Bill Allison – Sunlight Foundation

Posted on 05. Oct, 2007 by David Cohn in Politics, Tools

Your work in networked/citizen/collaborative journalism:
At the risk of adding to the nomenclature, we like to think of our projects as being “distributed research.” While the goal is to dig out information or link relevant information, much of which can be used to tell stories, we often leave the telling of stories to others.

Sunlight has started several distributed research projects to bring more transparency and accountability to Congress. Each project differs greatly; we’ll describe just a few here. Congresspedia, which we launched with the Center for Media and Democracy, is a wiki-based “citizen’s encyclopedia on Congress” that anyone can contribute to and edit (though we have an in-house editor to oversee it for fairness and accuracy). Our “Is Congress a Family Business” project /research/familybusiness/\u003c/a\>) \nprovided\u003c/span\> citizen researchers with an online tool that guided them to \nonline databases to look up information about spouses of House members \n(specifically, whether or not a spouse drew a paycheck from the member’s \ncampaign committee), and enter their findings into the form. \u003cspan\>The tool both guided their research and collected their \ndata, even displaying updated totals on the number of members checked and the \nnumber who had been tentatively identified as paying their spouses. \n\u003c/span\>We engaged citizen journalists an effort to find out which Senator had \neffectively blocked passage of S. 223, a bill that would require Senate \ncampaigns to electronically file their contribution information with the Federal \nElection Commission (as House and presidential candidates already do); they \ncalled all 100 Senate offices in an effort to find out, and reported what they \nlearned to us via comments on blog posts and emails. Finally, we have recently \nlaunched EarmarkWatch.org, a site that lets users connect the dots between \nlawmakers, lobbyists, campaign contributors and earmarks, plus share info and \ncomments on whether earmarks meet pressing needs, pay off political \ncontributors, or are simply pure pork. The site is at once an investigative tool \nfor finding information on earmarks, a repository of that information, and a \nsocial networking site for those who want to bring transparency and \naccountability to congressional spending.\u003c/font\>\u003c/p\>\n\u003cp\>\u003cspan\>\u003cfont face\u003d\”Arial\” size\u003d\”2\”\>Additionally, we have \nprovided grants to other organizations involved in citizen journalism, including \nCapitol News Connection (\u003ca href\u003d\”http://www2.pri.org/cncnews/index.html\” target\u003d\”_blank\” onclick\u003d\”return top.js.OpenExtLink(window,event,this)\”\>http://www2.pri.org/cncnews\u003cWBR\>/index.html\u003c/a\>) for \na project that would allow citizens to have their questions asked of \nlawmakers by CNC reporters; the Center for Indpependent Media (\u003ca href\u003d\”http://www.newjournalist.org\” target\u003d\”_blank\” onclick\u003d\”return top.js.OpenExtLink(window,event,this)\”\>”,1] ); /provided citizen researchers with an online tool that guided them to online databases to look up information about spouses of House members (specifically, whether or not a spouse drew a paycheck from the member’s campaign committee), and enter their findings into the form. The tool both guided their research and collected their data, even displaying updated totals on the number of members checked and the number who had been tentatively identified as paying their spouses. We engaged citizen journalists an effort to find out which Senator had effectively blocked passage of S. 223, a bill that would require Senate campaigns to electronically file their contribution information with the Federal Election Commission (as House and presidential candidates already do); they called all 100 Senate offices in an effort to find out, and reported what they learned to us via comments on blog posts and emails. Finally, we have recently launched EarmarkWatch.org, a site that lets users connect the dots between lawmakers, lobbyists, campaign contributors and earmarks, plus share info and comments on whether earmarks meet pressing needs, pay off political contributors, or are simply pure pork. The site is at once an investigative tool for finding information on earmarks, a repository of that information, and a social networking site for those who want to bring transparency and accountability to congressional spending.

Additionally, we have provided grants to other organizations involved in citizen journalism, including Capitol News Connection for a project that would allow citizens to have their questions asked of lawmakers by CNC reporters; the Center for Independent Media ) to train \ncitizen journalists and establish a Washington bureau to cover Congress; \nCitizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington (\u003ca href\u003d\”http://www.citizensforethics.org/\” target\u003d\”_blank\” onclick\u003d\”return top.js.OpenExtLink(window,event,this)\”\>\u003cfont face\u003d\”Times New Roman\” size\u003d\”3\”\>http://www.citizensforethics\u003cWBR\>.org\u003c/font\>\u003c/a\>) to create an Open Community \nOpen Document Review System, enabling citizens to review and annotate documents \nobtained from the government through the Freedom of Information Act; and we\’ve \nalso supported both NewAssignment.net and the Center for Citizen Media (\u003ca href\u003d\”http://citmedia.org/\” target\u003d\”_blank\” onclick\u003d\”return top.js.OpenExtLink(window,event,this)\”\>\u003cfont face\u003d\”Times New Roman\” size\u003d\”3\”\>http://citmedia.org\u003c/font\>\u003c/a\>). A full list of our grantees can be found \nat \u003ca href\u003d\”http://www.sunlightfoundation.com/grants\” target\u003d\”_blank\” onclick\u003d\”return top.js.OpenExtLink(window,event,this)\”\>http://www.sunlightfoundation\u003cWBR\>.com/grants\u003c/a\>. \n\u003c/font\>\u003c/span\>\n\u003cp\>\u003cfont face\u003d\”Arial\” size\u003d\”2\”\>\u003c/font\>\u003c/p\>\u003cfont face\u003d\”Arial\” size\u003d\”2\”\>\u003c/font\>\u003c/p\>\n\u003cp\>\u003cfont face\u003d\”Arial\” size\u003d\”2\”\>2. What are your goals?\u003c/font\>\u003c/p\>\n\u003cp\>\u003cfont face\u003d\”Arial\” size\u003d\”2\”\>Our main goal is to bring transparency to Congress, \nand each project we do is designed to further that goal. Sometimes we are \ntrying, explicitly, to answer a question (how many House members were paying \ntheir spouses from campaign funds in 2006; who has the secret hold on a \ntransparency bill) that require the same steps to be repeated dozens or hundreds \nof times (calling Senate offices, looking up expenditure records for House \ncampaigns). For other projects, the goal of aggregating the distributed research \nis secondary to the task at hand (scoring each member’s official Web site for \ntransparency; evaluating the merits of individual earmarks), though we can still \nanswer big questions (how many members post their schedules on their Web sites; \nhow many earmark recipients lobby Congress).\u003c/font\>\u003c/p\>\n\u003cp\>\u003cfont face\u003d\”Arial\” size\u003d\”2\”\>”,1] ); / to train citizen journalists and establish a Washington bureau to cover Congress; Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington to create an Open Community Open Document Review System, enabling citizens to review and annotate documents obtained from the government through the Freedom of Information Act; and we’ve also supported both NewAssignment.net and the Center for Citizen Media. A full list of our grantees can be found at http://www.sunlightfoundation.com/grants.

What are your goals?
Our main goal is to bring transparency to Congress, and each project we do is designed to further that goal. Sometimes we are trying, explicitly, to answer a question (how many House members were paying their spouses from campaign funds in 2006; who has the secret hold on a transparency bill) that require the same steps to be repeated dozens or hundreds of times (calling Senate offices, looking up expenditure records for House campaigns). For other projects, the goal of aggregating the distributed research is secondary to the task at hand (scoring each member’s official Web site for transparency; evaluating the merits of individual earmarks), though we can still answer big questions (how many members post their schedules on their Web sites; how many earmark recipients lobby Congress).

What are some of your notable achievements?
Using the Web in innovative ways to make the distributed research process user friendly and even enjoyable: We launched “Congress’ Family Business” at 3:30 p.m. on a Friday of a holiday weekend, and expected the research to take three or four weeks. Within 40 hours, the project was completed—citizen journalists found that 19 spouses were paid by a member’s campaign committee in the 2006 election cycle, totaling more than $636,000. The amazing thing about the project was that our researchers found that doing the research was almost addictive. Most participants researched multiple members—anywhere from 10 to 100. And remember, this project involved searching through campaign committee expenditure reports—the sort of task that normally causes eyes to glaze over.

Designing research projects around available data sources: One of the most important things we do is to steer our volunteer muckrakers to reliable data sources they can use to find information for our projects, providing enough instructions to familiarize them with their use. Our hope is that by making them aware of these resources, they will check them again when they need government information in the future.

Lesson you’ve learned (including mistakes you’ve made)
We’ve learned a lot as we’ve gone along, largely through making mistakes. Our first effort in this field, after Sunlight broke the story of then-Speaker Dennis Hastert personally profiting from a $207 million earmark for a highway project, we asked our readers to investigate their own member’s personal financial disclosures, and let us know what they found. We had about 100 eager volunteers, but no way to train them and, except for email, no way to communicate with them. There was also no methodology, no set of questions we were trying to answer, just a suggestion that people take a peak at their lawmaker’s financial disclosure form and report back to us on anything that looked odd. While a lot of people did a lot of work looking, only one story emerged from it (and that one on the Web site of Harpers, as one of our citizen researchers tipped off a reporter there to what he had found). Our second effort, a 2006 project called Exposing Earmarks (conducted jointly with a coalition of other groups) similarly suffered from a lack of thought on the front end: While a lot of people looked at individual earmarks, there was no means of collecting and correlating that information at one site, so that we ended up with a scattered effort. Since that time, we have learned that there is no substitute for having a research tool that helps guide research and collect information. Our newest effort, EarmarkWatch.org, also allows for interaction among researchers–a research, publishing and social networking tool.

Are you getting revenue for this? How?
No, we don’t get revenue for this. The Sunlight Foundation is a 501(c)3.

What’s next? What do you need to get to the next level?
What we need most of all is more transparency from Congress! Beyond that, we’d like to develop means of distributing tasks like fact checking, we’d like to be able to create a network of volunteers who would take on more responsibility for running the projects we create. We’d also like to come up with more cool tools using data from other sources while allowing others to make tools using our data.