Whether you're a gun owner, a home builder, an environmentalist or all of the above, you probably have no idea who is the lobbying federal government on your behalf, when they’re doing it or how it’s being done.

We got a very brief and narrow glance into that work today.

The key aspect in making a live event useful to citizens is to have an engaged community audience.

Our interactive real-time reporting platform, Sunlight Live, covered a meeting between high powered business association lobbyists and Republican leadership of the House of Representatives.

The event was originally scheduled as a closed-door conversation between lobbyists and Republicans on job creation. After outside groups highlighted the hypocrisy of Republican criticism of Democrats’ closed door meetings, Republican leadership decided that the forum would be openly streamed online as part of America Speaking Out: an initiative by Minority Leader John Boehner's (R-OH) to crowd-source policy ideas.

During the event, only a hour long, Sunlight Live performed a full court press to help the public understand the relationship between these huge organizations and Republican leadership. When any lobbyist was on camera we displayed:

a short biography of the lobbyist

what organization they represent and what issues that organization lobbies on

top recipients from the organization's political action committee (PAC) both in the current cycle and carrerreer totals

Along with our usual influence data on members of Congress, our crack team of investigative journalists (joined by Bara Vaida of the National Journal) blogged their research and reaction in real-time. At any moment Sunlight Live viewers accounted for 70-75% of the total audience for the event.

Here's an extremely succint summary of what the lobbyists pushed for from Paul Blumenthal on our Reporting Team:

1) Stop and roll back everything that the Democrats have done. (Chamber of Commerce, Wholesaler-Distributors and others.) 2) Spend more on infrastructure. This would be stimulus spending. (Builders) 3) No VAT or consumption taxes. (Retail)

Of course, you can play back both the video and our live blog here.

Mark Tapscott of the Washingtion Examiner read my mind and has already posted a constructive critique of the event:

* Whenever lobbyists are involved, campaign contributions ought to be simultaneously detailed, as the Sunlight Foundation did today with the GOP event. The more one party displays, the more the other has to do the same or better.

• Make it as inter-active as possible. Give the audience a chance to submit questions in real-time.

• Provide contact info for all speakers on the screen as they speak.

• Publicize the cybercast in advance as widely as possible and as far in advance as possible.

• Avoid the temptation to turn a civics demonstration into show business or message management.

The key aspect in making a live event like this useful to citizens is to have a community audience engaged in a discourse on the material at hand. We had some great comments in the live blog and on social networks but not nearly enough. Advance notice would have greatly helped build this conversation ahead of time. We also need better uptake from a more diverse set of media partners.

My final feedback is on the lack of critical integration with the America Speaking Out website itself. The groups these lobbyists represent have massive membership lists. It would have better served the audience (and the Republican leadership) had the lobbyists posted the ideas they were bringing to the forum on the web so their membership base and the public at large could respond to them in advance. The meeting could then be a discussion of that reaction instead of spending time reciting bullet points.

With each new event we build out the data behind Sunlight Live. What's next after lobbyist data? We have some amazing ideas and hope to share them with you soon. Get an update on when our next episode will be by following us on Twitter!

Still here? Looking for who showed up to the meeting?

Look no further:

Marlene	Colucci	American Hotel & Lodging Association
John	McClelland	American Rental Association
Geoff	Burr	Associated Builders & Contractors
Steve	Sandherr	Associated General Contractors
Brian	Worth	Independent Electrical Contractors
Jon	Eisen	Int'l Foodservice Distributors Association
David	French	Int'l Franchise Association
Joe	Stanton	National Association of Home Builders
Jay	Timmons	Nat'l Association of Manufacturers
Dirk	Van Dongen	Nat'l Association of Wholesaler-Distributors
Jade	West	Nat'l Association of Wholesaler-Distributors
Dan	Danner	Nat'l Federation of Independent Business
Matt	Shay	Nat'l Retail Federation
Lisbeth	Lyons	Printing Industries of America
John	Emling	RILA
Bruce	Josten	US Chamber of Commerce
Mike	Aitken*	Society for Human Resource Management

_{*Mike Aitken is not listed as a lobbyist - he is a Director of Government Affairs.}

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.

Mark Tapscott, editorial page editor of The Washington (D.C.) Examiner, and strong  ally of Sunlight's thirst for more transparency of information, attended the Personal Democracy Forum 2008 conference in New York, to appear on the panel that I convened. It was his first, and based on the refection he posted to his blog, it sounds like PDF has a new convert. Mark reports that it was not only quite memorable, but he also became infused with "a heightened sense that we are on the cusp of profound, even revolutionary changes in government and public policy thanks to the Internet."  He adds that, as a conservative, he doesn't use the word "revolution" lightly.

He writes that two things struck him at the conference: one being the staggering magnitude of the possibilities as a result of the explosion of information technology, and the other being how progressives have embraced this revolution quicker and more thoroughly than conservatives.

Mark, as a good classic conservative, fears what he calls "Leviathan," or "the all-powerful central government." Seeing how inept the federal government is currently with information technology it's very easy to get lulled into a false belief that there is no way it could ever get so deviously savvy to pose much of a threat. But of course Mark is correct to fear the potential of an Orwellian Internet-empowered centralized power. You've got to believe that sooner rather than later the feds will wake up and embrace this technology. The question is, will it be used for good or ill? And here at Sunlight, as well as with our friends and colleagues, we are dedicated to opening up the government with these new tools so that we can achieve a much more robust democracy, preventing Mark's monstrous scenario.

It's possible that one or the other of two scenarios will be realized, either we use information technology to tame and neutralize the beast, or else it will use these tools to crush what democracy we have left. Back in 2000, Lawrence Lessig wrote, "The next great hope for the information revolution (is) that we might be able to learn as much about governments and business as they have learned about us. That this might be the end of their effective privacy, just as it has effectively been the end of ours." Mark says he wonders if we will "...discover that the Internet empowers the wisdom of the crowds...to expand individual autonomy and group cooperation, while minimizing and rationalizing government power..." Leviathan should be kept from controlling the Internet, he writes, leaving a free people to choose their own destinies. This is what we are working toward here at Sunlight.