Imitation is the highest form of flattery.
Yesterday New York Attorney General Andrew M. Cuomo announced "Project Sunlight," New York State's first-ever comprehensive Internet database that will track donors, lobbyists, special interests, state contracts, and elected officials, and the links between them.
Seems like the situation with information about New York politics is not unlike the federal scenario:
While many databases are currently public domain, they are difficult to navigate. Additionally, the current process of accessing public information can be burdensome and time consuming. Project Sunlight goes well beyond the existing systems in making public information accessible. By combining multiple databases into a single, easy-to-use Internet resource, New Yorkers will be able to quickly examine elected officials' voting records and campaign contributors, and find outwhich entities may have benefited from their actions
A long-time public interest advocate -- Blair Horner -- a 25 year veteran of NYPIRG and an authority on government ethics and reform will head the project.
Continue readingOpen House Project is Well Underway
I spent part of the weekend following the very smart conversation that has already begun on the listserv that is forming the core of the collaborative effort for our new Open House Project. I used to consider myself a kind of Congressional process geek (to wit I spent part o the weekend reading the many posts on this listserv), but the folks participating in this collaborative bipartisan effort to study how the House currently integrates the Internet into its operations, so it can make recommendations to the leadership on how to do it better, have an amazing breadth of knowledge.
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 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.
Trying to Keep Up
The Senate took some steps forward last week to make its activities more transparent, but honestly, some of the most innovative and exciting stuff to make government more transparent is coming from individual lawmakers themselves (and in one case government) and enterprising organizations and citizens.
First, take a look at Freshman Senator Jon Tester posting of his daily schedule. How refreshing is this!? I hope others will pick up on his efforts to be really transparent about how he's spending his time, and on those of Rep. Kirsten Gillibrand's too. (Sen. Tester's schedule and Rep. Gillibrand's can be found on their pages on Congresspedia too.) We hope that some of our readers will send what these two lawmakers are doing to their representatives as models for what it means to execute the public's business in a public way.
Continue readingWhat We Did This Week
As regular readers know, Sunlight's been lobbying in the House and Senate for its Modest Proposals in the context of the larger package of ethics reforms that the Senate's been considering this week. You win some, you lose some, and we learned a lot in the process.
Sen. Cardin filed an amendment to require contemporaneous online filing of FEC reports, personal financial disclosure reports and travel reports, our top priority. This week, we worked closely with him and with Sen. Reid's office to have some version of the amendment accepted as part of the managers' amendment. We knew early on that the FEC reports were a long shot (outrageously so) as Sen. McConnell had made it clear that anything related to campaign finance would be kept out of the bill. (Go figure. Anything having to do with reforming the campaign finance system doesn't haven anything to do with ethics reform?)
Continue readingThe Day Sunlight Went Dark
All morning the Sunlight Foundation was beseiged with internet connectivity problems. During this time the staff figured out that without the internet half of the Sunlight staff and consultants would be jobless and the other half would be confined to the library, meeting with shady figures in backrooms of Congress gathering information or held hostage to the phone.
According to Nisha's calculations:
Jobless: Elliot, Greg, Kerry, Carl, Micah, Andrew, Conor, Garrett
Phone Bound: Ellen, Zephyr, Nisha, Eric
Library Bound: Paul
Stalking the Halls of Congress and dusty three-ring binders: Bill, Larry
Continue readingAnnouncing a $2 Million Investment from Omidyar Network in Sunlight
We are so pleased today to announce an investment of $2 million from Omidyar Network in the Sunlight Foundation. The investment will enable us to increase the number of "transparency grants" we make and provide general support, particuarly for expanding the capacity of the work of our Sunlight Labs.
Sunlight and the Omidyar Network share a fundamental belief in the value of transparency, the potential for new technologies to connect individuals to both information and others who share their interests, and the ability for citizens to influence the issues that impact their lives. We really couldn't have found a better partner. This thrlling investment will enable us and our partners to make giant steps this year (just our second year of operation) to bring Congress into the 21st century, and make it more transparent.
Continue readingLast Year, New Grants
Late in December, just before our holiday break, Sunlight approved several final grants for 2006, bringing our total grantmaking to just over $1.1 million for the year. As we look back over each of the grants we made, we are impressed by the quality of work that's been produced, the openness to collaboration amongst our grantees, and to the strides being made as each of these organizations enter the world of the Web 2.0. Our investments have paid off well. And yes, to answer the obvious question, Sunlight will expand its grantmaking in 2007.
We made three final grants at the end of the year. The first one of $117,000 went to Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Government (CREW) to fund the launch of its "Open Community Open Document Review System." CREW had already developed a demonstration version of an online reviewing process that is a really cool tool. It lets anyone review, tag and comment on any of the thousands of pages of documents that CREW has in their possession. (CREW has thousands of pages of governement records as a result of their thorough and repeated FOIA requests.) Our grant will help them build a massive publicly searchable database of every document they receive -- a database put together by citizen journalists. Look for the beta version at the end of March.
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