What better celebration of Ada Lovelace Day – celebrating the achievements of women in technology – could we have than to honor the women who are key to the government transparency movement to which technology is so key?  These women are using technology to pry open the doors of government, and are creating a new style of transparency powered by the Internet. By either making more political and spending data available online, facilitating others to do the same, addressing questions that arise in the age of technology or by creating new tools and context to help all of us connect the dots and understand what the data has to tell us, these women are empowering all of us to hold our government accountable in ways we never could before. As I look around to my colleagues, I see a remarkable number of us – too many to really mention in one column. So here are a few: Ryan Alexander became President of Taxpayers for Common Sense in November 2006, after more than seven years of serving on the board. Taxpayers, under her leadership, has become the go-to organization if you want to find out anything about earmarks. She’s had a long history working on behalf of the public interest: in the past 20 years she has worked as a non-profit advocate, litigator, manager, funder and consultant on issues from media policy, election reform, public health policy, transparency, privacy, women’s economic security and citizen participation. You can follow her on Twitter at http://twitter.com/ryanalxndr.

Danielle Brian’s been battling government secrecy for two decades as the Executive Director of the Project On Government Oversight (POGO) — a group that investigates, exposes, and remedies corruption and other misconduct in order to achieve a more effective, accountable, open and ethical federal government. POGO’s investigations have led to major reforms and cuts in wasteful spending in such areas as government secrecy, nuclear security, drug industry influence on health policy, and defense contractor waste and fraud. When she started there – there was no such thing as a fax or even a feeder in the copy machine, let alone the Internet. You can follow her on twitter at http://twitter.com/daniellebrian.

Leslie Harris is the President and CEO of the Center for Democracy & Technology, where she is responsible for the overall vision and direction of the organization and serves as its chief strategist and spokesperson. Under her leadership, CDT has grown significantly, opened a West Coast office and launched an influential Health Privacy Project. Leslie is widely known for her work on policy issues related to civil liberties, new technologies and the Internet including free expression, government and consumer privacy, cyber security and global Internet freedom. She frequently testifies before Congress and federal agencies, is a regular contributor to several online publications and blogs, including the Huffington Post, and in 2009 was named one of Washington's Tech Titans by Washingtonian magazine.  You can follow her on twitter at http://twittter.com/Leslie_Harris

Sheila Krumholz has been the Executive Director of the Center of Responsive Politics since 2007. She has been at the Center since 1989 (with a few years off) working her way up through the research ranks, overseeing the internal data compilation and analyses found on CRP’s site, OpenSecrets.org, as well as customized research for CRP’s clients. Under her leadership, CRP has increased its reputation as a reliable source for accurate, nonpartisan research and the premier resource on political finance, lobbying, revolving door and other influence data at the federal level. Sheila also a heads an organization where three of their four senior staff members – including the directors of IT and research – are women, representing a combined 40 years of work at the Center. You can follow her on twitter at http://www.twitter.com/skrmhlz.

Jen Palkha spent 15 years in technology media before deciding to focus on transparency at the municipal level with the founding of her new organization – Code for America – that works with city governments to identify web apps that drive transparency, efficiency and participation, and that are reusable by other cities. Code for America recruits teams of fellows from the web industry to build these apps through a structured program of public service. Jennifer is currently working with the 11 cities who applied for their first development cycle to decide which three to five projects will be built starting in January 2011. You can follow her on twitter at http://www.twitter.com/pahlkadot.

Melanie Sloan, a former federal prosecutor and Hill staffer, started Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics (CREW) in Washington in 2003. CREW has used litigation as a tactic to force our government to be more transparent. Melanie and CREW were instrumental in revealing that millions of emails disappeared from Bush White House servers. It is also thanks to CREW’s lawsuits against both the Bush and Obama administrations that the Obama White House now makes White House visitor records available online. You can follow CREW's work on twitter at http://www.twitter.com/CREWCREW

And my colleagues would berate me for not including my own story. I am co-founder and executive director of the Sunlight Foundation, a non-partisan, non-profit organization dedicated to using the power of the Internet to catalyze greater government openness and transparency. I am the founder of two other prominent Washington-based organizations in the field of money and politics – the Center for Responsive Politics and Public Campaign – and an expert on transparency and the influence of money in politics. You can follow me on twitter at http://www.twitter.com/ellnmllr

It’s been an enormous pleasure to work with  Ryan, Danielle, Sheila, Leslie, Jen and Melanie for many years.  We all say “thank you, Ada” for paving the way.

Once again, Sen. Joe Lieberman (Conn.) has introduced a resolution in the Senate to put non-confidential Congressional Research Service (CRS) reports online. Heather West at the Center for Democracy & Technology’s “PolicyBeta” blog  writes that a solid bi-partisan group of senators have joined Lieberman as co-sponsors. S. Res. 118 is a Senate resolution, which means the Senate Rules Committee and an overall Senate vote are all that’s needed to open the reports to the public -- who paid for them to be produced in the first place.

CRS is a $100 million funded “think tank” housed in the Library of Congress that researches and writes reports for Congressional lawmakers and their staff on current topics. They include serious and smart analysis, and the reports are well worth reading if you are interested in the hot issues of the day. These reports exist on an internal server on the Hill, but the public is denied access to them. The only way you can get them in by calling a lawmaker’s office and requesting a copy. (Of course, how do you know to ask about a report if its existence isn’t publicly listed someplace…A classic Washington Catch-22.)

Open CRS, a CDT project and Sunlight grantee, provides citizens access to CRS Reports already in the public domain and encourages Congress to provide public access to all CRS Reports. OpenCRS gets their copies from various people who choose to ‘liberate’ them. WikiLeaks, a Web site that publishes anonymous submissions and leaks of sensitive governmental, corporate, or religious documents, while attempting to preserve the anonymity and untraceability of its contributors, has released nearly a billion dollars worth of CRS reports, as well. There is one commercial service that manages someway, somehow to get all of them all. This service charges an arm and a leg.

Sunlight shares CDT’s demand that Congress open up all CRS reports to the public. This is an easy transparency reform. Kudos to Sen. Lieberman and his co-sponsors on continuing to press this important and common sense reform.

Encouraged by several openness and transparency steps taken by the Obama - Biden transition team, the Center for Democracy & Technology and OMB Watch, both Sunlight grantees, are calling on the new administration to go further and reverse a pair of Bush Administration orders that restrict the public's right to know under the Freedom of Information Act.

Andrew Noyes at Congress Daily (subscription required, but you can see read it here free thanks to GovernmentExecutive.com) reports that the two groups are impressed by the transition team's posting transition-related information at Change.gov, and by adding a "Your Seat at the Table" section, where proceedings of meetings and documents shared between Obama's aides and outside groups are posted online and available for comment.

Open government advocates like CDT and OMB Watch are more than eager to reverse eight opaque years of unaccountability by the Bush Administration, which used executive privilege, hyper classification under the aegis of national security, and stonewalling to further secrecy. "The catalyst was a 2001 memo by then-Attorney General John Ashcroft instructing agencies to withhold information by using such exemptions if an argument could be made to do so," Noyes writes. In 2002, Andrew Card, then the then White House chief of staff, issued a memo creating a category of "sensitive but unclassified" information to be withheld.

Noyes quotes Gary Bass, OMB Watch director, as saying the reversal of such policies is "totally consistent with the way the Obama team has operated." Over 200 individuals and other organizations joined OMB Watch in issuing a "right-to-know" agenda to the transition team last month. Asserting that agencies should have a proactive, affirmative responsibility to disseminate, Bass said, "FOIA requests should become the vehicle of last resort, not first resort." Noyes notes that efforts are afoot in Congress too that would strengthen FOIA, such as Sens. Pat Leahy and John Cornyn's Open FOIA Act. Last New Years Eve, Bush did sign Open Government Act of 2007, the first FOIA reform in a decade was to set up an independent FOIA ombudsman. But subsequent maneuvers by the Bush Administration "neutered" the law. We expect the Obama-Biden Administration takes CDT and OMB Watch's counsel. The incoming administration is giving us hopeful and positive signs.