American University’s Investigative Reporting Workshop began a new blog yesterday entitled ‘Exemption 10‘ in reference to the unwritten tenth exemption... View Article
Continue readingSunlight Weekly Round-up: Double standards in transparency
When lawmakers introduce legislation that is supposed to increase transparency, naturally we expect that they will lead in the everything... View Article
Continue readingMajor movement for more online transparency of Oregon’s spending
We welcome Jon Bartholomew as our guest blogger today. I first came across Jon’s work when I featured his blog... View Article
Continue readingAn Honor to Receive Government Technology Award
It is an honor to be among the twenty-five recipients of Government Technology’s award for ‘Doers, Dreamers & Drivers in... View Article
Continue readingWhat Do You Want to Get Out of TransparencyCamp?
The open government movement (like most of the online world) is obsessed with “unconferences” — meet-ups, of sorts, where the... View Article
Continue readingSunlight Weekly Round-up: Local transparency starts with you!
The Open Government Dialogue, a product of the National Academy of Public Administration stresses the importance of increasing the quality... View Article
Continue readingAnnouncing OpenGovernment.org – Easily Watchdog Local Government
Keeping track of local government just got easier with today’s beta launch of OpenGovernment.org, a joint project of the Sunlight... View Article
Continue readingLooking back at 2010
Hard to believe that a year that began with the Reporting Team analyzing and critiquing federal data released under the administration's Open Government Initiative ended with our pursuit of political organizations that do not disclose campaign donors. In between, we continued to publish the only resource for tracking congressional campaign fundraising, Party Time, updated our Foreign Lobbying Influence Tracker, delved into Recovery.gov data and earmark disclosures, and, with the help of our friends at the Center for Public Integrity, identified dozens of high value federal data sets that government agencies have not released.
The Data Mine project delved ...
Continue readingStatelight, Transparency in a Box: Pt. 4(a)
This is a continuation of Statelight, our series on advocating for open government change on a local level. Depending on... View Article
Continue readingTools for Transparency: GovSM
For the next month, we’ll be hosting special guest bloggers for our Tools for Transparency series. Today we introduce Josh Shpayher, founder of GovSM.com, a wiki website that keeps track of all the social media accounts of government, from congressional representatives to the Massachusetts Department of Transportation. GovSM believes that having a comprehensive catalogue of all the governmental use of social media will help government and the open gov community learn more about and improve their own social media practices to benefit their constituencies. By now, we’ve all heard about the social media wave and most of us have heard about Gov2.0 and governmental use (or their feeble attempts to use) social media. Though there have been many discussions amongst “good gov” people about government officials’ best practices for using social media, what has been lacking is a clearly defined method of determining how a government office or official can use social media to benefit their constituents. If a system of rating social media use can be widely circulated (similar to Golden Mouse rankings of congressional websites), I believe that the quality of government use of social media will rise dramatically.
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