As stated in the note from the Sunlight Foundation′s Board Chair, as of September 2020 the Sunlight Foundation is no longer active. This site is maintained as a static archive only.

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2Day in #OpenGov 1/12/2012

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Here is a Thursday's look at transparency-related news items, congressional committee hearings, transparency-related bills introduced in Congress, and transparency-related events. News Roundup:

International
  • WhatDoTheyKnow.com, a site dedicated to making it easier for people in the UK to make and track Freedom of Information requests, has been used to send 100,000 requests since February 2008. (MySociety)
  • Weak whistleblower protection laws and pervasive threats of retribution keep many Latin Americans from reporting corruption. The recent Central American and Dominican Republic Forum for Transparency outlined reforms that could help the situation. (Transparency International)
Government
  • Rep. Darrell Issa (R-CA) plans to introduce legislation to serve as an alternative to SOPA when the house comes back into session next week. The legislation will be a companion to a bill introduced in the Senate by Ron Wyden (D-OR). (National Journal)
  • The Research Works Act, introduced in the House of Representatives, could limit public access to taxpayer-funded research and provide a set-back to open access to information. (Tech President)
Campaign Finance
  • Super PACs and the candidates they support are not allowed to explicitly coordinate their activities. But, that doesn't stop them from watching, and parroting, each other's ads. (Washington Post)
  • According to a new study, four times more employees at major companies claim to have witnessed illegal contributions to public officials this year than in 2009. (Roll Call $)
  • Editorial: Congress should amend its ethics rules to require a "fundraising quiet period" during non election years. (Politico)

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2Day in #OpenGov 1/11/2012

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Here is a look at Wednesday's transparency-related news items, congressional committee hearings, transparency-related bills introduced in Congress, and transparency-related events. News Roundup:

Government
  • Three federal agencies are working together to create a web portal for FOIA requests. The portal will cost $1.3 million to implement and could save $200 million over five years if adopted government wide. (Fierce Government)
  • A new site, SOPA Opera, allows users to easily visualize congressional support and opposition to SOPA and the PROTECT-IP acts. (Tech President)
  • Reddit announced that they will impose a black out all day on January 18 to protest SOPA. (Yahoo/Digital Trends)
Lobbying
  • Cecilia Munoz, a former lobbyist for the National Council of La Raza who received a waiver to join the Obama administration, was promoted to director of the Domestic Policy Council. (National Journal)
  • The private equity industry has given more than $17 million to members of Congress since the start of 2007, with Democrats receiving more support than Republicans. (National Journal)
  • A former senior FCC official is joining Jenner & Block's communications practice. John Flynn previously served as a senior counsel for transactions to FCC Chairman Julius Genachowski and led the agency's review of the Comcast-NBC Universal merger. (The Hill)
State and Local
  • Los Angeles, CA hasn't updated its website in 14 years. They recently launched a beta version of their new portal, lacity.org, and are seeking public input to ensure that the site will best serve city residents. (Government Technology)
  • The Oregon Supreme Court is set to consider a campaign finance law passed by voters in 2006 that would limit individual political contributions. The former Secretary of State chose not to enforce the regulations. (Lobby Comply)

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Let the Redesigning Continue

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heat map

As some of you might have seen we're undergoing a major redesign here at the Sunlight Foundation. We started off with the building blocks, a new logo and mood board, to lay out the concept of our new look. Now, with last year's projects behind us, we're ready to share the wireframes and comps for the new site.

Before beginning a project as big as this redesign we wanted to make sure we had some evidence to back up our suspicions regarding the current Sunlight site. Our first step was to install heat map software to get a sense of where users were clicking the most and how they were navigating. As you can see from the darker-colored image, users are clicking most on certain navigation items and projects but not so much on the blog content that lives on the homepage. The rainbow colored image is what's called a scroll map, it shows how much of a particular page a user views before navigating away from it. The white color is what is viewed the most and then it goes down from yellow, orange, red, green and finally blue indicates the fewest views. For us, this shows that as soon as users hit that blog content they start navigating away from this page.

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