Joho the Blog
An Entry from the Archives

A group from the Sunlight are giving a Tuesday lunchtime talk at the Berkman center. The group here today includes Micah Sifry, Andrew Rasiej, Ellen Miller, and Michael Klein. [As always, what follows is an inaccurate sketch. I make no claim of completeness.)

The Sunlight Foundation aims at bring transparency and accountability to Congress. The name comes from the 1913 Brandeis quotation: "Sunlight is said to be the best of disinfectants; electric light the most efficient policeman." "Lawmakers will continue to do what they do," Ellen says, "so long as they can get away with it." The Foundation's goal is "real transparency about the quid pro quo": Who is giving them money? Who are they meeting with? What are they inserting into bills? Then, this information has to be put into shareable format (xml, APIs).

For this, they need citizens to do some investigation — "distributive journalism."

Congress still files bunches of disclosure information on paper. The Foundation is working with the Center for Responsive Politics on digitizing this. Ellen shows screen captures of how the government currently makes information available online: Endless lists of cryptically named files, many of which lead to single PDFs of paper forms.

Sunlight's plan: Collect new information, digitize the old, and invest in connecting the records. Find ways to involve citizens as muckrakers and reporters. Get the information out of DC and into the blogs, etc., where people are lookng for it. And galvanize a national campaign.

Micah says they'd like to have a tool to enable any blogger or journalist to put a box on any page that talks about a Congressperson. Maybe the box lists their top five donors and links to a page with all the info.

kjQ: (Bill McGeveran) Doesn't this pose a privacy threat to individual donors who have given a small amount of money to a cause that perhaps his neighbors don't like? How can we have the maximum benefit of sunlight but also not chill a private person who wants to donate $300 to some cause?
A: (Mike) That information is already there. It's already available.

A: (Ellen) If you give less than $200, it's not recorded.A: (Mike) There might be some small chilling effect, but the corrosive effect of not having sunlight is an overwhelmingly bad thing.

Q: (Amanda Michel) They key audience for Sunlight are the researchers and activists. They need timely data. Aggregating data and making it available to researchers would be a tremendous service.
A: (Mike) First the data has to be there. We'll also provide tools for using the data.

Q: (irc) Any support from Congress?
A: (Andrew Rasiej) No. Not publicly.
A: (Mike) Schwarzenegger is going to make his calendar public. And John McCain is in favor of more disclosure.

Q: How can they say no?
A: (Ellen) They say that if they post their calendars, they would be reluctant to meet with groups outside of the mainstream.
A: (Andrew) They just can't fathom it. "They're so addicted to topdown control..."

Q: (Dan Gillmor) Are there any states or municipalities that have gone part of the way that you could use as a test bed?
A: (Ellen) We're working on it.

A: (Micah) It's a fertile time for doing this.

Q: I ran a campaign for the mayor of Portland. To draw off votes from another candidate, we ran a competing candidate. With full sunlight, we couldn't have done that.

Q: Will there be an opportunity for candidates to respond?
A: (Mike) They have the world and the platform to respond. And we're just making the data available.
A: (Ellen) We're doing a blog that will use the data and people will be able to respond there.

Q: (me) Are you putting forward a Sunlight Pledge of some sort that candidates can take?
A: We're working on it. (Dan Gillmor adds: Put the draft up on your site and your readers will write it for you.)

Q: (me) Are you working on standardized data formats?
A: Yes. It's premature to talk about it. We're talking with people.
A: (Andrew) The data is in silos and the owners of it don't like the idea that their data might be put into the public.