government sunshine

Transparency in government was a major campaign promise from Obama - no secret meetings to write legislation, no rushing things through without giving people a chance to read the bill, etc. Not that any of that has happened yet because it hasn't ... but it was a nice promise! It's something that a lot of people are pushing for ...

I found this blog post over the weekend, and it opened up hours of websurfing for me ... I immediately started a new topic in the sidebar of Government Sunshine and posted all of these links. Here are the results with a bit more description:

LittleSis: a "reverse Facebook" for political connections, put together using public resources linking all kinds of political people to each other. And some non-political people as well. The example used in the above blog post was Rahm Emanual - Obama's Chief of Staff with Steve Jobs - the CEO of Apple Computers. Here's another outside blog post about LittleSis. And this is part of why we need websites like this ... I wonder if LittleSis would cover this type of relationship.

5 online political resources everyone should know about: Read, Write, Web is a computer tech blog, so I don't know if you'd be interested in other posts on this site. I read a couple of them, and this specific post certainly is applicable to our conversation here.

Sunlight Foundation: this is the organization that put together OpenCongress and some other internet databases to help regular Joe Citizens like you and me figure out the chaos that is Congress.

OpenCongress: has a list of active legislation on the home page, and if you register for the site, it will ask for your zipcode so when you log in, it will tell you what YOUR Members of Congress are doing. Active legislation is the important stuff because quite frankly, thousands of bills are submitted and introduced that don't go anywhere. You don't need to bother with it - just with the stuff that's actually moving.

When I was working at NCSL, a state legislator called me all in a lather about a bill that had been introduced and how was NCSL going to lobby against it. I looked it up and it had been introduced by a Democrat. That alone was, at the time, enough to consign it to oblivion so we didn't need to give it another thought.

Read the Bill: an online petition posted by the Sunlight Foundation to get Congress to make it a rule that complete bill text must be posted online for 72 hours for public comment prior to beginning debate. I signed it and encourage everyone to do so as well.

Public Accountability Initiative: the force behind LittleSis. Good work, PAI folks! Keep it up!

Who Runs Gov: if I ever name someone you haven't heard of in one of my posts, go to this site and choose the "browse profiles" option. There aren't any Bush people on the full list that I can see (like Karl Rove) and most Members of Congress are not. But the leaders are there - main Obama staff and the Congressional leadership. The top blog posts right now are about the Republican leadership jockeying around and attempting to sort itself out. (That topic is for another blog post because if you ask me, it's a disaster, but I'll get into that later.) The website is published by the Washington Post.