government can become as we adjust to new technology.

First, digital citizenship will only be available to those Americans who have access to the tools and infrastructure necessary to be a part of the growing national digital sphere. As the FCC addresses its mandate to promote access, broadband policy should be driven in part by what Internet access makes possible.

Digital technology creates new forms of agency for all citizens.  Online access to government information allows curiosity to become expertise, disparities to become investigations, and expertise to become guidance and policy.  Citizenship can only transform into a more mature, relevant form, fulfilling the potential of a nationally connected citizenry, when government is willing make our vital national information truly public -- online, in real time.

Most fundamentally, government must commit to modernized disclosure of ethics and influence data.  Among government's primary responsibilities is to preserve the public trust on which it is built.  The Sunlight Foundation has maintained a particular focus on creating digital access to this information, which includes campaign contributions, earmarks, lobbying records, and personal financial disclosure statements.  President Obama clearly shares this priority, promising, in Change We Can Believe In to build

"a centralized, online database of lobbying reports, tax earmarks, congressional ethics records, campaign finance filings, and information on how much federal contractors spend on lobbying..."

If fulfilled, this vision for online accountability can deepen the public trust in government, and empower private citizens and government overseers alike in exposing and deterring public corruption.  Ethics.gov, when created, will need to be built on new interoperable databases, to allow searches to function across different bodies of ethics information, many of which will only be posted online after a real commitment to public access overcomes discomfort at increased scrutiny.

In addition to checking influence and realigning incentives, public attention to government information can empower citizens to become more relevant participants in governance. If essential public notifications are accessed in practice only through expensive commercial publishers, even for government employees, we should expect only moneyed interests to have the information necessary for participation.  When agencies and offices broadcast opportunities for public participation beyond traditional means, only then will the distributed expertise of citizens across the country become an asset for governance.  Solving this problem will take effort from individual agencies and offices -- reaching out to citizens and stakeholders where they are available -- and also will take unlocking the public information now collected in unapproachable repositories like the Federal Register or FedBizOpps (FBO.gov).

In order to unlock citizens' fuller digital potential, the government must also recognize an emergent body of technological expertise growing throughout the country.  Programmers, web developers, and designers, both amateur and professional, are discovering that their skills are relevant to many of our government's problems, and are looking for ways to help.  Data.gov helps to establish their relevance as stewards of our national digital sphere, by offering the raw data necessary for innovation outside government, which in turn, can inspire change within government.  The successful Apps for America and Apps for Democracy contests demonstrate the potential of the citizen developer, creating dozens of applications at little or no cost to the government.

Influence data, procedural information, and data access can all help empower citizens to more fully participate in governance.  These three spheres of public information represent a large part of our government's new opportunity -- and new responsibility -- to serve the needs of a digitally empowered citizenry.

Just as a successful national broadband policy is necessary to fulfill our shared vision for a transparent, connected democracy, government transparency is necessary to allow digital citizenship to develop to its full potential.

Today, May 8th, marks the 125th birthday of Harry S Truman, our 33rd president. He once said, "Secrecy and a free, democratic government don't mix." Amen, Mr. President.

Here are a few of the more interesting media mentions of Sunlight and our friends and grantees from this week:

Monday morning, Tom Lee, a technology director at Sunlight, appeared on C-SPAN’s “Washington Journal” taking questions about Recovery.gov, the Web site set up to track spending under the federal government’s economic stimulus program. Tom is working on SubsidyScope, a project of The Pew Charitable Trusts, that looks at the role of federal subsidies in the economy. Below is the video of the segment:

Speaking of Recovery.gov, Matt Kelley with USA Today reported that the Web site won't have details on contracts and grants until October and may not be complete until next spring — halfway through the program. Kelley quotes Greg Elin, Sunlight’s chief evangelist, saying people accustomed to getting easily searchable information quickly could be frustrated. "If we have to wait until October to get the information or to the end of the year to get a powerful recovery.gov site, the Obama administration will have missed an important opportunity."

Katrina Vanden Heuvel, editor of The Nation, in an op-ed titled "Ways to Protect Our Democracy," highlights the work of Sunlight and Sunlight Labs, and mentions the Apps for America contest. Vanden Heuvel quotes Gabriela Schneider, "This is the next generation of civic engagement…We see it as a way to revitalize democracy. The transparency work is a catalyst for the greater democracy reform movement."

The U.S. Senate announced this week that it was going to start publishing roll call votes in XML, an online format that’s easily reusable by other programs. XML allows the data to be manipulated and organized in such a way that public interest groups can get a much more thorough picture of Senate voting patterns. In writing about the move, the Politico’s  Victoria McGrane quoted John Wonderlich, Sunlight's policy director, as saying the Senate’s decision was “spectacular.” The Examiner newspapers editorialized that the move signals the Senate had finally joined the 21st Century. As encouraging and important as this step by the Senate is, I’d hold off on that designation until senators start disclosing campaign finance data online and in a timely manner.

The New York Times’ Stephanie Strom highlighted the campaign to get Congress to release to the public Congressional Research Service reports, highlighting the efforts of Open CRS, Center for Democracy and Technology, OpentheGovernment.org and Sunlight.

Jeanne Cummings at the Politico wrote about “lobbyist contact” disclosures posted on government department and agency Web sites. She made note of a review conducted by Paul Blumenthal, Sunlight’s senior writer, that found only 14 of a possible 29 departments and agencies have created Web pages to disclose lobbyist inquiries. On March 20, President Obama issued a memo to all agencies involved with the distribution of funds from the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act requiring them to disclose all communications between lobbyists and agency officials. John Fritze with USA Today wrote that Obama’s effort to make lobbying more transparent has shed little light on the behind-the-scenes, special-interests lobbying thus far. He quotes Melanie Sloan, director of Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington, "We're looking to have more disclosure, not less. If this was supposed to give us more disclosure, why is it that you're not seeing lobbyist communications?"

Mother Jones' Jonathan Stein profiled Lisa Rosenberg, Sunlight’s government affairs consultant, terming her "K Street's worst nightmare" and "the lobbyist lobbyists hate." He wrote that Lisa is "not your average influence peddler," but does the "unthinkable" by lobbying for more oversight and regulation of lobbying. Stein quotes Lisa, "I have no friends...My lobbyist colleagues are cringing at the things that I do."

Joshua Zumbrun at Forbes.com wrote about six ways Uncle Sam can help rescue newspapers. One of his proposals is for the government to help ease newspapers into nonprofit status, citing the Center for Responsive Politics and the Center for Public Integrity as examples of nonprofit organizations that are already making an impact.

Thanks, and see you next Friday!

Within the past week, the New York State Senate has taken some impressive steps toward conducting its business open and online. Earlier today, the Senate launched its new Web site that offers citizens a much clearer window into how the chamber functions and invites their participation. The site now includes a weekly calendar, "What's happening now?" and "Find my senator" functions, info on senators, a listing of committees, data on issues and legislation, photos and videos and a blog. One aspect I find especially cool is the Markup function that allows the public to comment on legislation that is under consideration. This function is a New York version of Sunlight's Public Markup. (Sunlight’s senior technology advisors, Andrew Rasiej and Micah Sifry, are advising the Senate on their transparency redesign.) And here's a link to an article from The New York Observer about the launch.

Here's a short video of Malcolm A. Smith, Senate majority leader, introducing the site:

The new Web site launch comes on the heels of strong voices in the Senate calling on Gov. David Paterson to be transparent in how the state spends the federal stimulus funds. Last week, Republican lawmakers, citing a "total lack of oversight and accountability" with regard to the stimulus, called on the governor to adopt a comprehensive plan designed to ensure greater transparency in the spending of stimulus dollars. And earlier this week, 16 Democratic state senators sent the governor a letter calling on him to create an independent auditor to monitor the distribution of stimulus funds. And this all comes after a coalition, calling itself the NYS Stimulus Oversight Working Group, in April, called for the creation of an independent stimulus monitor (pdf). Back in late February, John Wonderlich, Sunlight’s policy director, testified before the State Senate’s Temporary Committee on Rules Reform about the need for states to be open and transparent in their spending of stimulus funds. In his testimony, John promoted standards for transparency that can and should be applied generally to any legislature, and should be examined in the context of state-level disclosure reform.  And he proposed eight questions we at Sunlight believe the New York State Senate should be asking: 1. Is public information online?  Any data deemed public should also be available online.  Government serves the public poorly when it fulfills disclosure requirements by keeping binders in the basement of a public building. Government should post online in a timely manner procedural information, such as bills, committee schedules, transcripts, reports, or calendars to allow lawmakers and citizens to participate in the legislative process.  Rules should require such information to be posted online by those responsible for its creation: lawmakers, the leadership, or committees.

1. Are databases accessible in bulk?  Public databases should allow for advanced access through both bulk data download and programmatic interfaces (Application Programming Interfaces, or APIs).  Limited level of access forces programmers and analysts to examine public data through a needlessly limited viewpoint, effectively spurning complex or creative scrutiny.

2. Is public data accurate and descriptive?  Legislative information must be accurate to maintain its public utility. Votes data, journals, and transcripts should accurately reflect reality, and chambers' rules should enforce this requirement.

3. Is technological infrastructure insulated from political abuse?  Professional qualified staff should create and maintain legislatures’ technological infrastructure with reliable funding and insulation from political concerns.  Committees for technological coordination, inspectors general, and public advisory boards can all provide effective steps toward promoting competent technology infrastructure.

4. Is ethics disclosure sufficient? Public trust is undermined when legislatures fail to enforce the disclosure of ethics information.  Financial disclosures, campaign finance disclosure, taxpayer funded expenditures, and ethics investigations should all be publicly available, in real time, and online.

5. Are individual lawmakers, committees, and leadership offices able to take advantage of online tools?  Just as non-profits, businesses, and other governments can set a useful example, individual staffers and lawmakers will often set good example if they can confidently engage online.  Legislatures should provide the technological support and legal guidance necessary for online engagement to flourish.

6. Is the public well served by the legislature's disclosure? Legislatures often fail to meet even basic needs of constituents, answering questions like "Who is my representative?" or "Where can I find this bill?" Citizens should have a clear mechanism or contact point for transparency feedback, to help identify shortfalls, and develop better disclosure procedures.

7. Are lawmakers and their staffs able to do their jobs? A useful proxy for public access can be lawmakers’ offices themselves.  If lawmakers and their staff are missing an essential piece of information, or relying on expensive subscription services to do their jobs, then citizens are certainly being shut out. Lawmakers should have a similar forum for addressing technological issues, without fear of political reprisal.

As Ingrid Drake writes at POGO’s blog, a strong legislative branch is necessary to provide oversight of the executive branch, as is diligent citizen watchdogging, I would add.  Ingrid reports that the folks at POGO are hearing reports from the Empire State that “information about available stimulus funds is currently being shared mostly with entities that already have long-standing ties to state government through existing grants and contracts, or other existing relationships.”

Congratulations to Andrew, Micah and the Empire State Senate for their new and more transparent Web site. And kudos to the folks in New York working on bringing oversight and accountability to how the state spends the stimulus. The rest of the states should do the same.

Here are a few of the more interesting media mentions of Sunlight and our friends and grantees from this week:

David Herbert with the National Journal (subscription required) wrote about the grades new media experts from across the political spectrum gave the Obama administration’s Web presence. The experts gave WhiteHouse.gov an average grade of C+. Although they mostly see it as an improvement from the previous administration's site, many noted that it remained a one-way forum and suggested it be opened to allow comments and other interactive features. Herbert quotes Ellen Miller, Sunlight’s executive director, "This occasional use of interactive tools" is impressive, but "90 percent of the time the site is pretty straightforward, as it was under [George W.] Bush." Recovery.gov, the administration’s site where citizens can monitor the expenditure and use of recovery funds, fared even worse in the Journal's poll, averaging a C. The most common gripe about the site, Herbert writes, is that it's "the view from 30,000 feet," as Micah Sifry, senior technology advisor for Sunlight and Personal Democracy Forum (PDF) co-founder, told him. Without providing on-the-the ground details, Recovery.gov offers taxpayers few tools for staying on top of where their money is going, reviewers said. Recovery.gov has competition in the form of privately-operated Recovery.org, which has "more granular data and a real search tool, which one assumes we'll eventually see on Recovery.gov," Micah explains. "I don't think it's fair to compare this site to other Web sites yet, as it's just weeks old," Micah added. "Let's take another look in three to six months, OK?"

Chris Lefkow with Agence France-Presse gained a different take by interviewing academics, technology analysts and nonpartisan groups on the administration's technology efforts. Lefkow writes that they all said the first "tech president" is off to a good start. Lefkow quotes John Wonderlich, Sunlight’s policy director, "their first pronouncements are very encouraging,” and added that the challenge, however, is going to be the implementation. Andrew Resiej, Sunlight’s other senior technology advisor and PDF co-founder, said the administration been doing as much as it can to fulfill its promises in regards to transparency and technological innovation. “However they've been constrained by decades of industrial-age rules and regulations and procurement protocols that are handicapping the speed at which they can implement that vision," he said.

Declan McCullagh at CBS News' "Political Hotsheet" blog also wrote about how President Obama's follow through on his transparency vow is receiving mixed reviews. In the post McCullagh highlights how Sunlight's Our Open Government List is allowing users to vote on what's most important to see in the 120-day review. McCullagh reports that the winner so far is formal data standards, which would allow programmers to extract government databases to be incorporated in their own applications. McCullagh also mentions that Sunlight hosted TransparencyCamp.

Dan Eggen at The Washington Post wrote about how some of the nation's largest defense contractors, labor unions and trade groups are forging an alliance to try to stop the Obama administration from cutting certain weapons programs. They are arguing that the proposed cuts would threaten 100,000 or more jobs. Eggen cites Center for Responsive Politics (CRP) data to show the defense sector’s influence in Washington, where it gave nearly $26 million to congressional candidates last year and spending $150 million on lobbying.

The New York Times republished Robin Bravender’s piece from Greenwire exploring President Obama’s regulatory actions taken during his first 100 days in office. Bravender quotes Gary Bass, OMB Watch’s executive director, "In most instances, the administration has moved away from a presumption of government secrecy to one of government openness, and Obama has scrapped some of the most damaging revisions of the regulatory process that Bush and his team imposed on the nation." The article highlighted OMB Watch’s “Advancing the Public Interest through Regulatory Reform” report (pdf), which is one of two reports, both released on Tuesday, assessing the Obama administration’s work on government transparency and regulatory reform at the 100-day mark. The second report, titled “21st Century Right-to-Know Agenda” (pdf) looked at the administration’s follow through on transparency and openness. Overall, the reports state that the president and his team have made significant progress in both the right-to-know and regulatory areas, but much more work needs to be done.

Carol D. Leonnig with The Washington Post reported that U.S. Rep. John Murtha (Pa.), chair of the House defense appropriations subcommittee, got the Pentagon to spend about $30 million on “the little-used airport named for him so it can handle behemoth military aircraft and store combat equipment for rapid deployment to foreign battlefields.” Most of the improvement, Leonnig writes, were funded through appropriations approved by Murtha's subcommittee, and have not been used for their intended purpose. The article includes comments by Melanie Sloan, executive director of Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington.  "Nobody wants to say no to Congressman Murtha or make him mad because he controls defense appropriations," she said. "Murtha wanted an airport, and he knew he could get one. It's like he's a billionaire, except it's not his money."

Robert O'Harrow Jr., writing at The Washington Post's "Government Inc." blog, writes about a new report from the Inspector General for TARP, which says the bailout is growing more complex and costly, and is operating with no clear leadership. O'Harrow highlights and extensively quotes from Anu Narayanswamy’s Real Time Investigations report that found the program is shrouded in secrecy, making it difficult to determine who is managing it.

USA Today published an editorial about how the federal government, when faced with the option of making information public or hiding it, is predisposed toward concealment. Federal Web sites are usually full of data, the editorial says, but are also notoriously hard to navigate. It mentions Google's new tool, Google Public Data, it launched this week to make it easier to search federal sites. Congressional sites can be even more inscrutable, they write, and mentions and links to Sunlight’s Senior Fellow Bill Allison's Real Time Investigations report regarding U.S. House of Representatives lawmakers disclosing their earmark requests, and how many responded by burying the links or posting unreadable pdf files. Kim Hart with The Washington Post also wrote about Google’s new tool, and quotes Clay Johnson, Sunlight Labs director, saying he’s encouraged by it.

Joab Jackson with Government Computer News wrote about how through mashups and Web apps, third parties are remixing and making innovative use of government agencies' information. Jackson quotes Clay as saying there are a lot of developers who are eager to get access to government data. "The nongovernmental sector will likely always have more talent and artistic capability than inside the government," Clay said. The article discusses Sunlight Labs' Apps for America contest, as well as Sunlight’s role in developing OpenCongress.org, OMB Watch’s FedSpending.org, CRP’s OpenSecrets.org and EarmarkWatch.org. Jackson also highlights Josh Tauberer's work at GovTrack.

Federal News Radio interviewed Clay about Data.gov, new federal CIO Vivek Kundra's soon to launch central repository for government data and research, and links to Sunlight Labs' mock up of the site.

Thanks, and see you next Friday!

Here's a little fun for your weekend. Yesterday, the Open House Google Group turned into an outright poetry slam.

David Weller kicked it all off with this submission titled “Government data” …

Info, not information Data, now, well, data? Databases galore Needing some more

Government info Is data consumed The truth as we know it Can I make a profit?

Then Joshua Gay added “Three Haikus for Internet Transparency and Change in 2009” …

"I will execute..."-- Ha! WhiteHouse.gov launched already--Haha!

I see my shadow on recovery.gov, Punxsutawney Phil.

Good start, kind of. Now, make sure we can read the bills-- that is, all of US!

Not to be outdone, GovTrack.us’ Josh Tauberer added this limerick…

There once was a man named Mike Honda, A congressman us geeks are quite fond 'a, In markup sessions takes on the chairman, a hulk, so that we the people can get our data in bulk.

His friend maverick Joe likes transparency too, Senate votes in XML he says long overdue, At party politics he snorts, Because the public should see those CRS reports.

And last we hear of the executive's new plan, For a CTO and CIO... ...perhaps YesWeScan?

And to top it all off, Sunlight’s John Wonderlich added what he called “An old haiku”…

Opening Congress blog net nerds bring scrutiny, Sunlight Foundation

and a new limerick:

The power that sprang not from Kings, but the merit the populace brings, thrives on data and docs, not closed doors with locked locks. Online access gives ideas new wings.

I always knew the open government movement was full of talented people…But they never cease to amaze.

Building on the achievements of the Open House Project, today we are launching a parallel initiative, the Open Senate Project. This bipartisan, collaborative project will study the Senate's current information-sharing practices to recommend how to improve public access to the Senate's work on the Web.

We hope that you to join us in figuring out what technological reforms we should recommend to the Senate so it can make its work more accessible and user-friendly online. You can do that by subscribing to Google group listed on the top right-hand corner of the Open Senate Project's homepage. Through that online group, we'll have an ongoing conversation and collaborative preparation of our recommendations.

John Wonderlich, program director for the Sunlight Foundation, will lead the effort in collaboration with project coordinators Josh Tauberer, creator of the nonpartisan Web site GovTrack.us, and Jon Henke, a former Senate staffer who now blogs at TheNextRight.com.

As John blogged recently, with your help, the Open House Project was successful in jumpstarting a public discussion that prompted the House of Representatives to make its work available online in new ways, including releasing legislative data in more user-friendly formats and establishing new rules that allow lawmakers to use Web services like YouTube and Twitter to communicate with their constituents.

But, we can't do it without you. Together, we can open the Senate.