If last year -- Sunlight's first year of operation -- was a little like being shot out of a cannon, it's hard to describe what the first quarter of this year has been like. Suffice it to say, we are moving at something beyond warp speed.
As a result we have some dramatic growth underway. Here's what's happening.
Our Sunlight Labs has become a core element of our work and we will dramatically expand its capacity this year. It started as an experiment in mid-2006 as a way to both support our grantees and experiment with technology ourselves. After an amazingly successful first year under the co-directorship of consultants Greg Elin and Micah Sifry, the Labs has become part of our cutting edge as our technology and software development arm, well beyond its original mandate. It's now evolving further to better support its expanded internal and external activities.
Greg Elin is becoming our consulting Chief Data Architect with responsibilities that include managing all API development with our partner organizations (a very high priority for us this year) and our own internal data products. He'll also be tackling the "names standardization" problem with other Labs staff. Micah Sifry and Andrew Rasiej of Personal Democracy Forum will continue in their valued role as strategic consultants to the Foundation and to the Labs.
What we’re up to
We're launching a number of real time investigative projects at the Sunlight Foundation, and this blog is sort of a diary of the investigations, where you can follow, day by day, what my colleague, Investigative Writer Anupama Narayanswamy, and I are up to as we go about our business trying to make Congress more transparent.
Right now, Anupama's main focus (you'll be hearing a lot more about this in the days to come) is FOIAing all of the roughly 120 federal agencies, requesting correspondence logs from members of Congress for January and February 2007. As they come ...
Continue readingThree New Grants
Just before I left town for a two-week break, Sunlight announced its first round of grants for 2007, totaling just over $200,000. On my return, I realized that we hadn't posted anything about them -- other than a press release -- and so our readers might have missed the news. We are staying the course in terms of the kind of investments were are making with the money going to organizations that are using new "Web 2.0" technology to further the organization's mission of putting information into citizens' hands to increase transparency in Congress. We believe that our grantees are on the cutting edge of work that will open up our legislative branch.
Continue readingTPM Muck Distributed Research on Attorney Purge
If you've got some time on your hands go and help TPM Muckraker comb through the 3,000 Justice Department and White House documents dumped on the Judiciary Committees last night. Head to TPM Muckraker's website to follow these instructions:
So here's what we're going to do. This comment thread will be our HQ for sorting through tonight's document dump.
And to make it efficient and comprehensible, we'll have a system. As you can see on the House Judiciary Committee's website, they've begun reproducing 50-page pdfs of the documents with a simple numbering system, 3-19-2007 DOJ-Released Documents 1-1, then 1-2, then 1-3, etc. So pick a pdf, any pdf and give it a look. If you find something interesting (or damning), then tell us about it in the comment thread below.
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A Buttoned Up CongressNow.com Launched by Roll Call
Yesterday, Roll Call and Gallery Watch launched CongressNow.com, which will provide a daily (2:30 PM) report on the most recent legislative action in Congress. It could be a great tool for web journalists and citizens who want to follow Congress daily. There's a big problem: it requires a subscription. This is Congress, and people will find other ways to get the same information. There's a second problem once you're inside--the links to the bills are links to Gallery Watch descriptions of bills, which also requires a subscription. If CongressNow.com wants to become a hub for citizens using the web to learn about Congress--which it could--it should link, instead, to OpenCongress, our new, very free, open source tool that gives direct and contextual information about each bill, and allows citizens to contribute their own input.
Continue readingSunshine Week Highlights
Last week we tumbled into an early daylight savings with a blizzard across the east coast and Sunshine Week, starting with a contest and ending with a push to pass legislation. As Ellen Miller's email to members described, Sunshine Week was originally started in 2002 as a series of “Sunshine Sundays” by Florida editors who were opposed to rollbacks in Florida's sunshine laws. Those Sunshine Sundays stopped about 300 provisions from going forward. In the last five years, the week has become a national celebration of openness and a time to push aggressively for more of it, from typically non-political journalists and happily political bloggers. On the first day of Sunshine Week, over 500 papers printed articles and editorials about the need for more open government. Meanwhile, the always industrious Center for Responsive Politics issued several useful suggestions to increase government transparency and the ease of accessing government records.
Continue readingNovak: Fear of Offending Congressional Appropriators Scuttled OMB Earmark Database
Robert Novak's latest column repeats, more or less, the information we heard originally from Mark Tapscott -- that fear of offending congressional appropriators led the White House to derail OMB's release of the earmark database OMB announced on January 25, 2007. We've been hearing a very different tale from the Office of Management and Budget, one which I think is rather plausible, as to why they haven't released the whole database. Appropriators are a relatively limited pool of members--it may well be worth the effort to start calling each of their offices and asking their member to go on the record, either supporting or opposing, OMB's effort to provide greater transparency to the federal budget through its disclosure of earmarks, to determine whether they were offended. That still might not answer the question of why OMB delayed the database to everyone's satisfaction, but it would let appropriators know that we're watching them too...
Continue readingFollow Up with OMB: Earmarks Database Work is Proceeding
Here's a (now longish) quick follow up on a post I wrote on Monday about a conversation I'd had with Rob Lehman, chief of staff of the Office of Management and Budget, about their efforts to get an online database of individual earmarks up on March 12 (they fell a little short, and were only able to post summary data). Yesterday, I called Lehman back to ask him how things were going, and to see if I could get a few more useful details about OMB's effort. Here's a brief summary of what I learned:
Continue readingFOIA Amendments Pass House–In Senate Next Week
The House passed HR 1309 on Wednesday, and a version of the same bill is in the Senate as S 894 (not yet on Thomas or Open Congress). Please write co-sponsors Leahy and Cornyn to let them hear your support. The bill would reduce delays in agency processing of Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) requests by: > Clarifying that FOIA requesters who are forced to bring legal action to push an agency to respond can become eligible to collect attorneys' fees when their suit is successful or is a catalyst for a change in the agency's position (the agency changes its position prior to judgment and releases documents).
Continue readingSunshine Proposals from Open Secrets
Speaking of the Center for Responsive Politics, it's probably worth noting that they've issued some useful suggestions to increase government transparency and the ease of accessing government records, all in time for Sunshine Week. Also worth noting that they provide a list of contacts at the bottom of the page so you can pass on their suggestions. They're all good, but here's one that I think is tremendously important:
Politicians might call it party-building, but the contributions they make from their personal political action committees (a.k.a. leadership PACs) seem more like career-building, as they collect chits to secure a committee chairmanship or leadership position. Continue reading
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