Senator Dick Durbin is crafting a bill online this week on universal broadband policy. I don't know if this effort is a first of its kind but I think it might well be.
Today I'm writing to invite you to participate in an experiment -- an interactive approach to drafting legislation on one of the most significant public policy questions today: What should be America's national broadband strategy? . . . There are two reasons I'm asking for your help and participation. The first is because I think we need more public participation and transparency in the way Congress crafts significant legislation. This is an approach to legislation that has never been tried before. If it's successful -- as I believe it will be -- it may become the way lawmakers approach drafting bills on other issues like education, health care, and foreign policy.
Now this is lawmaking in the sunlight!
Continue readingNews You Can Trust
One of Sunlight’s early goals was try to figure out how to improve the quality of reporting about what goes on in Congress, and so we are very pleased to announce a new grant to NewsTrust.net -- an organization that has developed an online news rating service to help people identify quality journalism -- or "news you can trust." Their members rate the news online, based on journalistic quality, not just popularity.
Their (still beta) Web site and news feed feature the best and the worst news of the day, picked from hundreds of alternative and mainstream news sources. Sunlight’s grant will provide an opportunity for a specific look at the U.S. Congress. Specifically, through the coming year, NewsTrust.net will search for quality journalism about our elected representatives, with a focus on accountability, corruption and transparency in Congress.
We hope you’ll jump right in. Sign up to contribute stories, get involved in evaluating them.
Read a good story on the U.S. Congress lately? Please submit it here, so others may learn from your research.
New Features on Congresspedia
Congresspedia has expanded its platform to include new features on policy issues and legislation, adding to its great wealth of information on members of Congress. These new resources complement its existing profiles on legislators. We think that the new features will give citizens access to insider information on issues and legislation, and offer opportunities to collaborate with policy experts. Here's a link to the portal home page.
Congresspedia now has:
* 14 new federal policy and legislative portals for experts and interested citizens to update and improve articles on various policy issues and on specific legislation. Here's a really terrific example on Telcom policy.
My Society Our Society
Ron Brownstein of the LA Times has a really thoughtful column today on what transparency means in the Internet Age. Keying off Sen. Barack Obama's announcement a week or so ago about the need to create more transparency for the work of government, Brownstein highlights the need to go beyond the simple provision of information about what government does in useable ways online (we agree that's necessary but not sufficient) to developing the kind of interactivity between citizens and lawmakers that is the hallmark of our colleagues in England at MySociety.org. That nonprofit's creative use of the Internet to engage citizens to collaboration with government (and the other way around) is setting the standard. Sunlight's already begun a series of conversations with MySociety that we expect yield some ways for us to experiment here in the US. Several future Sunlight efforts are looking in this direction.
Continue readingSunlight Collects Value Added Information Resources
Where can I find information on the contracts awarded to Northrop Grumman Corporation? Once I’ve found that information, where can I find the campaign finance and lobbying information for Northrop Grumman Corporation? Have members of Congress have accepted private travel from Northrop Grumman Corporation or a related association? Is there a profile of those members of Congress? Can I edit that profile with what I might find? Did that member say anything about Northrop Grumman Corporation in the Congressional Record? Are they mentioned in a committee report? Did they benefit from an earmark?
Web sites presenting different kinds of political, civic, and legislative information are distributed throughout the internet. While broad Web searches can be effective, they can also be time consuming and lead to sites of questionable reliability. With the debut of Sunlight’s Insanely Useful Web sites page (always listed in the tabs at the top of every Sunlight page) we're developing a collection of value-added government information databases on the Web.
Continue readingInsanely Useful Websites
Sunlight is starting to update and clean up (and eventually redesign) our Website and today we are posting the first installment: Insanely Useful Websites for government transparency. The sites listed here replace and dramatically update our old "resources" section.
How do you warrant a mention here? All these sites provide a broad range of information available to track government and legislative information, campaign contributions and the role of money and power in politics. Many of these resources apply the Web 2.0 ethos to sift, share and combine this information in innovative ways -- often times by mashing data together from disparate sources to maximize the usability of that information.
Get Momentum
So, this is neat.
Momentum: Igniting Social Change in the Connected Age by Allison Fine (which Sunlight distributed widely as a "must read" to philanthropists when it was published)" has won the 2007 Terry McAdam Book Award from the Alliance for Nonprofit Management. The Alliance is a D.C based professional association of individuals and organizations focused on improving the management and governance capacity of nonprofits nationwide. The selection was heralded for its "energetic and entrepreneurial approach to building ownership and influence for activities that create social benefit caught the both the minds and hearts of this year's jury in an engaging and provocative way."
We agree.
Web 2.0 in a Chart
We talk frequently about "Web 2.0" here at Sunlight. (Yes, we know that's a "buzzword" but it's a handy way of describing the new "read-write" culture of today's Web.) We think a lot about what it means for how Congress presents itself to and interacts with the public. Sunlight's fascinated by (some might say obsessed) with how the interactivity and transparency potential of the Internet can change the relationship between lawmakers and their constituents. How citizens can use the Internet to hold lawmakers more accountable for their votes, their earmarks, who they meet with, and what they say when debating legislation. (To wit, see what Rep. George Miller announced yesterday.) We use Web 2.0 "criteria" for our grant making, making sure that organizations we fund use the Internet in creative, interactive, and as a two-way street in their overall strategy. Even the databases we fund (arguably very Web 1.0 tools) have to be developed with the capacity to be exported in formats that others can use to mash different data sets together.
Continue readingObama on Transparency for Government
While Sunlight is mostly focused on Congressional transparency we can't help but notice that there is a presidential campaign going on. Sen. Barack Obama announced his positions last week for ethics and transparency reform.
Obama's reform agenda uses the Web in a significant fashion. There are lots of things I like in his proposal including the core concept of "Google for Government (information)," which in my mind means creating searchable, online databases as a requirement for government agencies' work. (Let's hope that as president Obama would also champion legislative changes that will allow for citizens to learn more about Congress' activities -- expanding what is currently reported and making it all available online in searchable databases.) Given the fact that Obama is a leader on government transparency issues in the Senate now, his willingness to talk about these issues demonstrates his commitment to them and his understanding that the public strongly favors more transparency by the government.
Continue readingPopup Politicans Live
When one of our tools is used by liberals and conservatives, we are happy.
Continue reading
59063
