Tag Archive: Micah Sifry

CJR’s Transparency Package

by Ellen Miller Jan 23, 2009 5:26 pm

Throughout this month, the Columbia Journalism Review has been rolling out a transparency package, which Sunlight helped to support. There... View Article

The Web 2.0 Election

by Ellen Miller Nov 4, 2008 4:14 pm

Agence France-Presse (AFP), France’s largest news agency and the third largest agency in the world, published a great overview of... View Article

“Show Us a Better Way”

by Ellen Miller Jul 2, 2008 8:22 pm

Micah Sifry (our strategic consultant and editor of techPresident) highlights another government transparency experiment coming out of the UK. The... View Article

Tom Watson

by Ellen Miller Apr 3, 2008 3:21 pm

Micah sez:

Go read British Cabinet Officer Tom Watson's speech on the "Power of information" and imagine a Member of Congress making a similar speech on how technology can radically reinvent government. Imagine one of our presidential candidates making it (even Barack Obama, who has done the most thinking on this topic.) You can't. But maybe, if we pay more attention to our cousins across the pond, soon someone will.

I have a meeting with Watson in the middle of April. Can't wait.

Citizen Scrutiny is the Bugfix

by Ellen Miller Mar 17, 2008 12:36 pm

That's what Micah Sifry, Sunlight's senior strategic consultant and executive editor of the Personal Democracy Forum says today, about an E-Tech on a panel on "civic hacking" -- online activists taking government data in its raw and user-unfriendly state, and making it accessible and helpful to citizens.

Sounds familiar.

The panel discussed a number of British sites launched by our colleagues at mySociety.org as well as the hacking of the UN at UNDemocracy.com, where you can now get easy access to the transcripts of the U.N. General Assembly and the Security Council in structured formats, information that was previously very hard to get your hands on. Neat stuff.

"When an institution is broken," Micah writes, "more scrutiny can only help fix it."

Yup.

TechPresident Wins Knight-Batten Award

by Ellen Miller Sep 18, 2007 9:35 am

Congratulations to our good friends over at techPresident for winning the 2007 Knight-Batten Award for Innovations in Journalism Grand Prize. The University of Maryland-affiliated J-Lab organized the award. Andrew Rasiej and Micah Sifry, Sunlight's technology advisors, founded techPresident to focus on how the campaigns are using the web, and how the web is using them. They are encouraging ordinary citizens to be their own Woodsteins, covering the candidates using all the new tools of the new web. The site covers campaign websites, online advertising, and postings on YouTube and has a must-read group blog and daily digest. Their tracking of which candidate has the fastest growing group of friends on MySpace and Facebook supporters has become a political bellweather.

Andrew and Micah have collected a couple dozen veterans of the 2004 and 2006 elections, both Republicans and Democrats, to blog on the site. This powerhouse stable includes the likes of Patrick Ruffini, former eCampaign Director for the Republican National Committee and webmaster for Bush-Cheney '04; Zack Exley , director of online organizing and communications for Kerry/Edwards '04; Morra Aarons, former director of Internet marketing for the DNC, and Chuck DeFeo, general manager of Townhall.com.

Micah and Andrew and the rest of the (very small) techPresident team are the innovators of the ongoing mashup of politics and Web 2.0. As the campaign heats up, techPresident will increasingly be an essential resource for journalists and average citizens alike. Congratulations guys!

Debates 2.0

by Ellen Miller Jul 25, 2007 12:36 pm

Sunlight's senior strategic consultant, Micah Sifry, has a really nice op ed in the NY Daily News today, that pretty much summarizes my thoughts about CNN's YouTube debate two nights ago. (He has taught me well.) A big step forward BUT....

Imagine if the next time there's a presidential candidates debate on TV, you could go online to vote beforehand on which questions should be asked, and the top choices from the public were included in the mix. Imagine that during the debate you also could grade the candidates' answers, and see how your peers and the rest of the public were grading them, in real time.

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PopTech 2006

by Ellen Miller Oct 23, 2006 1:33 pm

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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Kudos Are Due!

by Ellen Miller Apr 22, 2006 6:30 pm

In the rush to our launch this coming Wednesday – stay tuned for how to call in to our telephonic press conference – I want to just take a moment to reflect on the extraordinary amount of strategic thinking and planning and real work product that has been undertaken in the 4 months since the Sunlight Foundation was incorporated. What we will be announcing on Wednesday – the awarding of grants to create new databases and our discussions about how to mash information together to make it even more robust, the launching of a Congresspedia, establishing three new blogs, our initial efforts in distributive journalism and on-line tutorials – is work that might have taken another organization a year to put together! Kudos to all of us.