As Sunlight has covered before, California is one of the many states that is in dire need of transparency. A recently released report [pdf link] from the Pacific Research Institute offered up some policy recommendations after examining the situation. The free market think tank published their report during Sunshine Week and focused primarily on reforming open-records and open-meetings laws. The author of the report noted,

Recent incidents like the City of Bell pay scandal show that California’s open-records and open-meetings laws are in need of reform. Public pay is the public’s business, along with the debates, decisions, and actions of government and the outcomes of government policies.

In addition to looking at the widely publicized scandal in the city of Bell, the study compares open-government laws with other states using a number of scholarly rankings. According to the BGA-Alper Integrity Index of 2008, California ranks 45th for its open-meetings laws and 17th for its open-records laws. According to a database from the 2010 Marion Brechner Citizen Access Project (CAP), California ranked no better than a 5 (somewhat open) in any of the nine categories that pertain to open meetings and for open records, the state scored a 3 (somewhat closed) in 40 categories and a 2 (mostly closed) in 13 categories.

The Sunlight Foundation is enthusiastic to see more organizations spur discussions of open government and encourage brainstorming of solutions. Among the many policy recommendations, we were particularly excited to see the online posting of public meetings and minutes, as well as making records available online with all fees stated upfront.

After launching Sunshine Week with yesterday's successful Advisory Committee on Transparency event, it's a good time to reflect on positive transparency developments around the country (as opposed to yesterday's disheartening news).

Among the inspiring stories that we came across recently, Sunlight was particularly struck by the work of a software engineering class at Virginia Tech. As the Washington Post reported, a professor picked up on the students' desire to find their coursework relevant and dedicated a semester to build a mobile app for the university bus system. After a slew of prototypes and some extra funding, the impressive VT Bus Tracker debuted. It's important to note that this application was only possible with a willing and proactive partnership with the bus system operators.

In light of budget shortfalls around the country, many states have yielded to public pressure to open their books and are putting their financial information online. In the past few months both Indiana and New Hampshire launched 'Transparency Portals' that centralize state spending data. These websites have plenty of room for improvement, but the Sunlight Foundation is excited to see the states dip their toe into the growing community of public officials who recognize public information should be online.

Last week we were interested to watch developments in lobbying disclosure at the state level in Georgia. According to an article in the Atlanta-Journal Constitution, the Georgia Government Transparency and Campaign Finance Commission is hoping to vastly expand the definition of a lobbyist and allow e-filing across the board -- both principles the Sunlight Foundation includes in our Real Time Online Lobbying Transparency Act. While the proposals in Georgia are hardly perfect, any serious deliberation of lobbying reform is admirable and the Sunlight Foundation encourages these discussions.

What other rays of sunshine are we missing? Tweet @sunfoundation or use the hashtag #sunchat to join us this Thursday for a special Sunshine Week twitter chat.

Next week, the nation will be celebrating the 7th annual Sunshine Week. Started by the American Society of Newspaper Editors and supported through a grant from the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation in Miami, Sunshine Week was a response to a growing need to create public awareness of a trend that was damaging democracy by keeping public information secret from citizens. As part of this celebration of open government, Sunlight’s Policy Counsel, Daniel Shuman, will be moderating an Advisory Committee on Transparency in an event dubbed “Washington Lobbying Fix”. We also rounded up a few events happening at the state and local level for Sunshine Week...

CALIFORNIA: The Northern California Association of Law Libraries (NOCALL) and the League of Women Voters will be holding an event on March 23 to mark Sunshine Week at McGeorge School of Law. The event, which will happen just after the official national Sunshine Week (March 13-19), will give residents a chance to view the webcast from the national event while allowing them to participate in a panel discussion on open government.

MISSOURI: The Missouri Sunshine Coalition have partnered with Open Missouri to host an annual meeting and Sunshine Week celebration at the Reynolds Journalism Institute at the University of Missouri campus in Columbia, Missouri on March 17. The event will also include an annual board election, a report on the Coalition's statewide records audit and a presentation of the coalition's nominees for Sunshine Hero awards. Our very own Editorial Director Bill Allison will be delivering a key note address about how journalists can tap into government data. Interested participants are encouraged to register here

VIRGINIA: The Virginia Coalition for Open Government, a non-profit “alliance formed to promote expanded access togovernment records, meetings and other proceedings at the state and local level” have created an audio public announcement and is encouraging the public to download it as anawareness campaign for the public’s right to know.

ILLINOIS: In Illinois, the Peoria Journal Star asked their readers to send in stories of how the revised Freedom of Information Act law has affected them in dealing with governmental entities. As a way of observing Sunshine Week, the stories will be published on pjstar.com while some may be published in the Journal Star.

OKLAHOMA: Freedom of Information Oklahoma will be hosting its fourth annual conference for sunshine week on March 12. Dubbed “Putting Muscle Behind Oklahoma’s FOI Laws,” the day long event includes a training for the public on how to use public records and a discussion on bills that require the legislature to comply with FOI laws. Open government guru Robert Freeman is the key note speaker.

NORTH CAROLINA: The city of Cary, North Carolina is providing educational opportunities for staff and elected officials as a way of increasing awareness of “Sunshine laws” during Sunshine Week. The city has also updated its website to help citizens access public records and answer queries on how to submit public records requests. In addition, an audio message from the city’s mayor Harold Weinbrecht has been uploaded to the website to show the progress the city is making in open government.

NEW YORK: The Town of Wappinger in Duchess County, New York will be hosting an open government seminar on March 15 with Robert Freeman of the New York Senate Open Government Committee as speaker. Town Clerk Chris Masterson will be on hand to help interested participants to register and submit their questions to Freeman. The town’s website has more.

ARIZONA: The Walter Cronkite School of Journalism and Mass Communication in Phoenix, Arizona has organized a fun and informative way of opening government: a public records scavenger hunt. The school is inviting journalism students to take part in a hunt for public records and you can read more about it here.

This Sunshine Week was a particularly successful (and busy!) time for Sunlight. We helped usher in new transparency legislation, launched a nation-wide grassroots campaign, launched a new design contest, joint led a crowdsourced search for government data, met with editorial boards and more. No wonder we’re all exhausted this Friday afternoon.

Here’s a more granular look at what we accomplished this week:

For Sunlight’s Communications team, Sunshine Week began early, with extensive outreach to editorial boards, reporters and columnists. This strategy paid off, as Sunday’s kick off of Sunshine Week by newspapers across the country included many mentions of Sunlight’s work. (You can read all of our mentions on our site -- and note we’re still updating the list.)

On Monday, John Wonderlich, Gabriela Schneider and I met with an editorial writer Washington Post to discuss initiatives we support that would further improve public access to government information including the Public Online Information Act.

That bill was introduced at a press conference on Tuesday (under a transparently clear sky) on Capitol Hill. I joined Rep. Steve Israel and the Personal Democracy Forum’s Andrew Rasiej (who is also an adviser to Sunlight) in announcing this landmark legislation. You can watch our press conference if you want to know more details about this groundbreaking legislation.

On Wednesday, Sunlight Labs launched our fourth official contest: Design for America. Part contest, part festival, the Design for America contest's intent is to inspire the design community to tell great stories about how our government works, what our government does, and what it could do. It's a contest as much about possibility as transparency, and with categories ranging from infographics to web design, there's plenty for all to compete.

Also on Wednesday, we joined the Center for Public Integrity in crowdsourcing our Data Mine project, a new online series identifying inaccessible or difficult to use information from the federal government. We need your tips on what federal government records, databases, and filings should be open to the public – join us to help so  you can continue to read about public government data that we still can’t access. Follow  Jim Morris’ posts on the Reporting Group site, like his most recent  report.

On Thursday, Sunlight’s Engagement team kicked off our new Public=Online campaign . Jake Brewer led a roundtable discussion at Google’s D.C. headquarters, with Jose Antonio Vargas from Huffington Post; Jim Harper from Cato Institute and WashingtonWatch.com; Ginny Hunt from Google’s Public Sector Lab and Ryan Hopkins of Public Square Project in Pittsburgh. Public=Online is a completely non-partisan campaign with the first goal of making government transparency a major issue in the upcoming mid-term elections. We hope you’ll sign the pledge and join us.

I traveled to Boston that day to meet with the Boston Globe editorial board, speak with fellows at the Berkman Center for Internet & Society at Harvard Law School, and at an MIT’s Center for Future Civic Media Forum.

Our Engagement team also organized a Sunshine Week Blogswarm, in which about 50 bloggers across the country pledged they would blog about the importance of transparency to them. Look for a "Local Sunlight" blog post early next week by Nisha Thompson with a roundup.

Today, John Wonderlich joined White House Special Counsel to the President for Ethics and Government Reform, Norm Eisen, and Jim Harper from Cato and WashingtonWatch.com (which I should note is a Sunlight grantee) at the OpenTheGovernment.org “Building Transparency” panel at the Center for American Progress.

Whew! What a week.

(Note: this post has been updated since it was first published—see below)

It's Sunshine Week again, and in that spirit I want to share a recent story about open government. Two weeks ago, a government professional from the Republic of Korea looked over at me and, through an interpreter, said he was going to tell me why their political system is better than America's.

It was an interesting moment for me. At the meeting were three additional South Korean professionals, and I listened attentively as their interpreter related the gist of the argument:

• Corporations in South Korea are prohibited from spending money on political activity.
• Individuals can spend up to $5,000 per year on National Assembly races, and they can only give to four candidates per year.
• Any spending above $3,000 must be disclosed.

How did I find myself in this situation? For starters, it wasn't the first time! One of the many pleasant aspects about working at the Sunlight Foundation is the simple act of talking about open government with other interested parties. In this case, it was a delegation of professionals from Korea. The trip was arranged by World Learning, as part of the International Visitor Leadership Program administered by the U.S. State Department. Yesterday's was the fifth such meeting I've participated in since I started at Sunlight—previously, my colleagues and I discussed transparency with a delegation of Dutch officials, an activist/videographer from Australia, a political science professor from Colombia, and officials from Latin America.

I was a little playful in that last paragraph, but the meetings are more than just "pleasant." According to the State Department, almost "300 IVLP alumni are current or former Heads of Government or Chiefs of State." Alumni include British Prime Minister Gordon Brown and French President Nicolas Sarkozy. Last year alone, more than 4,400 people visited the U.S. through the program, and 190,000 have participated since 1940.

Ambassador Kenton Keith is the Senior Vice President of Meridian International Center, one of seven program agencies that facilitate IVLP for the State Department. He told me U.S. embassies around the world select participants: "These people are selected because the embassies regard them as people of either present or near future importance to areas of interest to the United States." They then spend 2-3 weeks in the United States for meetings with counterparts and for general orientation.

"They have a several-day presentation in Washington with government, NGOs and appropriate bodies, and then they go to other cities in the country," Kenton said. "When visitors go out into the country they are hosted by a network of volunteer groups under the umbrella of the National Council of International Visitors. They help them to get appointments with the people they need to see, and to get a feel for the society, the culture and the values of the United States."

Kenton describes IVLP as one of the "most valuable kinds of programs that we operate as a country." He told me participants can be anything from journalists to scientists, teachers, politicians and museum directors. "They obviously become familiar with the United States," he said, "an important country to most anybody in the world, and are often able to seize important networking opportunities with people in the same field and who have the same interests."

Not every meeting I attended was part of the IVLP, but they all have provided an incredible array of benefits for our organization. Most notably, we learn about the ways officials practice open government in different countries. When we met with the delegation from Latin America, for example, we learned that some countries have FOIA laws that are significantly better for citizens. In Mexico, all requests for public documents (think FOIA) are posted online. In other countries, all requested documents are posted online. Here in America, you can use the FOIA process to see what others people have requested (a nice little trick of journalists to avoid getting scooped), but the only person who can see the results is the person who submitted the request in the first place.

Aside from the policy perspectives these meetings can bring to light, they also provide the basis for some incredible best practices discussions and allow participants to forge collaborative partnerships. I met last year with professor Monica Pachon Buitrago of the University of the Andes. She was developing a Web site to track members of the Colombian legislature, something similar to OpenCongress.org. The site, CongresoVisible.org, is now up and running. We can learn from one another, by sharing which site features are most useful to readers or swapping code modules. When an open-government advocate from Australia was in D.C., we discussed some of the challenges he faces in that country: Generating interest among citizens, convincing officials that that a transparent government is good for them, and creating partnerships with other organizations and the media in Australia. Turns out, those are very similar to the challenges we have here in America.

As we prepare to launch our campaign, we're having similar discussions with individuals across the country. Activists, bloggers, and citizens are asking how they can help make their local and state governments more open, accessible and accountable. One of the best ways of figuring that out is to see how others have succeeded.

Which brings us back to the gentlemen from the Republic of Korea. The delegates were genuinely interested in the way members of the U.S. House of Representatives disclose office expenditures, and any impact that disclosure has had on Members or staff. We discussed the White House visitor logs, and Paul's story last month using the logs to examine the PhRMA deal. Finally, I answered some questions about the Citizens United decision: What it means for our movement, what the proposed legislative responses might be, and how we look at campaign finance disclosure in the future.

That led into the exchange I described at the beginning, and a more in-depth dialogue on disclosure. We spoke about the differences between our two systems of government, and I hope they learned as much from me as I learned from them.

From what I understand, that's the whole point.

Author's note: At the request of the U.S. State Department, we've removed the specific titles of the individuals from the Republic of Korea. We were informed, in the course of reporting this piece, that IVLP meetings are supposed to be off-the-record. While this was not conveyed to us until after the meeting took place, we don't want the delegates to experience any repercussions for what was said during the meeting.

On the occasion of Sunlight Week, our colleagues (and grantees) at the Center for Democracy and Technology (CDT) and OpenTheGovernment.org are releasing “Show Us The Data: Most Wanted Federal Documents” (PDF), a report based on the results of a  survey  funded by Sunlight and a Web-based collaborative tool created by Sunlight Labs. It cites documents and data that the federal government should make easier to find and to use, and recommends policy changes to make government more open.

Similar reports OTG and CDT have compiled in the past have shown national security concerns lead to too much secrecy. But not any more. Here’s a list of the top 10 most wanted government documents, according to the survey:

1.     Public Access to All Congressional Research Service Reports 2.     Information About the Use of TARP and Bailout Funds 3.     Open and Accessible Federal Court Documents Through the PACER System 4.     Current Contractor Projects 5.     Court Settlements Involving Federal Agencies 6.     Access to Comprehensive Information About Legislation and Congressional Actions  via THOMAS or Public Access to Legislative Information Service 7.     Online Access to Electronic Campaign Disclosures 8.     Daily Schedules of the President and Cabinet Officials 9.     Personal Financial Disclosures from Policymakers Across Government 10.     State Medicaid Plans and Waivers

Those involved in writing the report include Patrice McDermott and Amy Fuller of OpenTheGovernment.org and Ari Schwartz, Jud Watkins, and Heather West of CDT. Sunlight’s own Bill Allison, Ali Felski, James Turk and Clay Johnson lent their hands in making it all happen, as well.

Check it out!

I'm delighted to have had an OpEd piece published in USA Today today:

How powerful is the Internet in getting crucial safety information out to the public? In one case, that information went out 707 times per minute. That's how often, on average, people seeking information about salmonella-tainted peanut butter clicked on a website and widget sponsored by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) over a six-week period a total of nearly 44 million hits.

Happy Sunshine Week everyone! I'm happy to share some editorials from around the country in support of Sunlight's efforts to get the Senate to electronically file their campaign finance reports by passing S. 482.

The Knoxville News Sentinel writes in support of S. 482 stating, "although a former senator from Tennessee really didn't invent the Internet, we urge members of the U.S. Senate to make better use of it anyway."

The Salt Lake City Tribune pens an article about the Pass 482 campaign including a look at Sen. Orrin Hatch's position. "Hatch, too, says there is merit to the bill and that it enjoys widespread support." Sen. Hatch says he supports the bill but is yet to sign on as a co-sponsor. You can call his office here to ask him to sign on.

The Birmingham News and The Patriot Ledger both published op-eds by Sunlight's Ellen Miller calling for the Senate to pass S. 482.

The effort to Pass 482 is only just underway. You can still help out by calling your senators and asking them to support the bill at our Pass 482 site.

In conjunction with next week’s Sunshine Week, Scripps Howard News Service and Ohio University have released the results of their annual survey on government secrecy. They’ve conducted the survey each year since 2006, when 62 percent surveyed believed the federal government to be somewhat or very secretive. That percentage grew each year up to 74 percent last year. This year’s figure indicates that perceptions are leveling off, with 73 percent characterizing the feds as secretive. At least it’s stopped growing.

The authors of the study credit the finding that 80 percent of those surveyed agreed with President Obama's Freedom of Information directive calling for a presumption of disclosure as possibly blunting the rising distrust in government.

In each of the four annual surveys, Americans believe their local and state governments are more open than the feds. And they are more trusting of local public officials. Check out more details here.

Next Monday is Sunshine Week, the fifth incarnation of the national initiative to highlight the importance of open government and freedom of information. Journalists of both old and new media, librarians, non-profits, schools and anyone else who values the public's right to know are involved. The American Society of Newspaper Editors organizes the initiative, while the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation is the primary funder.

Check it all out here.