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.

Mockups of Lobbying Disclosure Demonstrate Potential for Real Time, Online

When we talk about real time, online disclosure, as we did yesterday, it's easy to miss just what this would mean.

The real, functional changes that come from new tools aren't always obvious when we first encounter them. We have to use and adjust to new tools to realize how transformative they can be.

President Obama's new lobbying policies come with an element of public disclosure that is transformative in ways we're just starting to process. While most analysis has either praised generally or criticized specifics, we'd like to demonstrate just what real time lobbying disclosure actually looks like.

In that spirit, we worked with Sunlight Labs Designer Ali Felski to put together the following mockups of web based lobbying disclosure. We imagined a single site that would function for the entire executive branch, allowing agency employees to file daily reports on lobbying meetings (the first image), and allowing the public to examine and search through the disclosures (the second image). In our conception, a single destination functions across all agencies, creating a single access point for up-to-date influence information.

The Input Form

The input form is intended as a destination for agency employees to fulfill their reporting requirements, which we envision as a daily task: one form for each meeting where a lobbyist is present.

We have included all the identifying information one may expect, while still maintaining a simple form that isn't overburdensome for agency employees. There's a place for an LDA code, which we're using as a simple identifying code for the topic of the meeting.

All of the information entered by agency employees would be submitted by lobbyists at the time of the meeting, and then entered into this simple web form either daily, or after the meeting occurs.

To get a sense of just what kind of view this reporting would enable, take a look at the next mockup.

The Search Page

Even a quick glance of this information should suggest the sort of window on influence we're imagining. Imagine having this sort of information across the federal government right now -- being able to track who is paying for lobbying, and what those discussions entail. One could quickly sort or browse all paid lobbying for individual clients or issue areas, and understand what agency actions are being influenced.

This would be valuable for the public, journalists, and even agency heads and employees, who are striving to evaluate decisions and understand what kinds of pressure they're feeling. This is the sort of view that could elucidate influence, and help us make better decisions.

This is just the beginning. What else can you imagine tracking? Would you set up an RSS feed of all lobbying related to your interests? Would you, as an agency head, track all lobbying directed at your agency? Do you have some other mashup or view in mind, that we haven't thought of? Let us know!

Online awareness is only starting to affect the way we see the world -- adding new perspective and analysis that we didn't have before. Like OpenSecrets.org or PoliticalPartyTime.org, technology has great promise to change the way we understand and interact with influence in government.