Sunlight_Foundation

Citizens using the Internet to monitor their representatives and the legislation that they draft is nothing novel. But a new Sunlight Foundation project aimed at allowing citizen legislatures to collaboratively script their own legislation, challenging what representative democracy means, certainly is.

Past elections have proven that a candidate’s willingness and ability to engage online communities can mean the difference between winning and losing an election. But with this project, The Sunlight Foundation, a funder of NewAssignment.Net, suggests that governance, not just election outcomes, can be changed as well.

Using the model of moreperfect.org, organizers have set up a wiki and divided the research project into four categories—identifying relevant, already-proposed legislation, gathering information and vetting news article about the legislation, suggesting legislative language or rules and suggesting amendments to existing bills.

“If this is a success, and we draft proposable legislation in this area, we can use this experiment to show lawmakers how they might do the same in the future—share principels with their constituents, and work with them, instead of in secret, to turn those principals into laws,” writes Zephyr Teachout, the Sunlight Foundation’s national director.

Ink is giving way to nodes and networks, ledes and inverted pyramids are being swallowed up by a tsunami of blogs and memes. Amid the din and aggressive edge of the digital conversation, how do we figure out what’s really going on in the world? The aim of NewAssignment.net is to harmonize these worlds, do a mashup of the best of each. On the one hand, there’s traditional shoe-leather reporting, where you call people up, assemble data and information, extract insights and ultimately a storyline that says something interesting. Though oft-derided these days, this is a craft, and done well it can have a tremendous impact – on individual lives and the political process. On the other hand, you have the digital world, where distance is obliterated (reducing, in some ways, the wear and tear on shoe leather), distinctions between “journalists” and “everyone else” are blurred, any curious citizen can post insights and ideas, and the pool of available digital data is growing exponentially.

So far, few people have managed to skillfully straddle these worlds; Bill Allison of the Sunlight Foundation is one of them. He worked at the Philadelphia Inquirer, where he was a researcher for investigative reporters Donald Barlett and James Steele; afterward, he spent nearly a decade at the Center for Public Integrity. At Sunlight, he has placed himself at the emerging nexus of citizen journalism and national politics, specifically Congress. Since starting at Sunlight last year, he has had a run of interesting stories and projects that capture something of how journalism will look like in the future – and, while it looks quite different, the fundamentals are the same.

I sat down recently with Allison to get his insights on the Internet and reporting, social networking, data and other topics – his remarks are excerpted below.

Bill Allison: I certainly don’t think that we’re at a point yet where the Internet could do something like the series you did on what was going to happen to New Orleans. They certainly can’t do a Barlett and Steele type investigation. There’s things the Internet isn’t capable of doing yet. There are bloggers who have expertise in a certain area who will write about their area of expertise, but that’s the opinion of one expert…this is just one person’s experience, and journalism is trying to put together, the joke is, two people’s experiences.

Last Friday, the Sunlight Foundation and Mitchell Kapor Foundation gathered the tech- and politics-savvy together in San Francisco for a workshop on government data, transparency and the web, dubbed Open Data/Open Government (or, alternately, Open(Data)/Open[Gov] or ODOG). The idea was to brainstorm on how to make previously unavailable and/or hard-to-understand data as friendly as possible to the average web-surfer.

The basic subtext: To most Americans, government operates opaquely, its decisions driven by money and special interests. Making data more transparent (and, by extension, decision-making and patterns of influence) will draw interested citizens to be more engaged, and – one hopes – make politicians more accountable. (Of course, lobbyists and interest groups can also access this information and use it to refine their tactics.).

I felt a little out of place at times amid the technical jargon flying. But it was a fascinating meeting. Like most reporters working in Washington, I’ve pored over campaign finance information, data on lobbying expenditures and federal contracts. Sometimes this is smartly crunched and organized, as on the Center for Responsive Politics site. More often, though, it’s heavy going. A couple of years ago, seeking information on lobbyist-paid trips by House members, I trekked to an office in the basement of the Capitol, where a guy handed me alphabetized binders – only one out at a time – with handwritten sheets for each member and his/her staff. The information was “public” – but not really. (I'm told it's now online)

Now, thanks to the relentless march of digitization, a flood of this data is coming online – as are new and ever more powerful tools for analyzing it. All available to anyone, anywhere with an Internet connection.

As the midterm elections quickly pass into memory, focus is now switching to the 2008 presidential question and what role the Internet will play.

That's no longer a negative thing.

At a panel discussion on “Trends in Political Blogging,” sponsored by the George Washington University Institute for Politics, Democracy and the Internet Wednesday, there was the usual debate over who is a blogger, who is reading blogs and whether or not blogs are providing a real revolution in communication.

Not much new there.

But one word that was mentioned several times--and we at NewAssignment.Net applaud this--was “transparency.” While professional campaigners may not necessarily welcome the onset of more transparency, this cycle will likely require them to be more open with the peeking public. “Blogs have forced the media and politicians to be transparent; you can’t get away with much anymore. . . you get called on it immediately,” said CNN’s Jacki Schechner.

First the Web was chaotic. Then came Google, with a mission to organize the world's online information. And all was well.

Then came online government databases, with all the data a citizen muckraker might want. But, as their information expanded, they too became chaotic. And along trotted Watchdogging 101, with a mission to teach users how to make sense of the chaos.

The Sunlight Foundation's Watchingdogging 101 acts as a middle man (middle-dog), matching straightforward questions -- How much is my representative worth? -- with the pertinent page from somebody else's database. Mainly it directs users to the Center for Responsive Politics' Open Secrets, which has become kind of a government database Wikipedia, with enough knowledge to keep one person busy for … a long time. Especially if she's not used to navigating millions of pages of informatoin.

For the first time since it began three years ago, the International Weblog Award for best overall blog was given to an English language site. This Saturday the Sunlight Foundation, a funder of NewAssignmetn.Net, was given that honor for their innovative use of network journalism.

The BOBs jury members said:

"they admired the Sunlight Foundation's work to increase transparency in government and called the project a positive example of how blogs can shape political discourse.

MediaShift's Mark Glaser and BlogHer's Lisa Stone, the two English-language judges, joined 11 other bloggers from around the world in nominating and deciding what sites would win.

"The Weblog champion of the world does everything right. A unique and interesting approach to the topic, super design and excellent writing are what it takes to win in the Best Weblog category."

Much like PaidContent.org, which received an honorable mention for best English language blog, the Sunlight Foundation does have it all, including a new approach to covering their topic. By using a networked style of reporting, the Sunlight Foundation is making government more accountable -- and as they earn more recognition and a larger network of citizen journalists, they are sure to keep our government transparent and liable.

Although the award was given to the Sunlight Foundation's blog, the organization has several projects that are aimed at shinning light on government and giving citizens tools to learn more about our democracy's vital institutions. This began with Congresspedia in January of 2006 and has continued with cooperative projects like the Congressional Family Business Project and Watchdog 101: A Do-it-yourself Watchdog Guide.

Yesterday America ventured out in what election-activist say was “the most heavily watched election in history,” with volunteer lawyer battalions and an arsenal of media contacts, corruption databases and documentation systems at the ready.

As voter watchdog groups stood guard, the Sunlight Foundation and its contributors determined exactly how Congress members dipped into their war chests. If nothing else, this was the most open source election in our nation’s history.

Sunlight, a funder of NewAssignment, and its citizen researchers are looking into how Congressional candidates pay their spouses directly or indirectly using campaign money. As Jay Rosen stated, “the practice is not illegal”—but it is “questionable.” Since Jay’s post the Sunlight Foundation has picked up even more momentum—with mentions in the San Francisco Chronicle and Austin American-Statesman.

As of two days ago, all Congress members had been investigated and Sunlight’s Bill Allison was about to start combing through the “raw results”—which asserted that 19 spouses were paid a total of $636,876 since January 1, 2005.

Recently the Sunlight Foundation asked members of the public to help uncover which members of Congress employed spouses on their campaign committees. Just two days later, Sunlight's Bill Allison reported that this "distributed research project" was done:

Incredible!--in less than two days, a virtual investigative team dug through campaign finance records for 435 current members of Congress, trying to find out if they paid their spouses from campaign funds. There were 24 of us (myself included--I looked up six members) who left our names, and 83 members investigated by anonymous researchers... Of those who did leave their names, our huge thanks go out to KCinDC who investigated 155 House members, Beezling who looked into 116, VaAntirepublican who did 24.

What's really interesting to me is not how quickly this assignment was completed, but the fact that just a few people completed more than 70 percent of the work.

The Sunlight Foundation's Congressional Family project hit the front page of Digg last night, opening up the work of one smart mob to the critique of another.

I'm part of the Digg community (and in full disclosure, the person who submitted the article.) I find Digg's social network to be great at highlighting important news of the day, but its ability to contribute to those stories is limited to comment threads, which are often shouting matches.

But every once in a while, a gem. Larian LeQuella says there's a difference between the data arising from Sunlight's project and the story we're actually interested in:

"While it may not be strictly illegal, I would hope that they are actually EARNING that pay! THAT is where the true story should be investigated. Some of those wives are lawyers and whatnot, so they may have a legitimate reason to work on the campaign trail. The thing that sticks in people's craw is that it's nepotism to put your own wife on the payroll.

So, while the amateur journalists are digging up these out of context payments, we need to really ask, "Did these spouses earn that money?"

Yes. That is a further refinement of what we want to know. Of course, they could earn it and it would still be sticking in some craws that campaign contributions can go right to a Member's household income.