A new Congress is sworn in today with the promise of significant reform. And as Congress is sworn in, the Center for Responsive Politics is releasing a Revolving Door database that profiles more than 6,400 individuals who have worked in both the federal government and the private sector. The practice of lawmakers and staff leaving the Hill and then plying their contacts with their former colleagues on behalf of private interests is one of the most critiqued practices on the Hill. Now we really have a full, factual picture of what's going on.
Continue readingIt’s Been Almost a Year …..
Sunlight opened its doors for business less than a year ago. In our first year, we focused on planting lots of seeds: identifying key assets in the existing public interest community and assisting them in building up their web infrastructure and getting their data resources out of silos and facing outward onto the web; investing in the development of several major new data-sets that are filling in missing elements of the money-influence-accountability nexus; creating or partnering in the creation of whole new sites and tools that are geared to make this data more accessible and more widely distributed across the web as a platform; reaching out to and establishing working relationships with likeminded individuals and organizations around the country; experimenting with new ways of engaging the public in fostering transparency; and beginning a conversation with Members of and candidates for Congress about being more open and transparent.
Continue readingRep. Gillibrand. You Are Not Alone…
The New York Times editorial that was very supportive of Sunlight's transparency agenda for Congress led with the mention that Representative-elect Kirsten Gillibrand has already decided to post details of her work calendar on the Internet at the end of each day. This afternoon I had a conversation with Matt McKenna, who is working on the transition team of Senator-elect Jon Tester, who told me that Tester has promised to do the same. In addition, Tester will institute a total gift ban for himself and his staffers, will prohibit any staff that leaves to work as a lobbyist from returning to work for him, and will ask a judge to conduct an ethics audit of his office every year. The office is considering other proposals too.
Continue readingWeighing in on Reform
Now that the election dust is settling and everyone is talking about reform in Congress, it's time for Sunlight to weigh into that discussion. We comment with some past experience: I've certainly been around the reform bandwagon a couple times (in the campaign finance arena), and so I am cautious about how all the talk will pan out. I know we have to push hard to make sure that reform doesn't settle on some lowest common denominator.
Here's where we are coming from: we strongly believe that greater transparency is an antidote to corruption - the issue that drove most voters this year. We know the public supports reforms that create greater transparency, overwhelmingly in fact, and frankly it would be shocking if lawmakers didn't seize this unique moment to enact reforms that open up their activities to real scrutiny. More transparency for what happens on Capitol Hill will breed more trust with their constituents.
Continue readingAnnouncing! Sunlight SEEKR
If you're a regular visitor to our site you noticed sometime last week, on the left side of our home page, our latest widget - we've dubbed it Sunlight Seekr. It's the first step to a one click search engine that culls through multiple databases. We put it up last week to play around with it and it appears to be working just fine so today we are going public with it. At the moment it does a simple search of five data sets: our own Sunlight Foundation and Congresspedia sites, The Institute on State Money and Politics and Center for Responsive Politics sites for state and federal campaign contributions, and GovTrack.org. Type in the name of an individual, corporation, and zip code and see what pops up. (To do really in-depth searches of all these sites APIs are inevitable, but not all the sites we wanted to include have APIs yet.)
Continue readingODOG
I'm just back in DC after a terrific meeting we co-hosted with the Mitchell Kapor Foundation in San Francisco which was dubbed ODOG - Open Data, Open Government. It was a discussion with many of Sunlight's data-oriented grantees and our friends in the high tech community on how open data and open government can help citizens recreate trust in their elected officials through the magic of the Internet and the new technologies which make information easily understandable and accessible.
The idea for this meeting began many months ago around the time of Sunlight's launch. The initial thought was to bring together the leading providers of public-interest data from Washington and around the country (Center for Responsive Politics, National Institute on State Money and Politics, OMB Watch, among others) with the leading providers of new services, tools and practices that are transforming the web for an introductory session. We thought that collaboration between these two communities could yield huge results in ways to greater transparency in user-accessible ways. We hoped to see the light bulbs turn on in both the communities.
Continue readingSunlight Foundation Site Named “Best Blog”
Wow! The 2006 International Weblog Awards are out, and Sunlight's been named the "Best Blog" in the world, by an international panel of thirteen bloggers! The competition, nicknamed Best of the Blogs (BOB) is organized by German broadcasting company Deutche-Welle. The panel judged thousands of blogs on the basis of their "prose, creativity, design, and user friendliness."
According to the contest organizers, "During a day-long conference, the BOBs jury members said they admired the Sunlight Foundation's work to increase transparency in government and called the project a positive example of how blogs can shape political discourse. The watchblog was also praised for its potential to be adapted for use in other countries."
Continue readingAnd the Antidote to Corruption Is….?
A CNN exit poll showed that 42 percent of voters said corruption was an extremely important issue in their choices at the polls yesterday. It led terrorism, economy and Iraq as the national issues that drove voters choices.
Can there be any doubt that more transparency is in order? When we launched the Sunlight Foundation, we found huge support among the public for greater disclosure of the inner workings of what goes on in Congress
The most popular proposals included: requiring public disclosure of all money raised for a campaign by registered lobbyists and creating an independent ethics commission to review complaints, conduct investigations, and report on unethical conduct by lawmakers and their staffs. Just behind were proposals requiring public disclosure of any attempts to secure earmarks in budget bills that directly benefit lobbyists or campaign contributors, requiring lawmakers to file reports on legislation they have introduced that would benefit their campaign contributors, requiring public disclosure of all contacts with regulatory agencies pressing for action that benefits campaign contributors, requiring lawmakers to report publicly all of their contacts with lobbyists, and prohibiting former members of Congress and senior staff from working as lobbyists in Washington for five years after they leave Congress. Every single one of these proposals got support of 59 percent or higher!
Continue readingElectronic Voting Problems Right Here in the Capital
Avid voter that I am, I was at my local polling place before work this morning to be greeted by the usual cast of 75-year old women who were "manning" the polling station - a local church in my neighborhood. After signing in (and checking to see if husband had already voted) I was handed a paper ballot at the same time that I was told "the electronic machine has malfunctioned." Surprised, I asked why and how and I was told that when they tried to start it up they "just couldn't get it to work. They say they will send over a new machine later in the day but I don't believe it," one poll worker told me while shaking her head knowingly. I asked the name of the manufacturer and after digging through a stack of manuals that was at least 8 inches thick together we found a manual with the label "Sequoia."
Continue readingCandidates Less Willing to Share Positions
I had lunch a couple of weeks ago with Richard Kimball, the founder and president of Project Vote Smart, the nation's premier information resource about candidates for public office at all levels. If you haven't checked out your lawmakers (whether Congressional, Gubernatorial or state legislative) on their site, you're missing information you need to know before you vote.
Richard related to me a very distressing fact. That in this age of transparency, candidates are less willing to tell the people where they stand on issues.
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