24 July 2009
Foundation Helps Citizens Find Government Information
Sunlight Foundation shines light on U.S. government documents
Washington — The U.S. government is responsible for collecting mountains of information, but making it accessible and useable to the average citizen is a monumental endeavor. Sunlight Foundation, a nonprofit, nonpartisan, nongovernmental organization, feels it is up to the task.
Founded in 2006 by Michael Klein, a Washington businessman and lawyer, and Ellen Miller, a longtime Washington public interest advocate, Sunlight Foundation and its laboratories use the Internet to make information about the U.S. Congress and the federal government more accessible to ordinary citizens.
“The impetus for the Sunlight Foundation was to challenge the cultural resistance of Washington to put government data online,” Miller told America.gov. “We’re really in the business of trying to redefine public information in 21st-century style.” That means having government information loaded onto the Internet in real time and available 24 hours a day, seven days a week, Miller said.
Sunlight Foundation originally focused exclusively on the U.S. Congress. One of its Web sites, OpenCongress.org, tracks legislation. It allows users to create profiles allowing them to follow and get alerts on a bill’s progress and enables participants to comment on legislation. One bill on unemployment insurance, Miller said, attracted the comments of some 45,000 people.
UNDERSTANDING DATA
Sunlight Foundation recently began looking at ways to make executive branch information more accessible. President Obama’s push for greater government transparency by providing data from all federal agencies on the White House Web site data.gov, according to Miller, “has been a huge boost to us and to our ability to push our agenda forward even more quickly.”
“The reason we’re excited about that,” Miller explained, “is that it gives us and the public an opportunity to understand the [government] data, to combine data, to understand better how government spends its money [and] what the relationships are between one data set and another data set.”
“We think it is the job of government to make data available in its rawest and pure form online and let citizens and others come in and build tools on top of it,” Miller said. “But the first and primary responsibility of the government is to get the data up [on the Internet], and we — or the community at large — take it from there,” she said.
Sunlight Foundation aims to help others know how they can read and what they can do with data available online. It encourages independent Web developers to design “mashups,” or Web applications that will enable citizens to easily access and understand government data. The Sunlight Foundation is currently hosting its second contest, encouraging citizens to design their own applications that could be used for U.S. government data. Offering $25,000 in prizes, the contest, according to Miller, is “a way of promoting the Obama administration’s interest in putting data online and making the information easily accessible and understandable to the average online citizen.”
The contest, “Apps for America 2: the data.gov challenge,” is in no way requested by or funded by the U.S. government, Miller emphasized. Sunlight Foundation, however, will offer the results to data.gov, she said. All the applications submitted through the contest are “open source,” meaning they are available for anyone to use and apply to their Web sites.
Miller said the Sunlight Foundation is excited about the expansion of its own work and the Obama administration’s transparency in government initiative.
“We think it will restore faith and confidence in the institutions of government and its officials,” Miller said.
See also “Obama Administration Breaks New Ground on the Internet.”
More information on the Sunlight Foundation is available on its Web site.
