As stated in the note from the Sunlight Foundation′s Board Chair, as of September 2020 the Sunlight Foundation is no longer active. This site is maintained as a static archive only.

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Democratizing Political Reporting

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This article in the Washington Post is the political class' (e.g. media, politicians, consultants, pollsters') lament that they've lost control of their candidate's message. But in fact it should be a celebratory piece about the fact that citizens are increasingly using the democratizing world of technology to spread the message about what candidates say and really think. Wouldn't you rather rely on YouTube clips, excerpts from speeches, and candid moments filtered by citizen journalists than political advertisements to tell you what a candidate really believes? No contest in my mind.

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FOIA Tips

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The folks over at the Electronic Frontier Foundation are releasing tips and guidelines on how to use FOIA, recognizing that so much good investigative reporting is happening live on the web. (Is it really happening anywhere else?)

There an FAQ on the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) that outlines how to use open government laws to get access to records kept by federal agencies like the Federal Bureau of Investigation, the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), or the Food and Drug Administration (FDA).

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Give Up Your Day Job

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Election season is offering all kinds of ways of citizens to put on their reporting hats and take to the streets. One of the neatest ideas I've run across is VideoTheVote which is asking us to record what is happening at the polls on election day. They will post the videos online and spread the word through the blogosphere.

As we say, "Sunlight is said to be the best of disinfectants..."

Thanks to TomPaine.com for passing along the promotional video. (It will make you mad all over again....)

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Needed: Citizen Journalists for Election Day!

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Our Advisory Board member, Craig Newmark just told me that BBC Radio is looking for five citizen journalists to help tell the election night story from around the country. Here's an incredible opportunity!

BBC Radio Five Live's  late night international news programme Up All Night would like your help telling the story of the US midterm elections. We'll be visiting Connecticut and Pennsylvania and on election night Washington DC - but we can't be everywhere and there many other fascinating races we'd like to cover. So we'd like your help in reporting the election.

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PopTech 2006

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Micah Sifry -- half of Sunlight's technology guru team -- has a very thoughtful post at his home base, Personal Democracy Forum, about his take-away from this year's PopTech 2006 conference.

Instead of thinking of political resources (money, information, people) as scarce and vital to control from the top down, what happens if we think about using the internet to open politics to much larger networks of involved citizens, either when we participate in our interactions with government representatives or when we participate in campaigns for issues or candidates? How can we use the abundance of people who want to contribute something to making government work better, or getting a person elected or an issue moved, in better ways?

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Sunshine Caucus

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Mark Tapscott's editorial in The Examiner this morning promotes the common sense idea behind the Punch Clock Campaign, and calls for the development of a Sunshine Caucus in the next Congress that includes all advocates for more transparency for Congress. We're all for it. In fact, we like the idea so much, that I noticed that Zephyr is already referring to those involved in Sunlight's work as "The Sunlight Caucus."

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The Sun to Shine on Cheney

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It looks like judges are getting with the transparency picture. Today, U.S. District Judge Ricardo M. Urbina ruled that by the end of next week, the Secret Service must produce access to records of who visited Vice President  in his office and at his personal residence.

The Washington Post asked for two years of White House visitor logs in June but the Secret Service refused to process the request. Government attorneys called it "a fishing expedition into the most sensitive details of the vice presidency."

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Bad Poll for America

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CNN reports this morning a new poll which shows the depths to which people have come to think that Congress is corrupt.

WASHINGTON (CNN) -- Half of all Americans believe most members of Congress are corrupt -- a figure that has risen 12 points since the start of the year -- and more than a third think their own representative is crooked, according to a new poll released Thursday by CNN. According to the poll, a majority disapproves of how both parties are handling their jobs in Congress. Just 42 percent approve of how the Democrats are doing in Congress, while 54 percent disapprove. The GOP fares even worse -- only 36 percent approve of their performance in Congress, while 61 percent disapprove. Pollsters from Opinion Research Corp. interviewed 1,012 Americans from Friday through Sunday. The survey has a margin of error of plus or minus 4.5 percentage points. In January, 22 percent of those polled said they believed their own member of Congress was corrupt, a number that has jumped to 36 percent since then.

 

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So How Are We Doing?

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I thought it might be useful to take stock of how much attention the new databases released by Center for Responsive Politics (Congressional Personal Financial Disclosure and Travel) and OMB Watch (Government Grants and Contracts) attracted last week. 

From Massie Ritsch at CRP:

In the first six days that the new personal finances and travel databases were online OpenSecrets.org logged nearly 140,000 unique visitors (though some may have visited over multiple days). OS logged more than 1.6 million page views and more than 7 million hits in that time.

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CFC (Combined Federal Campaign) Today 59063

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