Sunlight Foundation

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Sunlight Foundation
File:SunlightFoundationLogo 500wide.gif
Motto Making government & politics more accountable & transparent
Founded April 2006 (2006-04)
Founder Mike Klein, Ellen S. Miller
Type 501(c)(3)
20-3903427
Focus Government transparency, money in politics
Location
Coordinates Lua error in package.lua at line 80: module 'strict' not found.
Products Influence Explorer, OpenCongress.org
Interim executive director
 John Wunderlich[1]
Revenue
 $8,942,875 (2013)[2]
Expenses $6,971,567 (2013)[2]
Website www.sunlightfoundation.com

The Sunlight Foundation is an American 501(c)(3) nonpartisan, nonprofit organization that advocates for open government.[3] The organization was founded in April 2006 with the goal of increasing transparency and accountability in the United States Congress, the executive branch, and in state and local governments.[4] The foundation's primary focus is the role of money in politics. The organization seeks to increase campaign finance regulations and disclosure requirements.[5]

Organizational overview

Founding

The Sunlight Foundation was founded by Ellen S. Miller and Michael R. Klein due to their concern about the influence of money in politics. The Sunlight Foundation was launched in April 2006 with a $3.5 million contribution from co-founder Klein, a securities lawyer who started a firm called CoStar Group Inc. in the 1980s.[5][6][7] The first national director of the Sunlight Foundation was law professor Zephyr Teachout.[8]

Personnel

Ellen Miller, the organization's co-founder, served as the Sunlight Foundation's executive director until announcing her retirement in 2014. In September 2014, Christopher T. Gates was selected as the organization's new president.[9] Gates was formerly the chairman of the Colorado Democratic Party and executive director of Philanthropy for Active Civic Engagement and the National Civic League.[10] The organization's board of directors includes Mike Klein, Niko Klein, Andrew McLaughlin, Esther Dyson, Allison Fine, Sue Gardner, Mark Horvit, Craig Newmark and Daniel X. O'Neil.[11]

In January 2015, the Sunlight Foundation restructured, combining its reporting staff with its communications team. As a result of the restructuring, three staffers left the organization, including managing editor Kathy Kiely, who was laid off.[12] In June 2015, four more staffers left the organization.[13]

In January 2016, Michael Klein announced on Sunlight's blog that they were looking for a new chief executive, with Gates leaving the organization, with John Wunderlich acting as interim executive director.[1]

Awards

In July 2009, the Sunlight Foundation received the Public Access to Government Information Award from the American Association of Law Libraries.[14]

In July 2010, the Sunlight Foundation won the grand prize of the Knight-Batten Awards for Innovations in Journalism for their Sunlight Live project that incorporates streaming video, liveblogging, social networking, and data presentation.[15]

Funding

The Sunlight Foundation's donors include the Open Society Foundations, The Pew Charitable Trusts, the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation, the Rockefeller Foundation, the Ford Foundation, the William and Flora Hewlett Foundation, the Omidyar Network, Bloomberg Philanthropies, and the Laura and John Arnold Foundation.[16][17][18][19]

Policy positions

The Sunlight Foundation advocates for more regulation and limitations regarding campaign finance. The organization opposed the ruling in Citizens United v. FEC, calling it "disastrous."[20][21] The organization supported the DISCLOSE Act, a congressional bill that would have enacted stricter campaign finance regulations by requiring increased disclosure of political spending in federal elections.[22] The Sunlight Foundation believes that Congress should mandate real-time online disclosure of political contributions.[20] It opposes dark money, a term used to describe funds given to nonprofit organizations that are not required to disclose their donors.[9]

Activities

Demonstrators from the Sunlight Foundation outside Federal Election Commission offices as they discuss the application of Colbert Super PAC

The Sunlight Foundation's initiatives include Sunlight Labs, which is an open source community that collects and organizes public data;[23] Influence Explorer, which is an online tool for tracking money in politics;[24] and Foreign Influence Explorer, which tracks lobbyists who represent foreign clients in Washington D.C.[25]

In 2006, the Sunlight Foundation provided funding to the Center for Responsive Politics to improve its campaign finance and lobbying listings and to the Center for Media and Democracy to oversee a joint project called Congresspedia.[5] In June 2006, the Sunlight Foundation reported on Republican House Speaker Dennis Hastert's real estate investments, accusing Hastert of not divulging connections between a $207 million earmark he won for a highway and an investment he and his wife made in nearby land.[26]

Open House Project and OpenCongress.org

In January 2007, the Sunlight Foundation launched the Open House Project, a working group designed to make congressional procedures more transparent.[27] In February 2007, the Participatory Politics Foundation and the Sunlight Foundation launched OpenCongress.org, a site to track the full text of legislation and build a community to better follow congressional activities.[27] Originally run by the Participatory Politics Foundation with funding from the Sunlight Foundation, in 2013 the Sunlight Foundation overtook operations of OpenCongress.org.[28]

EarmarkWatch.org

In October 2007, the Sunlight Foundation joined Taxpayers for Common Sense to launch EarmarkWatch.org, a project that asked citizens to research over 3,000 earmarks and identify the sponsors and recipients.[29] In 2008, the Sunlight Foundation launched a project called Public Markup. The project crowdsourced ideas for model transparency legislation.[30]

Scout

Scout is a tool to create customized keyword alerts that notify users whenever the subscribed issue or bill is talked about in Congress, mentioned in the Federal Register or comes up in state legislation.[31] During beta testing Scout helped a coalition of transparency advocates oppose and remove a FOIA exemption for a bill.[32]

Call on Congress

Call on Congress is a toll free phone number individuals can call to learn about what Congress is doing.[33] The project hopes to bridge the digital divide by letting callers find out how their representatives are voting on bills and raising campaign money or connect directly to the lawmakers’ Capitol Hill offices and get details on where to vote on Election Day.[34]

Politwoops

Politiwoops was a Sunlight Foundation project which published an archive of thousands of deleted tweets by U.S. politicians. The project prompted Rep. Jeff Miller to delete his Twitter account after his tweet questioning President Barack Obama's citizenship was made public.[35][36] Other incidents covered by Politwoops include a number of Republican politicians reacting to incorrect news of the ruling in the Supreme Court's case about health care reform,[37] violations of the social media policies of the House of Representatives' Congressional Handbook by tweeting campaign information[38] and six politicians who deleted tweets praising and welcoming home Taliban prisoner Sgt. Bowe Bergdahl after questions arose over the prisoner swap that freed him.[39] Time selected Politwoops as one of their 50 Best Websites of 2012, calling it "strangely fascinating."[40] Politiwoops ended in 2015 when Twitter, citing concerns over user privacy, revoked the Sunlight Foundation's permission to use its application program interface.[41]

Upwardly Mobile

In April 2012, the Sunlight Foundation released Upwardly Mobile, a web application to research where in the United States individuals could enjoy financial security and an improved quality of life. The relocation search tool is mostly powered by publicly available federal economic data that includes employment, salaries, average rents, and local medical and transportation costs.[42][43]

Churnalism

The online Churnalism tool was launched in 2013 in collaboration with the Media Standards Trust as an open-source plagiarism detection engine. The tool allows users to compare two sources of text to analyze similarities.[44][45]

Ad Hawk

In 2012, the Sunlight Foundation launched a mobile application called "Ad Hawk" to identify political ads. Similar to many song identification services, Ad Hawk makes an acoustic fingerprint based on audio recorded while a television or radio ad plays and compares it against a central database for a match. Ad Hawk will return information from a variety of sources about the candidate, organization and issues ads if a match is found.[46][47]

Events and contests

In 2009, the Sunlight Foundation held the first annual TransparencyCamp, a conference where open government advocates met to discuss problems and solutions with government data.[48]

In August 2012, the Sunlight Foundation launched Sunlight Academy, an interactive training portal to help journalists, staffers, and citizens use transparency tools to research issues more effectively.[49]

In March 2010, the Sunlight Foundation announced the Design for America contest to encourage visualizations to make complex government information more understandable to citizens.[50]

References

  1. ↑ 1.0 1.1 Lua error in package.lua at line 80: module 'strict' not found.
  2. ↑ 2.0 2.1 Lua error in package.lua at line 80: module 'strict' not found.
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  4. ↑ Lua error in package.lua at line 80: module 'strict' not found.
  5. ↑ 5.0 5.1 5.2 Lua error in package.lua at line 80: module 'strict' not found.
  6. ↑ Lua error in package.lua at line 80: module 'strict' not found.
  7. ↑ Lua error in package.lua at line 80: module 'strict' not found.
  8. ↑ Lua error in package.lua at line 80: module 'strict' not found.
  9. ↑ 9.0 9.1 Lua error in package.lua at line 80: module 'strict' not found.
  10. ↑ Lua error in package.lua at line 80: module 'strict' not found.
  11. ↑ Lua error in package.lua at line 80: module 'strict' not found.
  12. ↑ Lua error in package.lua at line 80: module 'strict' not found.
  13. ↑ Lua error in package.lua at line 80: module 'strict' not found.
  14. ↑ Lua error in package.lua at line 80: module 'strict' not found.
  15. ↑ Lua error in package.lua at line 80: module 'strict' not found.
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  19. ↑ Lua error in package.lua at line 80: module 'strict' not found.
  20. ↑ 20.0 20.1 Lua error in package.lua at line 80: module 'strict' not found.
  21. ↑ Lua error in package.lua at line 80: module 'strict' not found.
  22. ↑ Lua error in package.lua at line 80: module 'strict' not found.
  23. ↑ Lua error in package.lua at line 80: module 'strict' not found.
  24. ↑ Lua error in package.lua at line 80: module 'strict' not found.
  25. ↑ Lua error in package.lua at line 80: module 'strict' not found.
  26. ↑ Lua error in package.lua at line 80: module 'strict' not found.
  27. ↑ 27.0 27.1 Lua error in package.lua at line 80: module 'strict' not found.
  28. ↑ Lua error in package.lua at line 80: module 'strict' not found.
  29. ↑ Lua error in package.lua at line 80: module 'strict' not found.
  30. ↑ Lua error in package.lua at line 80: module 'strict' not found.
  31. ↑ Lua error in package.lua at line 80: module 'strict' not found.
  32. ↑ Lua error in package.lua at line 80: module 'strict' not found.
  33. ↑ Lua error in package.lua at line 80: module 'strict' not found.
  34. ↑ Lua error in package.lua at line 80: module 'strict' not found.
  35. ↑ Lua error in package.lua at line 80: module 'strict' not found.
  36. ↑ Lua error in package.lua at line 80: module 'strict' not found.
  37. ↑ Lua error in package.lua at line 80: module 'strict' not found.
  38. ↑ Lua error in package.lua at line 80: module 'strict' not found.
  39. ↑ Lua error in package.lua at line 80: module 'strict' not found.
  40. ↑ Lua error in package.lua at line 80: module 'strict' not found.
  41. ↑ Lua error in package.lua at line 80: module 'strict' not found.
  42. ↑ Lua error in package.lua at line 80: module 'strict' not found.
  43. ↑ Lua error in package.lua at line 80: module 'strict' not found.
  44. ↑ Lua error in package.lua at line 80: module 'strict' not found.
  45. ↑ Lua error in package.lua at line 80: module 'strict' not found.
  46. ↑ Lua error in package.lua at line 80: module 'strict' not found.
  47. ↑ Lua error in package.lua at line 80: module 'strict' not found.
  48. ↑ Lua error in package.lua at line 80: module 'strict' not found.
  49. ↑ Lua error in package.lua at line 80: module 'strict' not found.
  50. ↑ Lua error in package.lua at line 80: module 'strict' not found.

External links

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