Beginning with this post, I’m going to start featuring organizations and individuals that are doing innovative work to achieve progressive change from the bottom up.  Since it’s Sunshine Week, the first feature in this series is The Sunlight Foundation (SF), an advocacy organization committed to making government more transparent by using social media and online tools in new ways.  This is a must-go-to site for anyone interested in a more open, less secretive government.  It is worth reading its About page in full, but here is a snippet of what it’s up to:

Through our projects and grant-making, Sunlight serves as a catalyst for greater political transparency and to foster more openness and accountability in government. Sunlight’s ultimate goal is to strengthen the relationship between citizens and their elected officials and to foster public trust in Congress. We are unique in that technology and the power of the Internet are at the core of every one of our efforts.

Our work is committed to helping citizens, bloggers and journalists be their own best congressional watchdogs, by improving access to existing information and digitizing new information, and by creating new tools and Web sites to enable all of us to collaborate in fostering greater transparency.

What really makes this organization unique is its creative use of the internet for online organizing.  The first thing you notice about SF’s website is its attractive design and the ease of navigating the different pages.  But a closer look at this site reveals a truly impressive range of content and interactive features.

First, co-founder Ellen Miller and a talented group of writers are the primary contributors to the blog, which has become regular reading for me.  I frequently find new information there about surprising ways that our government doesn’t provide the public with critically important information.  The writing is high quality as well.

Another feature of SF which makes it stand out is the way that it is using social media to promote its advocacy.  SF is on Facebook, though that is not much of a breakthrough.  And, like an increasing number of advocacy groups, SF is on Twitter @sunlightnetwork.  But just being on these social media sites doesn’t mean much in itself.  It’s all about how you use these tools and combine them with traditional media.  One example of a two-pronged media approach to advocacy is its work on Senate bill 482, the “Senate Campaign Discosure Parity Act,” sponsored by Sen. Russ Feingold (D-WI) and introduced on February 26 of this year.  @sunlightnetwork encouraged its nearly 1,900 followers to tweet their Senators to support S.482, and Senator Barbara Boxer of California responded favorably:

@Barbara_Boxer: Thanks to all who tweeted me about e-filing of campaign finance reports. I was a cosponsor of S. 482 before and will do so again.

So, does this mean we’re leaving the era of letter-writing and calling one’s Senator, and entering the era of Twitter advocacy (I just barely resisted writing “twadvocacy”)?  Not quite.  SF combines this kind of “new advocacy” with the old methods, such as writing op-eds, which Ellen Miller did today in an insightful piece in USA Today.  Most interesting to me was her take on how the internet is supplementing (overtaking?) traditional journalism as the watchdog of our government. She has some terrific examples of the ways that citizens have been using the internet to discover what their government is doing in their name.

Perhaps the coolest (and I use this term loosely) internet tool on SF’s website right now is its system to track calls to Senators to prod them into passing S.482.  The purpose of these calls is also to encourage Senators to defeat an amendment offered by Sen. Pat Roberts (R-KS) that would kill the bill.  The page very clearly explains how to lobby one’s Senators, and it allows users to enter the results of their lobbying directly on the site.  Awesome!

Sunlight Foundation has many more projects and government transparency issues that it is working on.  One project that I think is extremely important and worthy of mention is Readthebill, which is a petition to demand that Congress post legislation online 72 hours before it is debated so that legislators and the public have a chance to actually READ the bill that might become law.  Please sign this petition.  If you remember, the Patriot Act was read by no one except Sen. Feingold, and he was also the only legislator to vote against it.  We all know how that turned out.  Another very important and useful SF project is EarmarkWatch, which allows citizens to search for earmarks in bills to find out if they are worthwhile projects.  As regular readers of this blog know, I hate the current earmark system and I believe it is especially harmful to liberals when they participate in it.

There are many more great projects and innovative uses of social media that the Sunlight Foundation is taking the lead on.  One fun project called Capitol Words allows you to search for words spoken by legislators and see who repeated them most often: words like, health, energy, tax, education, etc.  The idea is to try to call out hypocrisy when we find it.  It turns out that in the past year, Sen. Dick Durbin (D-IL) uttered the word “oil” 534 times and “health” 478 times.  He’s clearly concerned about these topics.  What is he doing about them?  So, if you only visit one site for information on government transparency and reform, this is it.