The challenge in working for government transparency is that you are always working against its opposite: opacity. What we don’t see is often what's most harmful to us. When the Upper Big Branch Mine exploded in West Virginia last April and killed 29 miners, we were surprised because most of us had never seen it coming. The sad thing is, many of the experts didn’t see it coming either.

Open, searchable data is critical for us as citizens and for the experts we respect to get the information we need to hold our government accountable. The Mine Safety and Health Administration (MSHA) may be one of the better agencies at releasing data, but due to a computer glitch and awkward structuring of databases, the egregious safety violations of the Upper Big Branch Mine were overlooked.

We need to pay attention to the ways in which government information impacts our lives, because it does impact all of us. Transparency touches everything from the Chilean miners sent into a mine with a history of unstable conditions to the infamously overpaid city council of Bell, California to the countless narratives of closed meetings, embezzled funds and lost records that appear on the federal, state and local level.

The folks here at Sunlight know that government accountability and access to information and data affect all of us in many different ways, and we want to connect those narratives. We'll start with the story of the Upper Big Branch Mine, but we know you have a story of your own. Share it with us. Send us an email or submit your story in the comments.

graphics and co-production by Noah Kunin

In a reiteration of just about everything we cover here at Sunlight, Congressional Quarterly released a terrific article examining the many ways in which Congress is not transparent and open. If you read the blog here, or are familiar with Sunlight's work, these problems will be very familiar:

• Bills are often dropped hours before a vote. With no time to read the bills, large programs get voted on with little review from lawmakers and no review from the public. In one egregious case, lawmakers went scurrying for information on the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act amendments, legalizing domestic spying programs, as the final version of the bill was not available when the vote was held.
• Some committees are secret, some are open. Sometimes a bill can travel through multiple committees with varying degrees of transparency.
• Conference committees are supposed to be open, but openness is often circumvented or multiple conferences are held, some open, some not.
• Congressional Research Service reports, the information pipeline for most congressional offices, are not widely, publicly available.
• There is a large amount of over-classification of legislative activities related to defense and intelligence.

And so it goes. Congress still has leaps and bounds to make towards true transparency. Over the past two years, there have been some encouraging developments including the Honest Leadership and Open Government Act, the rewriting of franking restrictions for lawmaker web use, and the voluntary transparency of some individual lawmakers.

One thing that does stand out in this article that needs to be challenged is the suggestion that transparency could cause greater disapproval of Congress:

Lawmakers in the 1970s reasoned that more openness could benefit not just voters, but Congress itself. That isn’t necessarily true, said Princeton’s Zelizer, thanks to 19th Century German Chancellor Otto von Bismarck’s saying that the two things no one should want to see being made are sausage and legislation.

“It might not result in better ratings for Congress,” the professor said. “They thought, ‘If you make it more open, people will like it more.’ That actually didn’t happen.”

Zelizer, one of my favorite congressional experts, isn't wrong here, but his lessons don't necessarily apply to transparency as conceived of in the Internet-powered 21st century. While the reformers of the '60s and '70s did believe that openness would build trust with the public, they did not build interactivity and connectivity into that push for openness. Transparency, different from openness, proposes that information should not just be available and accessible, but that the public should be able to freely interact with both the information and all actors involved, including lawmakers, staffers, and other members of the general public. Unlike simply making information available, transparency would go a long way to help repair the image of Congress by actually connecting and involving citizens.

To see what this transparency could look like read my colleague Greg Elin's excellent review of the interactivity at change.gov, the Obama-Biden Presidential Transition web site.