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.}

Today, May 8th, marks the 125th birthday of Harry S Truman, our 33rd president. He once said, "Secrecy and a free, democratic government don't mix." Amen, Mr. President.

Here are a few of the more interesting media mentions of Sunlight and our friends and grantees from this week:

Monday morning, Tom Lee, a technology director at Sunlight, appeared on C-SPAN’s “Washington Journal” taking questions about Recovery.gov, the Web site set up to track spending under the federal government’s economic stimulus program. Tom is working on SubsidyScope, a project of The Pew Charitable Trusts, that looks at the role of federal subsidies in the economy. Below is the video of the segment:

Speaking of Recovery.gov, Matt Kelley with USA Today reported that the Web site won't have details on contracts and grants until October and may not be complete until next spring — halfway through the program. Kelley quotes Greg Elin, Sunlight’s chief evangelist, saying people accustomed to getting easily searchable information quickly could be frustrated. "If we have to wait until October to get the information or to the end of the year to get a powerful recovery.gov site, the Obama administration will have missed an important opportunity."

Katrina Vanden Heuvel, editor of The Nation, in an op-ed titled "Ways to Protect Our Democracy," highlights the work of Sunlight and Sunlight Labs, and mentions the Apps for America contest. Vanden Heuvel quotes Gabriela Schneider, "This is the next generation of civic engagement…We see it as a way to revitalize democracy. The transparency work is a catalyst for the greater democracy reform movement."

The U.S. Senate announced this week that it was going to start publishing roll call votes in XML, an online format that’s easily reusable by other programs. XML allows the data to be manipulated and organized in such a way that public interest groups can get a much more thorough picture of Senate voting patterns. In writing about the move, the Politico’s  Victoria McGrane quoted John Wonderlich, Sunlight's policy director, as saying the Senate’s decision was “spectacular.” The Examiner newspapers editorialized that the move signals the Senate had finally joined the 21st Century. As encouraging and important as this step by the Senate is, I’d hold off on that designation until senators start disclosing campaign finance data online and in a timely manner.

The New York Times’ Stephanie Strom highlighted the campaign to get Congress to release to the public Congressional Research Service reports, highlighting the efforts of Open CRS, Center for Democracy and Technology, OpentheGovernment.org and Sunlight.

Jeanne Cummings at the Politico wrote about “lobbyist contact” disclosures posted on government department and agency Web sites. She made note of a review conducted by Paul Blumenthal, Sunlight’s senior writer, that found only 14 of a possible 29 departments and agencies have created Web pages to disclose lobbyist inquiries. On March 20, President Obama issued a memo to all agencies involved with the distribution of funds from the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act requiring them to disclose all communications between lobbyists and agency officials. John Fritze with USA Today wrote that Obama’s effort to make lobbying more transparent has shed little light on the behind-the-scenes, special-interests lobbying thus far. He quotes Melanie Sloan, director of Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington, "We're looking to have more disclosure, not less. If this was supposed to give us more disclosure, why is it that you're not seeing lobbyist communications?"

Mother Jones' Jonathan Stein profiled Lisa Rosenberg, Sunlight’s government affairs consultant, terming her "K Street's worst nightmare" and "the lobbyist lobbyists hate." He wrote that Lisa is "not your average influence peddler," but does the "unthinkable" by lobbying for more oversight and regulation of lobbying. Stein quotes Lisa, "I have no friends...My lobbyist colleagues are cringing at the things that I do."

Joshua Zumbrun at Forbes.com wrote about six ways Uncle Sam can help rescue newspapers. One of his proposals is for the government to help ease newspapers into nonprofit status, citing the Center for Responsive Politics and the Center for Public Integrity as examples of nonprofit organizations that are already making an impact.

Thanks, and see you next Friday!

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.