Last week was busy and exciting here at Sunlight as we marked another successful Sunshine Week. It was a great opportunity to not only share our work in making government more open and transparent but to hear from others about their progress in matters of freedom of information. Here are some highlights from Sunshine Week 2013.

Open States Transparency Report Card

We released our very first Open States Transparency Report Card on March 11, which rated all 50 states and DC on the openness of their legislative data. We evaluated each state across six factors  -- completeness, timeliness, ease of access, machine readability, use of commonly owned standards and permanence -- to get grades from A to F. Our Open State project also received kudos from the New York Times data team, as it recommended the Open States API as the best resource for those who want legislative data about New York state since the paper was shutting down the API it created.

Sunlight Speaks Out

Throughout Sunshine Week, Sunlight staff participated in a number of events to commemorate the week and address the work we do. Thanks to all who kicked off the week at our DC happy hour to celebrate President James Madison’s birthday. Head over to our Flickr page to see all the festivities from last Monday.

On March 12, Editorial Director Bill Allison was in Philadelphia speaking at WHYY’s public forum on Open Data 101. He was a panelist along with the head of Pennsylvania’s Open Records Office Terry Mutchler, New Jersey open records expert Marc Pfeiffer and Holly Otterbein from WHYY. Follow the evening’s conversation on Storify or watch a video clip of the panel.

Also on March 12, Policy Counsel Daniel Schuman moderated a Congressional Transparency Caucus panel which brought together FOIA experts to explore ways the FOIA process could be improved and made more easily accessible to the public.

Daniel was on Capitol Hill again on Wednesday, this time testifying before the House Oversight and Government Reform committee. His testimony -- which you can read about here -- encouraged the Oversight Committee to continue its good work, to adopt the government’s best transparency initiatives, and to help the Obama Administration meet its pledge to be the most transparent once ever.

Bill Allison was back on the FOIA speaking circuit on March 14 at a National Press Club panel with award-winning reporter Charles Babcock, now an editor at Bloomberg News; Randy Rabinowitz, director of regulatory policy for the Center for Effective Government; Lisette Garcia, senior investigator at Judicial Watch.

We concluded Sunshine Week with two events. First, Policy Director John Wonderlich spoke at a National Freedom of Information Day panel at the Newseum, hosted by OpenTheGovernment.org and the First Amendment Center. There, he outlined how the Obama Administration could make real progress on open government. You can make out some of the faces that attended here.

Sunshine Week would not be complete without a #FOIA chat. Sunshine Review invited Bill Allison as a guest during its weekly Twitter chat, where he shared FOIA tips and walked participants through the FOIA request submission process. During the Twitter chat, Bill also shared some resources which you may find useful in your own pursuit of public records. In case you missed it, here is a Storify recap.

The important work that we all do around open government and freedom of information shouldn’t end at Sunshine Week. Visit our Participate page to get involved year round.

Late last month we applauded the House Appropriations Committee for appearing to improve on its dismal record of webcasting hearings. As we noted, webcasting is an effective way to allow interested parties to access public hearings that are often essentially private because of space constraints.

Unfortunately, that praise was premature. We've been monitoring the committee's progress since then, and were hopeful that we could close Sunshine Week by announcing that it had continued to webcast the vast majority of its hearings. That has not been the case.

During the last week of February, when the committee appeared to be turning a corner, every hearing listed on its schedule was webcast live. That trend ended almost as soon as it started.

In the first two weeks of March the committee only webcast 8 of the 24 hearings that it has held. Even worse, only 4 of its 17 open hearings over the past week have been webcast.

That means that during Sunshine Week the House Committee on Appropriations only managed to webcast 23% of its open proceedings.

This was unacceptable in 2012 when a Sunlight analysis found that the Appropriations Committee was the only House committee that did not webcast the vast majority of its hearings and it continues to be unacceptable today. We will continue to monitor the Appropriations committee until they prove that they have complied with House rules that require them to webcast their hearings "to the maximum extent practicable."

Photo Credit: the test pattern is from Gak on Flickr.

Happy Sunshine Week! The FOIA-rich week may be winding down but there are plenty of events still lined up.

Tomorrow, Friday March 15 at 2:00 p.m. ET, our very own Bill Allison (Sunlight’s editorial director) will be on a Twitter FOIA chat -- taking your questions on all things FOIA and sharing some tips on using the Freedom of Information Act. He will also provide some information on some new resources that might help you, and heartfelt sympathy for the problems you encounter when using the Act.

Follow along as Bill composes a FOIA request in real time and submits it to a federal agency. To participate, submit your question or comment and add the (hashtag) #FOIAchat.

What: Twitter FOIA chat with Bill Allison, Sunlight's Editorial Director

When: March 15, 2013, 2:00 p.m. ET

Where: Twitter (#FOIAchat)

For those in D.C., this evening Bill will be a panelist with award-winning reporter Charles Babcock, now an editor at Bloomberg News; Randy Rabinowitz, director of regulatory policy for the Center for Effective Government; Lisette Garcia, senior investigator at Judicial Watch; on a panel about using the Freedom of Information Act to ferret out documents and data at the National Press Club, 6:30-8 p.m. You can still get your ticket here.

Today at 10 a.m. I will be testifying about open government before the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee. The hearing is timed to coincide with Sunshine Week, an annual, week-long discussion on the importance of access to public information. The testimony (pdf, odt, docx) is intended to encourage the Oversight Committee to continue its good work, to adopt the Administration's best initiatives, and to help the Administration meet its pledge to be the most transparent once ever.

I hope that you'll watch and let me know what you think. I am particular excited that Chairman Issa and Ranking Member Cummings just yesterday released draft legislation to overhaul the Freedom of Information Act, which follows on the bipartisan DATA Act and Access to Congressionally Mandated Reports Act that was favorably reported by the committee last Congress.

Sunshine Week 2013 is well underway. While yesterday we looked at how well our state government made information available online, today we turn our attention to Capitol Hill.

This week is about supporting policies that maintain our right to know and the importance of open government. So how does Congress do just that? Using Sunlight’s Capitol Words tool, let’s take a look at how lawmakers talk about Sunshine Week.

Democrats say “FOIA” the most in Congress, with Sen. Patrick Leahy (D-VT) leading the pack. The senator is also at the top when “right to know” is mentioned in the Congressional Record.

The “open government” chart (see above) on Capitol Words illustrates how Congress began using the term more and more in recent years. You can see lots of spikes in 2007 when Congress was debating and passing the Honest Leadership and Open Government Act.

And since Sunshine Week coincides with the birthday of James Madison, here is how Congress remembers our fourth president.

Today we’re making available our Transparency Report Card, a byproduct of the work we did in producing Open States.

In the course of writing scrapers for all 50 state legislatures, our Open States team and volunteers spent a lot of time looking at state legislative websites and struggling with the often inadequate information made available.  Impossibly difficult to navigate sites, information going missing and gnarly PDFs of tabular data have become daily occurrences for those of us working on Open States. People are always curious to know how their state stacked up compared to others -- in fact one of the most frequent questions we have been asked has been “so which state was the worst?”  That question got us thinking:  How could we derive a measure of how “open” a state’s legislative data was?

After some consideration, we came up with six criteria on which each state could be evaluated, based on six of the Ten Principles for Opening Up Government Information: completeness, timeliness, ease of access, machine readability, use of commonly owned standards and permanence.  We omitted four of the original ten criteria (primacy, non-discrimination, licensing and usage costs) that tended not to present serious differences between states.

Evaluating each state on each criteria was a large task, and with community support we ensured that each state was evaluated by multiple people.  After the evaluation was complete, we converted the qualitative data on how a state performed to numeric scores (specific scoring details are available on the report card itself).  After summing these scores, states were also assigned a letter grade according to where they fell among their peers.  A state with a net score below negative one was given an F, a negative one or zero became a D.  With the average total score among states being a 1.5, we gave states with a net score of one or two a C, three became a B, and four and above became an A.

The final breakdown was 8 As, 11 Bs, 20 Cs, 6 Ds, and 6 Fs.   If you’re interested in how your state did compared to others you can check out all the details on the Open Legislative Data Report Card.

We know first-hand from our ongoing dialogue with state legislatures and open government technologists that identifying these commonplace problems can go a long way toward addressing them. In that spirit, and in the spirit of Sunshine Week, we offer this report card and recommendations today.

Last evening, over a hundred supporters of open government joined Sunlight Foundation, the National Press Club, ProPublica, United Republic, Reporters Committee for Freedom of the Press, Openthegovernment.org, Online News Association, ASNE, POPVOX, ProPublica, Public Campaign, Public Citizen, and Electronic Privacy Information Center to celebrate Sunshine Week. The event held at the National Press Club, was an opportunity to meet those working on and committed to transparency.

Although the event was just an informal gathering for advocates and journalists, the guest of honor was clearly the spirit of James Madison whose birthday coincides with Sunshine Week. An early advocate of transparency, he famously wrote:

"A popular government without popular information or the means of acquiring it, is but a prologue to a farce, or a tragedy, or perhaps both. Knowledge will forever govern ignorance, and a people who mean to be their own governors, must arm themselves with the power which knowledge gives."

Tomorrow is James Madison's actual birthday and also National Freedom of Information (FOI) Day. The First Amendment Center will be holding a conference at the Newseum to discuss some of the current issues surrounding freedom of information and open records. Can't make it to the conference? You can follow the conversation live on webcast.

Here in DC? You can visit the National Archives and view the original Freedom of Information Act. Happy Sunshine Week- and hope the weather is actually cooperation in your part of the country!

While journalistic skill and technique are essential for writing a good investigative article, we often take it for granted that journalists have access to the information they need to write complex news stories. Without publicly available data, much of our news would not be possible. We've been looking at investigative articles as part of an ongoing series called "Back to the Source" for the last several months. Now we've decided to amp it up a bit and make redacted visuals to explicitly demonstrate how little the public would know without laws and regulations that force the government to make the data it has publicly available.

In honor of Sunshine Week we decided to create "The News Without Transparency." We took original investigative articles and manually blacked out all the information that would not be known without existing transparency measures. It is worth taking a look at just how little we would know.

Some examples we found notable are below, and the ongoing series is available here.

This Sunshine Week is bringing in a series of remarkable citizens around the nation -- showing us that everyone can demand for open government from our leaders. Here today to share his one-man experience in opening up the City of Atlanta, is our guest blogger Matthew Cardinale. Matthew is the News Editor and Founder of the Atlanta Progressive News and a North American Correspondent for the Inter-Press Service.

Atlanta has had three names in its history: Marthasville, Terminus, and Atlanta.  My friend Jill and I joked that Terminus sounded like a more appropriate name to describe the City of Atlanta and their Law Department, with their endless financial resources, that is, courtesy of the taxpayers.  I guess it was because it sounded more cold and bureaucratic, more ruthless, evocative of the Terminator, evocative of Goliath.

I never intended to take on Terminus.  Actually, at the time I was trying to build relationships with newly elected Council Members and to strengthen relationships with incumbent Members.  So much for that!

I was concerned about efforts by Councilwoman Joyce Sheperd (District 12), newly appointed Chairperson of the Community Development/Human Resources (CD/HR) Committee, to limit public comment.  She had instituted an unprecedented five minute time limit at CD/HR and was one of several Council Members pushing for the Council to adopt a uniform rule to limit public comment in all seven Committees.  Currently, each Committee Chair has discretion to adopt their own rules, subject to being overruled by the Committee.

I think many of us concerned citizens were blindsided when at the Council Retreat at the Georgia Aquarium, while at lunch, Committee on Council Chairwoman Felicia Moore (District 9) took a so-called straw poll of members as to whether they wanted the Committee to draft a uniform rule. Seven Council Members voted yea; eight voted nay.

All I wanted to know was how everyone voted!

So I called Felicia Moore and asked her.  She said they didn’t record how the individual Council Members voted because they didn’t consider it an actual vote.  She said it was a straw poll because it wasn’t a vote on legislation; it was a vote on whether to draft legislation.

I requested a copy of the minutes of the Retreat from the Municipal Clerk, Rhonda Dauphin Johnson, and upon receiving them, noted the minutes merely said that Moore had led a discussion and that it was determined the Council was in favor of keeping the current rules.

So, then I looked up the law.  I found OCGA 50-14-1(e)(2), a section of the Georgia Open Meetings Act, said that the minutes shall record all motions and “other proposals.”  I then told Moore and the Committee that the secret vote was a vote on an “other proposal.”Moore repeatedly insisted it wasn’t a secret vote, because as she said, “You can’t take a secret vote at an open meeting.”  I replied if it wasn’t a secret, to tell us how everyone voted!

At that point, Moore sought the opinion of the Law Department.  Senior Assistant City Attorney Kristen Denius provided an opinion that stated that because it was not a roll call vote, that the vote details did not have to be recorded. I then pointed to another provision in the statute regarding non-roll call votes.

OCGA 50-14-1(e)(2): “In the case of a roll-call vote the name of each person voting for or against a proposal shall be recorded and in all other cases it shall be presumed that the action taken was approved by each person in attendance unless the minutes reflect the name of the persons voting against the proposal or abstaining.”

I said, don’t you see that for non-roll call votes it said you must list the names of the persons voting against the proposal or abstaining?  I then said I was considering filing a lawsuit.  At that point, Moore said to go ahead and whatever I felt was necessary, but that she would not be asking the Clerk to ask Council Members how they voted.

So, at that point I had already threatened to file a lawsuit. Unfortunately, I was not successful in finding an attorney willing to take on my case on contingency.  So, I had to sue without one.  Of course, if you threaten to sue and don’t do it, then your threat has no value in the future.  So I had to sue pro se.

Before doing so, I warned Council Members that I would also be seeking criminal misdemeanor fines against them in their personal capacities.  I asked all fifteen Council Members for their individual votes, promising not to seek fines against them if they told me how they individually voted.  After a continuous campaign, nine disclosed their votes, while six refused. So, I ended up suing the City of Atlanta, the secret six, Moore, Council President Ceasar Mitchell, and Clerk Johnson.

As a journalist, I already had some experience reading legal documents and felt comfortable with the basic outlines of the legal process.

Matthew Cardinale outside Atlanta City Hall: Photo credit by Joeff Davis

My friend Dwanda used Google to find two lawsuits filed under the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA).  I used one of them as a template for my initial Complaint.  I simply changed the facts that occurred, the parties, the venue, the causes of action, the relief sought, and of course the laws referenced, from FOIA to the Georgia Open Meetings Act (OMA).I filed my pro se lawsuit in May 2010 in Fulton County Superior Court and the case was assigned to Judge Christopher Brasher.

The City filed a Motion to Dismiss for failure to state a claim upon which relief could be granted. They said that because the OMA did not require the listing of the names except in cases of a roll-call vote, that even if my allegations were all true, that they did not break the law. I filed discovery, including several Interrogatories upon several Council Members and the Municipal Clerk.  I filed a reply to their Motion to Dismiss.

Then, I was shocked when, in August 2010, Judge Brasher granted their Motion to Dismiss.

Brasher ruled the statute did not state that the minutes had to list the names of those voting against the proposal or abstaining, merely that we had to assume the vote was unanimous if those names were not listed.  So go ahead, he basically said, assume the vote was unanimous!

However, the vote, we already knew, was split, seven to eight, so the ruling was forcing us to assume something that wasn’t true.So in October 2010, I appealed to the Court of Appeals of Georgia.  An attorney who was giving me advice up until that point warned me not to appeal, said I would set bad case law, said that my chances of prevailing were slim, and asked whether I wanted to spend two to three years on this.

I argued, and cited case law, that a court should look beyond the literal language of a statute when a literal construction would lead to absurdity.  I argued that the Act should be interpreted broadly, in favor of openness, consistent with the intent of the Act. I found two scholarly journal articles in two different law school journals that wrote about the intent of the Act at the time of its passage in 1988, and cited these as well. Unfortunately, the Court of Appeals ruled against me in February 2011.  This time, even the Georgia First Amendment Foundation advised me against wasting my time on appealing.

But I filed a Petition for Certiorari to the Supreme Court of Georgia in March 2011, which they granted--a rare accomplishment in itself-- in July 2011.  I made oral arguments before the Supreme Court in October 2011, which are available online here

I filed a Supplemental Brief in November 2011. Then, in February 2012, the Supreme Court ruled in my favor, that the names of those voting against or abstaining do have to be listed in the case of a non-roll call vote

This was such a great day.  I held a press conference on the steps of City Hall, and got to go down to the Council Meeting, which was being held that day, to tell them about themselves. There are so many aspects to this victory.  Not only are secret votes now banned across the entire State of Georgia, but my case sets strong case law that the Act must be construed broadly in favor of openness.

The ruling also lets ordinary citizens know that there is an Open Meetings Act, and an Open Records Act, that gives them the mechanisms to hold elected officials accountable, and that if they just engage the process provided by the Act, sometimes they can win, even without an attorney.

I had another victory last week when on March 05, 2012, the Council adopted a resolution to amend the minutes of the February 2010 Council Retreat to list the names of those voting yea and those voting nay. That was awesome; a bit anticlimactic for the impact of the action in comparison to the two year struggle it took to make them take the action, but it was pretty cool that I basically forced them to do something they really, really did not want to do.

As it stands now, the case is in remittur back to the trial court, via theCourt of Appeals.  The Court of Appeals currently has it and says it may not have time to deal with it for another few weeks or months. When it arrives back at the trial court, I hope for a speedy resolution.  I have asked the City to contact me regarding a possible Consent Decree, but have not heard from them as of yet. I also have a second lawsuit against the City for a variety of Open Meetings and Open Records violations that is currently pending in Fulton County Superior Court.

I’m currently in the process of applying to Law Schools and am waiting to hear back about possibly beginning Law School this Fall Semester 2012. I hope to eventually be able to help citizens across the State of Georgia who require an attorney represent them in Court.

I also have a more long-term project that I am interested in pursuing which is to develop a website to help more ordinary citizens in Georgia to file their own pro se lawsuits.  There are so many lessons I learned that I would like to share with others so that, frankly, they do not have to make some of the same mistakes I did.  And so they won’t have to learn everything from scratch.

Interested in writing a guest blog for Sunlight? Email us at guestblog@sunlightfoundation.com