Bill Hobbs reports that a pair of lawmakers in the Tennessee legislature (one in the Senate, one in the House) have introduced a bill to make subcommittees, committees, and the two houses of the legislature itself subject to the state's version of the Freedom of Information Act, known as the Open Records Act. Hobbs notes that you can track the progress of the legislation here. So which member of the House, and which member of the Senate, will introduce similar legislation at the federal level? Congress, of course, is currently exempt from the Freedom of Information Act.
Continue readingNew Sunlight Advisors
We are very excited to annouce today that we are expanding our Board of Directors and our Advisory Board, adding some extraordinary people -- Esther Dyson, Jimmy Wales, Charles Lewis, Yochai Benkler -- to an already distinguished group that includes Craig Newmark and Kim Malone. As Sunlight moves into our second year of operation we are pleased to be joined by some who are most on the cutting edge of technology and investigative journalism.
Esther Dyson (www.edventure.com) has been elected to serve a one-year term on the Board of Directors. Dyson is a leading expert on emerging digital technology and business models. She is the author of “Release 2.0: A Design for Living in the Digital Age,” (1997) which explores the impact of information technology on people’s lives, and produced the Release 1.0 newsletter for more than 20 years. Currently, she is an active investor in start-ups around the world and blogs for Huffington Post as Release 0.9.
Continue readingTrying to Answer Questions about Contracts and Lobbyists
Last week, GoodbyeJim.com's Jonathan Marks wrote a post about a company called ProLogic. After noting that that company has made campaign contributions to Rep. James Moran, and has hired a sophisticated lobbying firm, PMA Group, whose employees have been generous contributors to Moran's campaigns over the years, Marks raises what I think is a fairly important question: How does ProLogic win business? How does it fair against competing firms that don't have the benefit of any representation from a savvy insider firm like PMA Group (which describes what it does here)? And what does this say about the way procurement decisions are made in the government? Are we always buying the best mousetrap? Are we unable to buy the best mousetrap without the mediation of lobbyists? Conversely, are we making do with somewhat overpriced, somewhat mediocre mousetraps because the company that manufactures them hired the lobbyist with the right connections?
Continue readingLooking into Lobbying Federal Contracts and Grants
This story, about the problems that the Coast Guard and its contractor, Integrated Coast Guard Systems (a joint venture of Northrop Grumman and Lockheed Martin), are having with their Deepwater program, got me thinking--and about something other than this report on the program by the Inspector General of the Dept. of Homeland Security. Under federal law (it's title 31 U.S.C. section 1352, for those of you keeping score at home), contractors and subcontractors, for-profits and non-profits, universities and state and local governments that lobby the federal government for contracts, grants, cooperative guarantees, loans, loan guarantees or loan insurance have to file a form, called SF-LLL, when they lobby the federal government for that contract, grant, cooperative guarantee, and so on. The instructions that come with the form say, "The filing of a form is required for each payment or agreement to make payment to any lobbying entity for influencing or attempting to influence an officer or employee of any agency, a Member of Congress,an officer or employee of Congress, or an employee of a Member of Congress in connection with a covered Federal action."
Continue readingInstant APIs: no code necessary, just add mouseclicks
APIs and mashups are the bread and butter of the Sunlight Labs. In fact, the official name of the the Labs is actually The Sunlight Mashup Labs, so it is perhaps not surprising that we headed off to the MashupCamp 3 at MIT, Cambridge a couple of weeks ago to geek out and to see the latest happenings, trends and players in the world of mashups and technology.
Continue readingSunlight Accepting Applications for Mini-grants for 2007
The Sunlight Foundation is offering grants of $1,000 to $5,000 for local groups that have creative ideas for changing the relationship between elected Federal representatives and the people they represent. This is the second year of our mini-grant program. Last year we funded five extraordinary programs (see below) selected from nearly one hundred applicants. Successful applicants will receive the grant, consulting and strategic support, and networking opportunities. Our goal is to provide that extra element that takes a project from good to great -- server space, a video camera, or access to polling data -- or provide the seed that makes a new project viable. Projects could range from citizen media, to creative use of the internet to engage citizens in watchdogging, to opening up new ways of communicating with federal lawmakers to creative mapping of lawmakers' activities.
Continue readingDIY Transparency in Virginia
Is Virginia the epicenter of the use of digital video in politics? First we have S.R. Sidarth’s YouTube video of then-Sen. George Allen (R-Va.) calling the University of Virginia student a “macaca” (which we all now know to be a racist term). Now the Democrats in the state legislature have gone to videotaping committee hearings that have been scheduled during off-hours -- early in the morning and late at night -- and therefore do not have to be recorded. Call it DIY transparency.
The videotaping effort, called Assembly Access, began after the Republican majority changed the rules to allow bills to be killed in subcommittees without recorded votes. After a minimum wage increase bill -- the top bill on Democrats’ agenda -- was killed in a subcommittee without ever receiving a vote the minority went to the videotaping tactic to show the public what was going on behind the scenes.
Continue readingNew Earmark Transparency from OMB by March 12?
Office of Management & Budget is circulating a memorandum that requires agency heads to collect information on earmarks--defined here as "funds provided by the Congress for projects or programs where the congressional direction (in bill or report language) circumvents the merit-based or competitive allocation process, or specifies the location or recipient, or otherwise curtails the ability of the Administration to control critical aspects of the funds allocation process." OMB will require agencies to specify the recipient of the earmark, its address, the cost of the earmark, a description of what that money will be spent on, and a citation to and copy of the relevant statutory language, among other things. Agencies will have to submit data for Fiscal 2005 earmarks (and for some legislation going back to 2002), as well as keeping track of new earmarks going forward.
Continue readingAt Least They Spelled Our Name Right
Yesterday, Fox News featured the Sunlight Foundation as their "Power Player of the Week" on the morning news show with Chris Wallace. And while we certainly appreciate their attention, and their showcasing our Watchdogging 101 tutorial, as well as a glimpse at a number of the databases that we funded (I was embarrassed that the databases shown were not clearly identified as those we funded at the Center for Responsive Politics) they really missed the core of what Sunlight is about. They left too much on the editing room floor.
Continue readingPolitics 2.0
You read a lot here about Web 2.0 on the Sunlight blog, and hopefully see it practiced too. So now read this column by our senior strategic team -- Andrew Rasiej and Micah Sifry of Personal Democracy Consultants -- on Politics 2.0. It appeared yesterday in the new multimedia platform The Politico.com. And while you're at it, check out our new Sunlight Labs Blog.
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