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

Thursday’s launch by the Obama administration of Data.gov, the repository for all the information the federal government collects, generated a number of good press mentions. Vivek Kundra, President Obama’s new Chief Information Officer, built and manages the Web site, which developers can access data to create applications for the Web and handheld devices. The Washington Post's Kim Hart wrote about the launch and quotes Ellen Miller, Sunlight’s executive director, saying it "demonstrates the acceptance of the notion that providing raw data is inherent to establishing trust in agencies." Ellen said that the administration is redefining public information. "To be truly public, it needs to be available online. That's a dramatic shift." Hart also quotes Patrice McDermott, director of OpenTheGovernment.org, saying most federal agencies have not traditionally emphasized openness. "It's not what Congress has told them to do in the past, and it's not their culture. There's going to have to be some real pressure on agencies to do this." Hart also mentions Sunlight Labs' Apps for America 2 contest, and writes that it is modeled after the Apps for Democracy contest started by Kundra when he was the District of Columbia's chief technology officer. Richard Waters at the Financial Times (subscription required) wrote about the launch and the contest, and quotes Ellen saying the launch represents "a sea-change in how government views its information."

Wired's Kim Zetter and Wired Science's Alexis Madrigal both have articles about Data.gov that mention Sunlight and the Apps for America 2 contest. Madrigal also quotes Ellen, “Data.gov says that our information is your information,” and that “it represents this enormous change in attitude about what public means. It means it’s online. It’s means it’s available. I think it’s a dramatic breakthrough in the role of government.”

Federal News Radio's Jason Miller produced a story on Data.gov, and includes an mp3 of his interview with Kundra who mentions the Apps for America 2 contest. Chris Dorobek, co-anchor of Federal News Radio's afternoon drive program, interviewed Ellen about the launch and posted the audio. Jon Gordon with American Public Media's "Future Tense" interviewed Clay Johnson, Sunlight Labs’ director, about Data.gov. Clay said the site represents "a good first step" by the administration.

Daphne Eviatar with The Washington Independent reported on the Project on Government Oversight (POGO) sending Congress a letter asking that it provide better supervision of the government’s $1.25 trillion mortgage-backed securities purchase program. POGO is concerned with potential conflicts of interest of having private fund managers advising the government on the program while also advising private clients on how to invest in similar assets. “(Potential) conflicts of interest could have a wide range of consequences, including financial losses for the American taxpayer, an unfair competitive advantage for the fund managers, and the continued erosion of public confidence in the government’s ability to stabilize the financial system,” POGO warns.

In a post on the blog of the Bill Moyers Journal, PBS journalists Bill Moyers and Michael Winship wrote about the influence being exerted by health industry in the debate over reforming national health policy. They cited Center for Responsive Politics data showing the health sector has spent more than $134 million on lobbying in the first quarter of 2009. Speaking of health care reform, USA Today’s John Fritze wrote about former U.S. Sen. Tom Daschle (S.D.) remaining a key player in the health care debate four months after tax questions prevented him from serving as Health and Human Services secretary. Fritze quotes Melanie Sloan, executive director of Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington, saying Daschle’s private citizen status raises questions about what Daschle is advocating for and who he is representing when he meets with Congressional lawmakers behind closed doors. "It's like being a senator or being in the administration without having any of the restrictions," Melanie said.

Politico's Kenneth Vogel reported on how at least a dozen lawmakers and political committees held fundraising events in conjunction with Monday night's sold-out Bruce Springsteen concert at Downtown Washington’s Verizon Center. Vogel quotes Nancy Watzman, director of Sunlight’s Party Time project, as saying rock concerts are not an uncommon venue for political fundraisers. “Democrats do it and Republicans do it. They tend to have different musical choices, though,” Nancy said, conceding Monday’s cluster of Springsteen fundraisers are “quite a number for any particular concert, but that speaks to Bruce being The Boss.” Vogel wrote that Nancy is herself a Springsteen fan, and paid about $100 to see his recent concert in Denver. “I probably didn’t get as much bang for my buck, though, because I can’t call up a member of Congress now and say, ‘Hey, remember when he played "Born to Run?" Well, I have this bill I want to introduce.’”

Jim Abrams with the Associated Press wrote two articles about the earmarks House lawmakers are requesting to add to the transportation bill they will take up this summer. In the first article, Abrams quotes Bill Allison, Sunlight’s senior fellow, saying the collective disclosure is way ahead of where it was just three years ago. “But they could still be doing it better." Bill said that the Transportation Committee process falls short of a new requirement in both the House and Senate Appropriations committees that members post earmark requests online before they submit them. Also, there is no central location for posting requests, making them difficult to find on Web sites, Abrams wrote. In the second article, Abrams reported that the lawmakers are requesting $136.3 billion in earmarks. He recounts Bill's criticism about the absence of a central location for posting earmark requests, which makes them more difficult to locate. With the help of some other Sunlight staffers, Bill had dug through the earmark disclosures last week and built a easy-to-access database. His work motivated Mark Tapscott, editorial page editor at the Washington Examiner, to name Bill "One of the unsung heroes in the nation's capital." Eliza Krigman, writing at the National Journal's "Under the Influence" blog, also highlighted Bill's work. Krigman wrote that "Sunlight's 'Real Time Investigations' staff did the yeoman's work of scrolling through member's Web sites searching for transportation earmark requests through yesterday's deadline."

Thanks and see you next Friday.

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

Various media outlets and bloggers, including the likes of CNET.com, the Associated Press, the National Journal, Lawrence Lessig and Craig Newmark, have covered and congratulated the Center for Responsive Politics' (CRP) for making its data records from OpenSecrets.org free for anyone to download. The Journal's "Tech Daily Dose" column reported that more than 120 people had downloaded bulk data within the first 24 hours of CRP opening up its archives.

The Washington Post's "The Reliable Source" column highlighted Capitol Words, which "slices and dices the entirety of the Congressional Record for your searching pleasure," they write. McClatchy's David Lightman reported that, in light of the financial crisis, words you would expect to be used by congressional lawmakers often, such as recession, bailout, stimulus and deficit do not crack the top 30 most frequently uttered terms so far this year. And Daphne Ritter with the New York Post looks at the top words used by several lawmakers from the Empire State's congressional delegation.

Alice Lipowicz with Federal Computer Week used OpenCongress data in writing about how only 10 congressional lawmakers (four senators and six reps) post their daily schedules on their official Web sites. New York Newsday editorialized about how Sen. Kirsten Gillibrand (N.Y.) is blazing a trail in her congressional career by posting her schedule and personal financial disclosure reports online. "While (congressional lawmakers are) at it, they should make sure that information is easy to locate, archived and searchable, so that watchful voters can track, over time, the lobbyists and interest groups bending an official's ear," the editors wrote.

Last week, Ryan Singel at Wired's "Epicenter" blog wrote about Sunlight Labs' contest Apps for America, and asked his readers to vote for their favorites. This week, he reported back on the response he received, and issued what he terms the "Epicenter Reader's Choice award."

Speaking of Sunlight Labs, both Craig Newmark on his blog and Andrew Pratt at Science Progress praised the Labs' pre-design for the yet-to-be-launched Data.gov, the site that new White House CIO Vivek Kundra has promised will be an easy-to-use central repository of federal bulk data. "This is precisely the kind of work I've argued that the nonprofit and advocacy sphere needs to be engaged in right now," Pratt wrote.

The San Francisco Examiner editorialized about how Congress should exercise its oversight authority and find out where every last federal bailout dollar has been spent. The Examiner gives props to Anu Narayanswamy's Real Time Investigations expose' of the identity of senior U.S. Treasury officials who are also members of the Troubled Assets Relief Program's Investment Committee -- a small group that makes big decisions about which banks receive how much of our money.

The Washington Independent's Elana Schor reports on an analysis they conducted of House and Senate fundraising during the current election cycle compared to the previous cycles. Despite the economic downturn, their analysis showed significant upticks in campaign giving. Schor quotes Bill Allison, Sunlight's senior fellow, "For the average citizen, the election is over and they're not even going to think about it for the next four years." But the donors "who are paying close attention," have a vested interest in what Congress does -- or does not -- pass into law this year.

Thanks, and see you next week!

Each weekday, Sunlight's communications team collects all the press mentions of Sunlight and of our grantees.  Instead of just keeping that to ourselves, we thought we'd try something new by highlighting some of the more interesting mentions  and sharing that with you each week. (You can also check out our Delicious page and our Press Center to see who's writing about us.)

Elizabeth Brotherton at Roll Call (subscription required), Associated Press Managing Editors, Paul Krawzak with CQ Politics and Deb Price with The Detroit News wrote stories about about U.S. House of Representatives lawmakers posting their earmark requests for the 2010 budget on their Web sites as new transparency guidelines required. Bill Allison, Sunlight’s senior fellow, researched the disclosures. Journalists used Bill's research as the base for their articles, including many regional papers reporting on earmarks requested by their respective congressional delegations.

National Journal’s "Tech Daily Dose" blog reported that the Center for Responsive Politics’ site OpenSecrets.org is going "open data" this week. For the first time in their 26-year history, CRP "is making its most popular data archives fully available to the public for download for free,” The Journal writes.  Sunlight helped fund CRP's OpenData initiative to make millions of records available under a Creative Commons license, The Journal adds.

Sheryl Gay Stolberg with The New York Times wrote about President Obama's promise to bring transparency to the federal government. She notes the administration is finding that fulfilling the pledge is easier said than done. Technological hurdles, privacy concerns and the Washington's entrenched culture of secrecy have so far proven hard to overcome. Stolberg lists several steps the Obama team have successfully taken, the streamlining of a health care summit over the White House Web site and the setting up of Recovery.gov to help track the stimulus package. She quotes Ellen Miller, Sunlight’s executive director, as saying the site is “an amazing potential model of how information is made available to the public."

The Huffington Post published an op-ed by Mike Klein, Sunlight’s co-founder and chair, where he commends President Obama for establishing a transparency policy applicable to lobbying and the stimulus program. Mike encouraged the administration to not limit transparency just to lobbying the stimulus program. "The president should now mandate real time online transparency of lobbying throughout the executive branch." He also called on Congress to amend the Lobbying Disclosure Act so that lobbyists would be required to disclose all lobbying, whether of the Congress, the executive branch or the independent agencies, and in real time and online. Ryan Singel at Wired's "Epicenter" blog profiles Sunlight Labs’ contest Apps for America, and asked his readers to vote for their favorites.  Mark Tapscott, editorial page editor of the Washington Examiner, also wrote about Apps for America. Winter Casey and Bara Vaida at National Journal's "Under the Influence" blog and Jonathan Stein of Mother Jones wrote about mockups of Web-based lobbying disclosure forms John Wonderlich, Sunlight’s policy director, and Ali Felski, Sunlight Lab’s senior designer, created.

Here’s an exciting development! Last week, I blogged about an encouraging report by Doug Belzer at Federal Computer Week, where he wrote about how Twitter, blogs and other Web 2.0 tools are revolutionizing government business. The General Services Administration had determined that Twitter’s standard terms of service is compatible with federal use.

Two days ago, Doug has another exciting article, this time in Government Computer News, about GSA announcing that it has signed agreements with Flickr, YouTube, Vimeo and blip.tv that will allow federal agencies to use new-media tools. Agencies can now begin using these tools to better communicate, network and share information via the Web.

Chris Snyder at Wired's Epicenter blog termed the move, "Web 2.0, meet dot-gov. Dot-gov, this is Web 2.0." He's right in calling it a "big step" for agencies attempting to become more transparent and interactive with citizens. "Now that the bureaucratic brush has been cleared, government agencies will be free, for example, to embed videos and create photo widgets that citizens can embed into their MySpace or Facebook pages," he writes. An example of a government agency already using Web 2.0 tools successfully is the Centers for Disease Control alerting the public about the recent peanut better product recall.

Chris quotes Andrew Rasiej, founder of Personal Democracy Forum and Sunlight's senior technology advisor, as saying it's another example of why it really matters who’s president of the United States. "Because we have the country's first tech president, the speed at which the government can catch up with the private sector and use of technology is exponential."

Each individual agency will determine their own guidelines for how their employees can use the tools. “The new agreements make it easier for the government to provide official information to citizens via their method of choice,” according to GSA’s administrator, who is in discussions with other new-media providers. They started with these four because of their popularity and large number of users.

We're excited about this development. You should be too.

Midnight tonight (Eastern Time), Wired is officially launching "Data.gov Is Coming — Let's Help Build It," a wiki designed to find and identify important and valuable data sets held by the federal government, and to make them available and usable. Yesterday, in an email to the Open Government Google Group, Alexis Madrigal, staff writer at Wired, announced that it’s already live at http://howto.wired.com/wiki/Open_Up_Government_Data.

Madrigal wrote that Vivek Kundra, the newly appointed CIO of the federal government, “seems like an ally -- as do his superiors -- but we want to hold them to their claims about wanting to open up government data.” Wired designed the wiki to be a place to report where government data is locked up by design, neglect or misapplication of technology. And they want us to point out the government data that we need or would like to have. Based on how the wiki evolves, they will follow up with government agencies to see what their plans are for that data and track the results. Madrigal wrote that they hope to combine the best of new social media and old-school journalism to get our hands on government data.

Wired’s wiki dovetails nicely with two projects that Sunlight has been involved with. Our friends at OpenTheGovernment.org and the Center for Democracy and Technology, with the help of Sunlight Labs, set up Show Us The Data - The Most Wanted Federal Government Documents. They too are asking the public to help identify government documents, reports, or data sets that should be made available online. They’ve asked people to “vote” on what sequestered docs they most want to be freed. The voting ends Monday (tomorrow), so quickly go check it out. They will release a list of the 10 docs that received the most votes during this month’s Sunshine Week. Federal News Radio interviewed Patrice McDermott, director of OpenTheGovernment.org, about the program.  As Patrice said in the interview,“Openness makes us stronger.” Michael Smallberg at POGO blog writes that the project's goal is to identify the documents and databases the public most wants access to through interactive voting and collaboration. They will produce a final report recommending documents and data that the federal government should make easier to find and use.

And last month, Sunlight launched Our Open Government List (OOGL) to gather meaningful feedback for President Obama’s Open Government Directive. We wanted to add a public element to the crafting of this Open Government Directive that is itself transparent, participatory, and collaborative. We encourage you to submit ideas for what the Directive should address, and to vote for your favorite submissions.

We are determined to hold the president and his new CIO to their promise of an open and transparent federal government. So far, so good. But we’ve got to keep the pressure on.

Evan Ratcliff, writing at Wired, has an interesting take on the Stimulus Bill. He proposes that the government’s act of  putting all the  stimulus-spending data on Recovery.gov “may be more than a minor victory for the democracy. It could be a stimulus in and of itself.” By making government information available in databases with “machine-readable formats,” such as RSS, XML and KML, new business can be created, boosting the economy in the process. Ratcliff quotes Sean Forman, CEO of FortiusOne, "The data is the infrastructure." Entrepreneurs, such as Forman, are eager to get their hands on spreadsheets “squirreled away on a federal agency server,” so they can turn a profit by making it useful to someone by reorganizing the data.

Ratcliff compares where we are to day with government data with the situation in 1996 when the feds opened up GPS signals to the public, spawning a $6 billion industry. He lists other examples: Tiger census data, Google Earth, Microsoft Visual Earth, Zillow, Trulia, CloudMade and Swivel as companies that are opening up government data that was previously out of reach to the public and making a buck in the process.

Now this is stimulus we can believe in.