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All Things Reform is occasionally text interviewing newsmakers in the government reform community. Recently, we conducted our first interview with Matt Stemple of You Street about their new campaign from Americans for Campaign Reform.
The Sunlight Foundation has done a great service to the transparency movement in the last few years on the internet; many projects and campaigns have received crucial funding from their foundation, for instance. They also make an effort to be a comprehensive resource of government transparency news for the general public.
Today's interview is with Nisha Thompson, Sunlight's Organizer and Outreach Coordinator; she may be reached at nthompson@sunlightfoundation.com.
ATR: Sunlight Foundation's web site and accompanying campaign sites and social networking provides transparency news. What blogs do you publish, and what 'beats' do they cover in today's transparency movement?
Sunlight Foundation: Thanks for the kind words about our work! We can only grow a movement to open our government when we're collaborating with others dedicated to the cause like you. So, thanks for helping us spread our message to get involved to create the transparent government we'd all like to see.
We publish the following blogs:
• Sunlight Foundation (http://blog.sunlightfoundation.com/), which covers news of government transparency, our work and that of our grantees and colleagues.
• Real Time Investigations (http://realtime.sunlightprojects.org/), which covers our investigative research team's work to dig into government data and use FOIA requests to shine a light on Congress
• The Open House and Senate Projects (http://theopenhouseproject.com and http://theopensenateproject.com), which reports on changes to policy on Capitol Hill and our collaborative work with other groups to advocate for technological reforms to make government information more meaningfully accessible to the public
• Party Time (http://politicalpartytime.org), which updates readers with latest fundraising events and other political parties
• Sunlight Labs (http://www.sunlightlabs.com/blog/), chronicling the technical side of making government transparency, updated by Sunlight's open source development team
ATR: People can also get your news on Facebook and Twitter, among other social networking sites. Is this news exclusive of your other news locations, e.g. your blogs and other sites? Or is it being published first at these social network sites as breaking news before being published elsewhere? How do you utilize each of your social network sites?
Sunlight Foundation: It depends. We typically use Twitter to share breaking news. On Facebook, we post updates that the community might enjoy. Both Twitter and Facebook have feeds from our blog. So they are used mostly at the same time to get people information. We also keep the dialog going and foster community-building among open government and open source fans the 'old fashioned' way, via lists. (We use Google groups for these. We feel the best way to keep people informed is by putting our news not only on our blog but also places were people are plugged in already to get their information.
ATR: Aside from your blogs and social networks, are there any more of your locations publishing news? If so, where does the public find it, and what type of news is it?
Sunlight Foundation: No pretty much any news we want to share comes out of our blogs and social networking sites. This is where we focus on sharing information. In some cases we have mentions in MSM and we also put those on our Delicious account and that is fed to our Web site. The best place to get all the news we cover is the Sunlight Foundation home page.
ATR: Would you say that Sunlight Foundation fully covers the news in the government transparency movement? Or does it fill its own niche of news stories exclusive of other government transparency organizations? Are there any more organizations with government transparency news and developments exclusive of the Sunlight Foundation?
Sunlight Foundation: We definitely do not cover everything (try as we might)! A great place to start is Open the Government. While we do cover state-level transparency initiatives through the Local Sunlight blog series I maintain, I'd recommend Open Records (http://openrecords.wordpress.com/) and Sunshine Review (http://sunshinereview.org/index.php/Main_Page) as great places for that information. International Transparency is hard to keep track of as well as. Organizations like Transparency International lead the way in organizing the international transparency community. Likewise, transparency groups exist around the world – one that we're huge fans of is MySociety in England. They really 'get' the Internet as a vehicle for transparency.
ATR: Reform politics is grassroots activism with government in the public's interest. Defined this way, would you say the Sunlight Foundation considers itself a reform organization? Are you primarily a public interest group? Or do you primarily associate and assist with governmental affairs? Or do you work in both directions; if so, how does each direction fit in your organization's mission?
Sunlight Foundation: We consider ourselves a transparency organization, powered by the Internet, first and foremost. Having said that, we do work to catalyze technological reform to enhance transparency in Congress through our Open House Project (http://theopenhouseproject.com) and its companion, the Open Senate Project (http://theopensenateproject.com). Through these initiatives, we are working to encourage a "cultural" shift on Capitol Hill to encourage more lawmakers to understand the benefits of using the social Web in general and their own official Web sites to improve transparency and communication and citizen engagement in their work. As part of those efforts, we are working on changing policies and rules so information can become more open and elected officials can have more options to interact with citizens. We've been successful, namely with helping to influence the modernization of Franking rules, which govern how members of Congress can use the Internet in their work to communicate with constituents.
We also promote our reform agenda on the Hill, as best articulated through our model transparency bill – which we crafted online with citizen input at PublicMarkup.org (http://publicmarkup.org/bill/transparency-government-act-2008-revised/) Right now, we're working to secure support on the Hill for that bill by meeting with congressional staff and lawmakers (so, yes, we do use 'old-fashioned' lobbying techniques!)
We also take that information and make it user friendly, present it in different ways to create a new way to look at government's work. Our mission is to not only create a transparent government but also empower citizens to take their representatives to task so that we have an elected body that represents citizens and not just the highest bidder. By advocating for more transparency as well as showing people different ways to expect government information we can actually show people that government information and data doesn't have to be intimidating, but something that can be interacted with and meaningful.
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