People have become increasingly aware that their elected representatives often do not read the legislation they vote upon. Sometimes there’s not enough time between the introduction and adoption of legislation for anyone but the bill’s sponsor to grasp the contents. Other times so many amendments are added that few people -- if any -- fully understand the final document. In the haste to build support and pass bills, provisions are inserted unnoticed that contain unrecognized flaws and political pay-offs. The public and legislators alike are disconnected from the legislative process intended to serve their needs

Congress and the general public need tools to access and analyze legislation. They need Read the Bill 2.0.

Many politicians and politically-aware citizens seek to reconnect the legislative process through their support of the "read the bill" reform. Its central premise is the idea that legislators and members of the public should have enough time to read legislation before it is voted upon. The Sunlight Foundation, one of the primary advocates of this idea, has long recommended that non-emergency legislation and conference reports be posted on the Internet for 72 hours before final consideration.

In the expiring Congress, this idea gained enough political currency that some of its major legislation -- including health care and financial reform -- was available online 3 days prior to final consideration per  Speaker Pelosi’s promise to do so.  However, no legislative rule imposed this requirement, it was not always imposed uniformly, and often times you had to (1) know where to look to find the bill and (2) be willing to thumb through PDFs containing up to 1,000 pages. Even so, it was a commendable step forward.

Reps. Baird and Culberson introduced legislation (H. Res 554) that would have gone one step further and formalized the “read the bill” requirement by amending the House rules; it garnered 217 co-sponsors. Presumptive-Speaker John Boehner has pledged to impose a “read the bill” requirement for all legislation, but it is not yet clear whether he will update the House rules to do so. We think he should.

Anyone who has tried to read legislation soon realizes that doing so can be complicated and difficult. The text is often written in a shorthand that can be unlocked only with patience and frequent reference to the U.S. Code and Statutes at Large. It's difficult to see how draft language changes over time because there is no redlined version of the legislation, and sometimes you need to compare two lengthy PDFs against one another. The bills themselves don't always show up on THOMAS, the official online legislative database, in a timely manner, and they are difficult to find when published elsewhere.

Congress and the general public need tools to access and analyze legislation. They need Read the Bill 2.0. There are three main technological obstacles.

Legislation should be available online in real time, in machine-readable format, and accessible in bulk.

First, legislation that’s supposed to be available on THOMAS isn’t always there on time. The Senate version of the DISCLOSE Act, for example, took more than 4 days to appear on THOMAS after it was introduced. When legislators bypass THOMAS and directly publish legislation online to satisfy the 72-hour rule, it’s often difficult to find. THOMAS must be comprehensive and timely.

Second, all legislation should be published in a machine-readable format. PDFs aren’t good enough. Unless the data is in a machine-readable format, you cannot easily perform a redline comparison between two bills, like I did here, which showed how the DISCLOSE Act changed over time. Fortunately, 97% of the legislation published on THOMAS this past Congress is available in XML, which is an incredibly useful machine-readable format that provides a helpful structure to the data. But 3% of bills are available in PDF format only, and those bills are usually the ones that are most important, lengthy, and time-sensitive.

Third, the THOMAS database should be available to the public “in bulk,” which would allow users to download large amounts of information at one time. Currently, third parties write programs that extract human-readable information from THOMAS in a time-consuming and error-prone process known as scraping. They then use this information to build citizen-empowering tools like OpenCongress and GovTrack. This kind of innovation -- allowing people to use congressional information to better understand what Congress does -- should be encouraged.

Indeed, in 2009 the Library of Congress and GPO were directed to form a task force to report on the feasibility of bulk access to THOMAS, but no report has materialized. Rep. Foster recently introduced legislation (HR 6289) to partially implement bulk access to THOMAS data and jump-start the report. The incoming Congress should clear the pipes and let public legislative data flow to the public.

Real-time redlining of the US Code become possible once you combine bulk access to information with publishing legislation in a machine-readable structured-data format. Wouldn’t it be great if you can see at a glance how a bill would change the law? Or how an amendment would change the text of a bill? Congress could build this tool, and others, or could require that the legislative text be structured so that outside parties could do so. It could also take steps to improve THOMAS generally. Regardless, nothing will likely happen without congressional action.

The goal isn’t merely to allow legislators and citizens to be able to read the bills, but to understand them as well.

For “read the bill” to have bite, people need better tools to make use of legislative information. Publishing PDFs of bills online 3 days prior to a final vote is necessary, but insufficient, for legislative transparency. The kinds of tools we need can only arise with faster, better access to raw legislative information. We need Read the Bill 2.0. After all, the goal isn’t merely to allow legislators and citizens to be able to read the bills, but to understand them as well.

Each new Congress begins with its own unique face. The ascendant Newt Gingrich in 1994, the first woman Speaker of the House surrounded by children in 2006 and a teary-eyed John Boehner in 2010. As we await the future for presumptive Speaker Boehner's policies, we know that those of Gingrich and Nancy Pelosi differed greatly. That is save for one area: transparency. A new Congress, with fresh blood, offers a singular moment to advance transparency causes, whether in the legislative field or elsewhere.

Of course, the decisions on where to move on transparency has largely been influenced by the idiosyncrasies of the Speaker or the new congressional class or the prevailing winds of the time.

In January of 1995 Speaker Gingrich unveiled the first online database of legislation known as THOMAS. THOMAS was a breakthrough at the time even though it did not include anywhere close to the amount of information that it does today. Gingrich, a fan of the futurist Alvin Toffler, was incredibly interested in computers and found it important to make legislation available to the public over the new Internet technology.

The House of Representatives, under the Democratic majority prior to the 1994 election, had put a lot of work into wiring offices for Internet access and posting legislative information through the House Information Services (HIS) and the Government Printing Office (GPO). The new Republican majority, particularly Gingrich and incoming House Administration Committee chairman Bill Thomas, thought that HIS was a pet project of the Democrats and that GPO was inept. This led them to centralize control over the online legislative database in the Library of Congress, where THOMAS still lives today.

In 2006 Pelosi and the Democrats were elevated to office, in part, due to a string of corruption scandals tainting the Republicans. The Jack Abramoff scandal exposed both the casual and explicit corruption in Washington. Associational biases led to corrupt decisions as staffers accepted sports and concert tickets and wound up doing favors for lobbyists. Travel to exotic locales, for educational purposes, of course, were prized lobbyist tricks to win support from congressmen for their clients. Meals could be used as bargaining chips. And in the case of Rep. Randy "Duke" Cunningham, earmarks were sold to defense contractors for yachts, prostitutes, antique furniture and, in one case, a house.

The Democrats moved quickly once the new Congress began. A bill was drafted that included dramatically increased transparency on lobbyists and lobbyist gifts to members of Congress, restrictions on private travel and the receipt of gifts from lobbyists and increased transparency around earmarks and other legislative activities including committee hearings and conference committees. This was a landmark bill that has made following Congress and influence much easier in the Internet age.

This phenomenon is not new either. The increase in new congressmen, largely in the Democratic Party, from 1970 to 1974, produced a series of lasting transparency policies in campaign finance, committee operations, executive branch operations and congressional activity.

So what does this mean for the Republicans in their 2010 form under a Speaker Boehner? That appears to be a big unknown at the moment. Boehner does not appear to have the zest for technology that Gingrich did, nor does the moment portend a need for action as the corruption scandals of 2006 pushed Pelosi to act. There are, however, some areas that both Boehner and Majority Leader-to-be Eric Cantor have noted that could provide some clues as to where transparency could be advanced in the House.

The Republican leadership has stated that they are going to devolve some power back to committee chairmen after a decades-long centralization of power in leadership offices. This provides a moment to codify rules and increase transparency in committee rooms.

The Sunlight Foundation released a list of rules changes for the new Congress to adopt, which includes a series of important changes to committee openness. These include posting recorded votes online in a structured format, post official transcripts, disclose financial statements filed by witnesses and post all committee documents online. (More suggestions can be found here.)

Giving the public time to read bills before they come to the floor for debate is another area that appears ripe for action. This was a hallmark criticism that Republicans made of the legislative process in the 111th Congress and they should codify a rule requiring bills be posted online for 72 hours prior to consideration.

John Boehner has consistently stated his support for transparency in the legislative process during his term as Minority Leader. As he ascends to the Speaker's chair, many will watch to see how his criticisms of opacity translate into policies of openness.

Check out this line from Jay Newton-Small's Swampland blog post on the way forward for health care reform in the House:

Once they have a bill, Dems need to post it online for at least 72 hours for members to review before a vote.

The fact that reporters covering Congress are stating that the Majority "needs" to post the bill online for 72 hours shows how far the Read the Bill effort has gone. As this policy has become the norm it is increasingly clear how important legislative information is to both individual members of Congress and ordinary people.

Congress should still pass a rules change to require the 72 hours reading time to make the policy enforceable. Still, you've shown Congress that people out there want to be able to read legislation and be assured that their representatives have enough time to read and study the bills.

So, Nancy Pelosi and Steny Hoyer announced that they were going to place the final health care bill online for 72 hours prior to consideration yesterday. Where did they decide to do this? Twitter. And no one raises a hackle at all. It's just accepted that this is a valid announcement of an important transparency policy. What better way to demonstrate how far Congress has come in terms of social media use and transparency than to have the Speaker of the House announce a transparency policy on a widely-used social media site.

It wasn't too long ago that lawmakers weren't even allowed to officially use Twitter, let alone any social media site, to communicate with everyone else. The Sunlight Foundation was at the forefront of changing that policy starting in 2007 and culminating in rules changes in 2008. John Wonderlich summed this all up way back when:

In May of 2007, the Sunlight Foundation released the Open House Project report, which included an entire chapter on the issue of Franking Reform.  That chapter, prepared by David All and Paul Blumental, has guided our advocacy and discussions of web use restrictions since then. Those discussions simmered until earlier this summer, when tensions between Members of the Franking Commission  briefly escalated (the part of the Committee on House Administration that handles Web restrictions).  This summer’s discussion caught some media attention, and unsettled some web-savvy Representatives, and ultimately engaged both parties’ leaders in the House. The Sunlight Foundation capitalized on the chaos, creating the first twitter-based petition in the site letourcongresstweet.org, which amassed twitter-based signatures, and displayed vigorous support for updated rules from online communities across the political spectrum. While House officials maneuvered publicly, the Senate passed similar reforms with a bit less fanfare.  As recently as last week, agreement looked unlikely from the House committee, with Roll Call reporting that an attempt at negotiations ended in “an emotionally charged hearing and a breakdown in negotiations.” That’s why we were suprised and delighted to get word from the Committee on House Administration that a new agreement had been reached.  This measure wasn’t just a slight rewrite, however.  The new guidelines represent an enormous change, one which has new media staff from both parties glowing.

And now we just take for granted that serious policies are announced over Twitter. Personally, I think that is awesome.

Last week, Jake wrote that "it is utterly imperative that the final version of the bill be online for the public to view for at least 72 hours." The House Majority just announced that they will do just that (via #HealthReformNow):

Pelosi and Hoyer say final health reform bill will be online for 72 hours before House vote so Members and Americans can review #hcr

This is a great development and another big win for those who have called for the bill to be available to the public for 72 hours throughout this whole process. The Sunlight Foundation has called for the health care bill to be available to the public for 72 hours at each point that versions have come to the floor. In each of these instances the majority has acquiesced and posted each version, from the House bill to the Senate bill, for at least 72 hours prior to consideration. Those of you who have signed the Read the Bill petition and put the pressure on Congress to be this transparent have been vital in ensuring that we have access to this major bill before lawmakers consider, debate and vote on it.

Earlier this week, Ellen explained the importance of the 72 hour requirement:

Think of posting something on line for 3 days as a ‘safety valve’ – a final chance for citizens, media, lawmakers and lobbyists alike to look at the whole package giving everyone one last opportunity to raise questions and concerns about the bill. If readers are in an advocacy mode they have time to  mobilize others in support or opposition, and/or take action in whatever form they see fit. There is no measure more important to debate in the open than health care, and this is a moment when we all need to be champions for public, online disclosure and engage with our government. With 72 hours, the buck can actually stop with citizens the way our Founders intended. We know that Congress do it because congressional leadership has already done so at other critical points in this debate.

Of course, we still need to make sure that this promise is kept and that won't be done until the bill has been online for 72 hours and then brought to the floor. Let's keep it up.

As Jake wrote last week, the final version of the health care bill must be made publicly available for 72 hours prior to floor consideration. For us here at Sunlight figuring out what that exactly means has been a moderately arduous task over the past week. The legislative process to be used, “ping-pong,” is fairly confusing and, due to that, pin-pointing the final version is difficult. I'm going to try and unpack this in the best way possible here.

How exactly does this “ping-pong” process work? “Ping-pong,” like the game, envisions the two chambers sending amendments to the bill back and forth with multiple votes on amendments. Ultimately, the chambers will reach agreement and the bill will finally be considered passed.

Below is a quick summation of what that entails (for the full version please read this CRS Report):

1. Choose a legislative vehicle to amend. This could be the House bill or the Senate bill.
2. One chamber – let's say the House – proposes an amendment or a series of amendments to alter the language of the bill. In the case of the health care bill it is highly likely that this amendment will come in the form of a single amendment in the form of a substitute.
3. The second chamber – the Senate in this example – is then offered three options: agree to the House amendment, agree to the House amendment with further amendment or reject (if there are multiple House amendments the Senate may agree with some and disagree with others).
4. If the Senate agrees to the House amendment to the bill then the bill is considered passed and heads to the President for his signature. If the Senate, however, decides to further amend the House amendments then they can report the bill back to the House with a Senate amendment to the House amendment to the bill. (More on rejection later.)
5. If this happens, the bill and it's amendments can go to each chamber only once more before the process ends with either a passed, amended bill or the rejection of the process, which doesn't necessarily mean the bill has been defeated.
6. If rejection happens anywhere along the way, it can come with a motion from the rejecting chamber to do a number of things. These could hypothetically be a motion from the Senate for the House to recede on parts of their amendment(s); a motion to form a conference committee; or a motion to begin the process again.

(There are many more possibilities that can occur along the way. Please read the aforementioned CRS report for those details.)

So... where in this lies the FINAL bill. First and foremost, we consider the first amendment to the bill to be the final version of the bill. This amendment must be made available for at least 72 hours prior to a vote. This means that if the amendment is made available on Monday both chambers could, conceivably, consider and vote in the affirmative on this amendment on Thursday. But, you say, the second considering chamber can offer their own amendment to the first amendment offered. If the amendment offered by the second considering chamber contain major changes to the legislation or the original amendment(s) in the “ping-pong” process it needs to be available for 72 hours before the second considering chamber can consider them. If the amendment offered by the second considering chamber consist solely of minor technical edits, it need not be available.

There is a little bit of Calvinball involved here, but I think that is totally reasonable considering the unpredictability of the process. All that we, the public, need to do is remain vigilant in ensuring that this complicated process remains as transparent as it can be until it reaches an endpoint.

A couple of days ago I wrote about some of the potential transparency issues related to the decision by House and Senate Democrats to skip conference for the health care reform bill (see here for background on what conference is). After thinking more and more about the issue I'm inclined to believe that the issues raised with skipping conference relates more directly to a structural shift in Congress that far too many are ready to ignore. (For more on the conference committee controversy see this post by John Wonderlich.)

Ezra Klein, who has been focusing on congressional malfunctions for the past few months, points out the major shift in congressional relations and partisan behavior in recent years:

...understanding the United States Congress as an institution gripped by ideological competition is simply wrong. It's an institution gripped by electoral competition. The political scientist Frances Lee puts this particularly clearly in her new book, “Beyond Ideology.” "Parties," she writes, "are institutions with members who have common political interests in winning elections and wielding power, not just coalitions of individuals with similar ideological preferences." According to her data, senators in 2004 are 63 percent more divided along party lines than senators in 1981. It's no coincidence that the rise in party-line voting has coincided with the ideological realignment of the parties. Now that the parties agree internally, they can focus their efforts on winning power.

The dynamic that this electorally centered process creates is one in which the minority has no incentive to help the majority pass legislation. Rather than working to include conservative ideas in the health care bill there is total opposition from the Republican side. In this era, the key for the minority party, especially one that has suffered successive losses, is to kick the majority out and regain power. It's like a football team who throws in the towel in the middle of a losing season to acquire a high draft pick. Might as well aim to regain power in the future than play the game in the present. It worked for Republicans in 1994 and Democrats in 2006.

This new era (the past twenty-some-odd years) of Congress poses numerous problems for transparency in the legislative process. This largely stems from the fact that what has been viewed as the normal legislative process in the past no longer applies.

The majority rushes bills through Congress with little time for lawmakers or the public to review them. Omnibus bills obscure hidden provisions in the crammed, rushed appropriations process. Earmarks are used to fund the districts of endangered incumbents. Speeches on the floor and in committee hearings are akin to Javanese shadow puppetry so as to avoid the all-powerful gaffe patrol. The Rules Committee holds late night sessions – more so in the past than currently, but other problems still persist – prior to a bill's consideration leaving little time for lawmakers to review a bill's rule.

In many ways, there are moves to address some of these changes in legislative behavior. The passage of a rule requiring legislation be publicly available for at least 72 hours before consideration would reduce the ability of the majority to rush legislation. There have already been some reforms to the Rules Committee, while others continue this discussion. Earmarking is reduced and vastly more transparent. These are not fixes to get back to some “normal” legislative process that no longer exists, but ways to adapt to the way the legislature works in a partisan and electorally focused era.

There are countless debates circulating regarding how best to adapt to this new legislative era. Transparency advocates should be aware of the way Congress has changed and focus on adapting the transparency agenda to reflect this changing dynamic rather than seeking to return to a “normal” procedure that has long since become irrelevant.

Earlier today, Jonathan Cohn broke the news that House and Senate Democrats are "almost certainly" going to bypass the official conference committee process to pass the health care reform bill. The reasoning given by Democrats is that going to conference allows Republicans with multiple opportunities to block or delay the bill's ultimate passage. David Waldman gives a great run-down of the rules that would allow for further delay. The move to conference would require multiple Senate votes on moving to conference and appointing conferees, all processes that are subject to cloture votes (60 votes) and require 30 hours of debate. Skipping conference eliminates these cloture votes and requires lawmakers to only cast votes on the final passage of the bill. While providing the speedier passage of the bill, skipping conference presents some transparency-related problems.

Recently adopted and long standing House and Senate rules require conference committees to be generally open to the public. Both House and Senate rules require that all conference committee meetings be open to the public unless a majority of conferees votes in open session to close the meetings. Senate rules require all conference committee reports be publicly available for at least 48 hours prior to a final vote. Without conference, there is no mechanism to provide for openness in the final discussions regarding the health care bill.

Other conference rules provide for openness within the conference committee rather than public openness. These provisions require that conference committees not exclude conferees from decisions or refuse them the ability to see documents or participate in meetings. It will be much easier to exclude potentially difficult members (coming from both the left and right) without a formal conference.

The forgoing of formal conference isn't entirely uncommon -- and, in the end, everyone will still have to go on the record as for or against the final bill. At the same time, the process may speed up the bill's passage while potentially limiting both the public's and many of their elected official's ability to consider the changes to the bill. As with every other major moment of consideration during this bill's journey, both chambers should make the final version (conference report, amendment, substitute) available for at least 72 hours prior to consideration.

Sunlight hasn’t been around nearly as long as that song -- it was first recorded in 1961 and we opened our doors in May of 2006 -- but for us 2009 was a very good year. We have you, an amazing staff and boards, and our generous investors to thank for that. Hardly a day went by when a new idea wasn’t hatched, tested or dumped, when a blog item wasn’t posted, when an idea for how to visualize data wasn’t tossed around. The best ideas survived and thrived in the creative, collaborative (and yes, sometimes chaotic) culture Sunlight has nurtured for the past 3 and a half years. We are excited about how far we have come and that we are poised for even bigger strides in the next decade.

A few highlights from this year from my point of view.

OpenCongress.org -- our joint project with the Participatory Politics Foundation --launched its most comprehensive site redesign mid-year, improving usability of its tools and clarity of data presentation. In addition, it integrated new useful sources of data and feature sets to make it even easier for individuals and organizations to track and share the best info about their interests  and, as result of the redesign and new features, and hot issues like health care and financial industry reform, OpenCongress has experienced its most-ever sustained traffic levels this year. In fact, in August 2009, shortly after the launch of the redesign, it appeared that OpenCongress became the most-visited government engagement Web site in the U.S., and perhaps in the world. And wait til next year -- if you think OpenCongress is a useful site, imagine the same kind of web-based resources rolled out for your state in 2010 based on state legislative data.

Apps for America Contests. Sunlight held two very successful contests this year resulting in the creation of 100 new apps based on government data. (Yes, this data can actually be made interesting and useful for ordinary mortals.) These contests were hugely important to the development of a strong and engaged Sunlight Labs community and for demonstrating an interest in government data. The community exploded reaching over 1,200 participants. Check out some of the wonderful apps if you haven’t seen them already.

The Great American Hackathon was held on December 12-13 just before Sunlight took off for its well-deserved winter break. The Hackathon -- run by our Labs team -- was a decentralized event held at over 20 venues across the country and its purpose was simple -- to get developers to meet each other and to work on new open source open government projects.

Transparency Corps. We launched Transparency Corps this year -- Sunlight’s answer to the question we often are asked: ‘How can I help?’ We ran several campaigns on that platform and expect it to become even more active in ‘10. We parsed the Kentucky State Legislature manually, worked with Open New York, collected the number of votes each member of Congress received and ran two earmark-related campaigns. All in all, it resulted in a contribution of 662 volunteer hours for the Sunlight Foundation and 228 hours for partners, and the completion of 8,312 individual tasks. Wow!

Mobile Apps. In the last half of 2009 we developed apps for the iPhone and the Android. The Android app, ‘Congress’, has received over 2,000 downloads which is significant for the Android marketplace. The iPhone app, ‘Real Time Congress’ just received approval and we plan to formally launch it the first week of January, 2010 We also built an overlay of Recovery.gov data on the LayAR augmented reality mobile app. This move into the use of augmented reality to show the usefulness of online disclosure of government information has sparked the interest of many. Fairly obviously, expect lots more along these lines in the next year.

Congrelate. Sunlight Labs built Congrelate as a way for people to view, sort, filter and share data about members of Congress and their districts. The Labs compiled data from Congress, the Census, OpenSecrets.org, GovTrack and other sources to let users manipulate the data and see how they relate. Congrelate allows users to select what data they would like to see, add it to a ‘sheet’ then filter and sort through it easily. Congrelate will get renewed attention in 2010 with new data sets added and an improved UI.

Transparency Camps. Sunlight hosted two unconferences this year -- one here in DC and one at Google HQ in Mountain View. Through events like this, and our Transparency Breakfasts and Transparency Happy Hours, Sunlight is helping to build new relationships that will hope will create and galvanize a transparency community. We hope you’ll join in these events as we plan more for the coming year. House (and Senate) Expenditures Online. As a direct result of Sunlight’s suggestions, on November 30, the House published their expenditures reports online for the first time. Sunlight had long advocated for such a move, and devoted a section of our Transparency in Government Act (drafted in 2008) to the issue.  (Senate reports will be forthcoming in 2010.) Sunlight quickly crafted an online database of the newly released information, since the House reports were released in a PDF document  (boo…..) rather than a searchable database. (File this one under the category of ‘If Congress won’t do 21st century style transparency we’ll show them how to do it.’)

Read the Bill. Technology makes it possible for anyone to review legislation before it’s considered and tell their representative what they think of it. In 2009 Sunlight began calling for posting all legislation online for 72 hours before its considered by either the House or the Senate. Now thanks to our efforts to heighten public awareness around this, Congress can no longer talk about a piece of major legislation without a reporter asking, ‘will the final version of the bill be online for 72 hours?’ Sunlight has helped to change the conversation and the way the public is thinking about transparency even when transparency laws or regulations have yet to pass. We’ll keep pushing this forward in ’10 to make sure that every bill is available on line before it’s considered by Congress.

Redesigning Government series. In 2009, Sunlight launched an ongoing ‘redesigning’ government series -- making mock-up redesigns of GSA, FEC, EPA, FCC and Supreme Court sites, and others. This work resulted in many conversations with each of the agencies about their Web sites and how the agencies could improve the ways they make data available to the public. We even crowd-sourced testimony we presented to the Federal Election Commission with details for their consideration. We think that was first!

Real Time Investigations had an incredibly successful year, using Sunlight and grantee-sponsored tools to push the envelope of transparency, and using shoe leather reporting to find out what the data can tell us about who owes what to whom, how and on what government spends its money. Hundreds of investigative posts were made to the site. Sunlight’s Reporting Group wrote 11 major stories using data from the Foreign Lobbying Influence Tracker alone. This team was also responsible for training more than 1,250 journalists and bloggers in 2009 an activity that will pay off handsomely as more data comes on line. Next year expect to find many  of these training resources online.

Party Time. Sunlight’s Party Time site now contains more than 6,700 fund-raising invitations and it has become a valuable resource for journalists, bloggers and advocacy groups. In particular, we saw an increase in outside groups using the data to do their own complex analysis. Everyone can follow the money after it’s raised, but only Sunlight gives you an introduction into real time political fund-raising.

The Foreign Lobbying Influence Tracker was launched this year, a joint project with ProPublica. The site digitized, for the first time, information from disclosures filed under the Foreign Agent Registration Act, or FARA, which requires lobbyists for foreign governments to reveal a wealth of information about their lobbying activities, including the dates and subjects of their contacts with members of Congress, their staffers and executive branch officials. The Foreign Lobbying Influence Tracker makes more than 13,000 records searchable by lobbyist, client, person contacted and issue raised. The site has been searched 163,104 times by media organizations, citizens and even congressional staff. We will continue this project into 2010 with ProPublica.

There was a lot more. Sunlight worked closely with the Administration to help move them in the right direction on the Open Government Directive and their lobby reform initiatives. We are happy to see our fingerprints in many aspects of what was announced by the White House in late December. So too, Sunlight worked with many players on the Hill to convince them to begin to open up Congressional information. We've begun to explore how transparency is practiced -- or not -- at the state level too. At the end of the year we were hard at work on several major legislative initiatives to be introduced in January of 2010 that would  dramatically improve Congressional transparency.

None of the above speaks to the thousands of blog posts written at Sunlight, Sunlight Labs, Open Congress, Real Time Investigations, or on the Party Time websites, nor the stunning visualizations that accompanied and highlighted many of those posts (think  ‘a picture is worth a 1,000 words'), nor the hours of conversations with elected officials, their staff and administration officials, as we all come to grips with how technology can change how we get access to information and what the public can do with it. Our work on SubsidyScope, the Pew Charitable Trust project for which we are building a database of government subsidies, garnered tremendous kudos for its design and ease of use as the first sectors were released. There are a number of soon to be released projects on which we spent hundreds of hours of development time this year  – new tools that will make it easier for journalists, bloggers and citizens to make use of data in easily understandable ways.

2010 will be an incredible year for us.  Lots of plans are underway. Some I’ve mentioned above, and Clay Johnson, Labs director detailed a number of them including figuring out how to handle the glut of data that government will make available under its Open Government Directive and how to enhance it with state and local government data too; mashing important ‘influence’ and ‘spending’ data sets together so it will be available with a single search; widgets to make following your lawmaker’s campaign contributions and earmarks (and other activities) very easy; launching a new major new campaign to drive public demand for more -- more transparency, more data, and a more open government. And always on our list is making all this information more easily available for reporters, bloggers and online citizens like you. We’d love to have your ideas of what you’d find useful. Please leave them in the comment section below.

For all your support and help -- and for the hard work of our grantees -- we are most grateful. We welcome all your contributions -- monetary and participatory. And we hope you will help us keep transparency priceless.

Last week, Congress spent $1.1 trillion tax dollars by combining six pieces of appropriations ("spending") legislation into one 1,000+ page "minibus" bill and passing it with almost no public disclosure or debate.  In fact, the bill was available to the public online for less than 24 hours.

Before December 18th, Congress will be taking up the last remaining 2010 appropriations bill: Defense.  If history is any lesson, Congress will likely try to cram different pieces of legislation into this final bill, and these new bills will be those that were unable to pass previously on their own.  If the new bills are included in the Defense appropriation bill at the last minute, the public won't know what's going on until after the bill is passed.

It's imperative that we have the ability to read the bill online not only before it's passed, but before it's debated, so we can call our representatives while there's still time to have an impact on what they spend our money on.

The craziest part of this whole thing (Capitol Hill finds these things to be "normal") is that the legislation Congress will try to insert may not have anything to do with defense. Raising the nation's debt limit and various health care reforms are two possible inclusions.  By "drafting" behind the Defense bill their chance of passing Congress increases.

And while debt limit and health care reform provisions are at least being discussed in the media, it is the laws we can't see, that have never been debated in the open, that are the most dangerous threat.

Example: the Commodity Futures Modernization Act that was slipped into an omnibus bill back in 2000.  The text was only available for 24 hours and its inclusion in the omnibus was only known for 4 minutes before final consideration.  The passage of the Act not only created the "Enron loophole" but a market of unregulated derivatives which contributed to near economic collapse in late 2008.

Last week, as Congress dropped and passed the minibus appropriations bill, the ridiculousness of not making the bill available online for 72 hours was frustrating and disappointing. Even for the team here at the Sunlight Foundation, who were watching very closely, the $1.1 trillion minibus bill had passed before we could do so much as send an email alert!

It was perhaps most distressing because we now KNOW Congress can make major legislation available for 72 hours before it's debated; we've seen them do it throughout the health care debate. Appropriations don't get the same public pressure as health care so our representatives decided not to give us time to go through the massive spending bill - which added up to be more spending than the Stimulus package.

This week, Congress has a chance to redeem themselves with the one remaining spending bill of the year, and we'll be demanding they get it right.

Post by Jake Brewer with contributions from Noah Kunin.

Image credit by id-iom