The Honest Ads Act is the first significant legislative effort to address the new challenges of network propaganda, writes Harvard Law School professor Yochai Benkler, who sits on Sunlight's advisory board.
Continue readingLawmaking is Data-making
The Open Law Library is working with Washington, D.C. to create a platform to make capturing and using legal data cheaper and scalable, opening more of the law to the public it governs
Continue readingHelp the Open Data Charter learn what helps cities
The experiences of adopting and implementing the Open Data Charter are relatively undocumented. The Charter and Open North want to hear directly from practitioners, learn from their experiences, and share their findings.
Continue readingState of Open Corporate Data: Wins and Challenges Ahead
Last year saw advances and setbacks for opening data about the ownership of corporations, but it's critical that the world continues to push for genuine transparency and access to company registers as open data in 2017.
Continue readingHow Data Refuge works, and how YOU can help save federal open data
Editor’s Note: Last week, Sunlight joined Abbie Grotke, a digital library project manager at the Library of Congress, and professor... View Article
Continue readingHow federal agencies and Congress pass laws to deny individual FOIA requests
A judge can force a federal agency to comply with a Freedom of Information Act request. But, while the FOIA is pending, the agency can ask Congress to pass a law allowing it to withhold the requested information.
Continue readingOpenGov Voices: Bringing transparency to earmarks buried in the budget
Researchers at the University of Chicago spent the summer training computers to extract all the earmarks from the hundreds of pages of mind-numbing legalese found in each budget.
Continue readingOpenGov Voices: “Don’t get mad. Get data!”
Disclaimer: The opinions expressed by the guest blogger and those providing comments are theirs alone and do not reflect the opinions of the Sunlight Foundation or any employee thereof. Sunlight Foundation is not responsible for the accuracy of any of the information within the guest blog.
Brad Lichtenstein is an award-winning documentary filmmaker and president of 371 Productions, a Milwaukee-based company that makes media and technology projects for the common good. BizVizz is a corporate accountability mobile app inspired by his latest film, As Goes Janesville, which premiered on the PBS series, Independent Lens. He can be reached at @bradleylbar
In 1973, I got into a fight with an older, big, mean 8 year old because he (or more likely his parents) loved Nixon. In my squeaky kid-rage voice I screamed that Nixon was a criminal who lied to us. He pushed me down then promptly kicked me out of our neighborhood car city. I fought back by sneaking out that night to sabotage his area. I remember this story vividly some 30 years later because it reminds me of how intense the feeling of rage can be and how useless it is to vent it in destructive ways.
BizVizz, our corporate accountability app, was born by a similar rage. Toward the end of As Goes Janesville, my PBS/Independent Lens documentary about a GM town trying to recover from their century-old plant’s shutdown, the city council votes to approve a $9 million incentive package for Shine Medical Technologies. That’s 20% of the town’s budget for a medical isotope startup that has pitted cities against each other to leverage tax breaks in exchange for the promise of jobs. The risk wasn’t what made me seethe so much as the way the city council and town leaders acted in the dark, subverting transparency by never disclosing the results of a third party audit of the company nor holding a public hearing despite the fact that taxpayers were footing the bill. Score another defeat for democracy.
OpenGov Voices: Book preview: The Foundation for an Open Source City
Disclaimer: The opinions expressed by the guest blogger and those providing comments are theirs alone and do not reflect the opinions of the Sunlight Foundation or any employee thereof. Sunlight Foundation is not responsible for the accuracy of any of the information within the guest blog.
Jason Hibbets is the project manager at Red Hat and lead administrator for opensource.com. He has been applying open
source principles in neighborhood organizations in Raleigh, NC for several years, highlighting the importance of transparency, collaboration, and community building. Follow the rest of his thoughts at @jhibbets.
My latest writing project has been quite challenging. At the beginning of 2013, I wrapped up the first draft of a book I’m writing about the open government movement in Raleigh, North Carolina. The City of Raleigh has made a lot of progress over the last two years, which is part of the inspiration for collecting Raleigh’s story. The movement towards a more open and transparent government started to accelerate after the city council unanimously passed an open government policy.
Raleigh is on the verge of defining their open data policy and a draft of their open data standards is currently posted on Open Raleigh. From my conversations with Jason Hare, the Open Data Program Manager for the City of Raleigh, the city is about to strategically release a bunch of open data. All this is in preparation for an upcoming Triangle Datapalooza, a region-wide event rumored for later this spring that aims to excite the entrepreneurial community about open data and discover new opportunities.
This is all very exciting for civic geeks and hackers in the Triangle area. I’m excited because I saw an opportunity to collect Raleigh’s open government and open data story. I’m in the final stages of finishing the book. The first round of editing is complete and my editors and I are finalizing the latest changes. I plan to self-publish the book (paperback and eBook), and I’m considering starting an IndieGoGo campaign to help crowdfund the initial round of publishing. I am also crowdsourcing ideas for the book cover on my personal blog.
Continue reading
OpenGov Voices: Innovative Investigations — How a Watchdog Group Uses the FOIA Process to Push the Limits of Transparency
Disclaimer: The opinions expressed by the guest blogger and those providing comments are theirs alone and do not reflect the opinions of the Sunlight Foundation or any employee thereof. Sunlight Foundation is not responsible for the accuracy of any of the information within the 
guest blog.
Mary Beth Hutchins is the Communications Director at Cause of Action. Prior to joining Cause of Action, Hutchins spent several years at an Alexandria, VA-based public relations firm where she managed press outreach for a number of national non-profit groups.
The need for government transparency has never been greater than it is right now and at Cause of Action, we’re working to make sure it happens.
As a nonprofit government accountability organization, Cause of Action works to expose cronyism, waste, fraud and mismanagement in the federal government through a combination of investigations, education and litigation.
With our staff of investigators, lawyers and communications professionals committed to government transparency, Cause of Action frequently uses Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) requests to shed light on otherwise opaque facets of the Federal Government.
59063
