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Describe your project
Since our founding in 2006, the Sunlight Foundation has assembled and funded an array of databases and Web-based software tools to illuminate the interplay of money, lobbying, influence and government in Washington to a degree never before possible. We are now working on a new set of related applications we call Sunlight Media Services (SMS) to demonstrate how such congressional transparency data affects citizens and their congressional districts on the local level. SMS is an attempt to implement Tip O'Neill's famous aphorism that "all politics is local." Accordingly, SMS will offer to the mainstream media a complete package of information about the components of congressional politics germane to the communities they serve. Designed to be integrated into online, print and broadcast mainstream media news coverage, SMS will be a Web hosted, regionally customizable, ready-to-use array of political news and government information content compiled from all the data and tools developed by Sunlight and a consortium of its grantees. SMS can, thus, provide access to a robust array of graphical, interactive sources of information about local senators and representatives, their major contributors, those who lobby them, their earmarks and other legislative activities - whatever is most desired by the readership. SMS can also serve as a research tool for journalists to localize their presentation of national stories by plugging a draft article into a Web form which suggests relevant tags, graphics and additional lines of inquiry, and which could also automatically produce a sidebar of relevant data tied to keywords in their draft article. Because SMS will vastly enhance the capacity of traditional news media to provide coverage of the local area’s members of Congress, it should dramatically increase and improve the flow of continuously updated information so that communities can see how they and their representatives and senators and locally important issues are affected by lobbyists, major political donors and other influencers in their
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Who would want to use it and why?
The number of people who go online as their first source of political news and information is 60 million and growing, according to a January 2007 survey by the Pew Internet Center. However, few readers and reporters have the time or expertise to visit multiple sites to research what influences their politicians or to discover interlocking interests lobbying on an issue in the news. Increasingly, some in mainstream media (newspapers in particular, but also local TV and radio sites) and bloggers use the work of Sunlight and its grantees daily. SMS is a solution to the problem that it may be years before mainstream media sites invest in building up their own online infrastructures to deliver this kind of contextually relevant information.
Why are you the best person or organization to develop this project?
Better data-driven storytelling by journalists and wider distribution of congressional disclosure information has always been core to the Sunlight Foundation vision. Sunlight’s facilitation of databases of political information and the development of technologies to apply to them has freed billions of bytes of important data from their basements, paper or other non-digitized formats and even from digital silos. We are unique in this core work. Publication of the fact of Sunlight's progress in these efforts has created an unprecedented demand for more: more information, more transparency, and more easy-to-use tools. The now-online datasets we have made available now have downloads in the millions per month. To wit, since its launch in October 2006, FedSpending.org, a Sunlight-sponsored searchable database of federal contracts created by OMB Watch, has had more than 6 million cumulative searches. As we head further into our second full year, Sunlight intends to pursue several inter-related projects to further push the envelope. On a typical day, Sunlight’s array of initiatives to get members of Congress to be more transparent about how they spend their time every day is cited – from tech blogs extolling Sunlight’s mashup contest entries, to mainstream and inside-the-Beltway coverage of our review of how Congress can make better use of the Web to our analysis of earmarks from academic, conservative and nonpolitical points of view. Sunlight's information, and tools developed by Sunlight Labs and Sunlight grantees, are recognized as reputable source information by major media including The Associated Press, The Washington Post, USA Today, CNN, ABC, NPR, Bill Moyers Journal, as well as high profile political news blogs such as Daily Kos and TPMmuckraker.com. Sunlight's "Pop-up Politicians," a tool which surfaces aggregated data on members of Congress on Web sites, even received laudatory praise from premier technology news blog, Tech Crunch.
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What potentially bigger thing might happen if everything went perfectly and the stars all aligned?
The very big thing that Sunlight Media Services may help bring about, if all the stars align, would be a reinvigorated civic culture and a restoration of public confidence in our democratic institutions. Public approval of Congress, the President and the media are at historically low levels; public cynicism and disdain for government and the press have never been higher. By providing online readers with timely, accurate and accessible information on government, Sunlight Media Services would lead to a healthier public debate about the performance of our elected officials, one based on facts rather than slogans. Journalists who use the service’s multiple streams of data will be able to write better, more thoroughly researched stories, without having to leave their desks. Readers will be able to access that same information, finding out for themselves what is going on in Capitol Hill, and seeing how it affects them and their communities. And elected officials and their challengers will be able to run on a robustly documented and displayed public record, easily accessed by all citizens—whether the news organization that hosts it is The New York Times or the Smyth County News & Messenger. In that sense, Sunlight Media Services will be more than just a means for writing “gotcha” stories. Combining localized data on government spending, lobbying and campaign finance with information on legislation and votes would give citizens a vastly enriched baseline of information for evaluating their elected officials. Sunlight Media Services will provide a matrix of political information that will allow informed citizens and journalists to better understand and judge the actions of their elected officials.
How will you be able to measure whether or not your project has really made a difference?
Obviously the key for us is to get this information before as many eyes as possible. We’ll closely monitor a number of metrics, including the number of media and other sites that carry Sunlight Media Services, the number of hits and unique visitors the data receives, the number of blog posts that link to it and the news stories written that rely on it. We’ll also look for evidence that readers are finding the information valuable, and signs that readers of media using SMS are better informed about politics as a result. As important as these measures are for quantifying the reach of Sunlight Media Services, we believe its true impact will come in ways we don’t as yet anticipate. When a community group uses data from Sunlight Media Services to make their argument in a petition or court filing, when an independent Web developer notices a pattern in campaign contributions from agricultural and banking interests to a particular lawmaker and publishes an interactive tool that lets anyone check their own congressional representatives for the same pattern, when individuals and groups spring up like mushrooms finding things in the data and using it in new ways (that will make us wonder why we hadn’t thought of them first), then we’ll know that the project has really made a difference.
Requested amount from Knight News Challenge
What unmet need does your proposal answer?
At a time when media organizations are struggling to find the resources to cover the news, Sunlight Media Services will provide a comprehensive and cost effective tool for covering Congress and the federal government. Reporters who no longer have the time to follow the money by wading through hundreds of pages of paper records looking for the sponsors of congressional travel or investments on financial disclosures and then match them with line items buried in appropriations committee reports will have all of that information—and more—at their fingertips. A few clicks of the mouse will replace the countless hours once required to mine federal data. And because that data will also be available to the news organization’s readers, displayed using customized graphics, visualizations and in other reader-friendly formats, Sunlight Media Services will serve as a model and catalyst for helping publishers, editors and reporters develop new formats for journalism. A few numbers, referenced in isolation in a story, do not always provide readers with sufficient context. Is the $70,000 given by employees of a special interest to the campaign of a member of Congress over the course of a dozen years a lot of money? Was a representative’s vote for a telecom tax break an anomaly or part of a pattern? Sunlight Media Services will be able to provide at-a-glance context for that kind of information. The news won’t always be a story or a photo or a video clip: sometimes a tag cloud or an interactive timeline better engages a reader. Sunlight Media Services will help media organizations discover and develop new methods of presenting information, a critical need in the future development of journalism.
Total cost of project, including all sources of funding
What specific, unique opportunity do you see that will make this project more successful than others trying to fill that general
Since its inception, the Sunlight Foundation has made two of its core goals digitizing federal data, whether it be spending through contracts, grants and social safety net programs, financial disclosure information from members of Congress, legislative votes or earmarks, and then making those data sets compatible with one another—that is, moving them out of their silos. While there are multiple organizations that provide individual data sets, no organization has devoted as much time or energy into developing the infrastructure necessary to combine this information. Sunlight has a consortium of grantees (see list below) ready to contribute their own data to this effort, all of whom are following or adopting our technical standards for making their data compatible with the application programming interfaces that will make Sunlight Media Services possible. And Sunlight has the expertise to combine these data sets in a way that allows them to tell meaningful stories—taken together, these streams of information give any citizen with access to the Internet the ability to know as much about what’s really happening in Washington as a seasoned insider.
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How will people learn about what you are doing?
Because Sunlight Media Services is not a destination on the Web but rather an element that will be hosted on already prominent media sites, getting word out to the general public will be relatively easy. In order to make media organizations aware of and eager to adopt the service, we will embark on a three-pronged strategy. We will begin by building a constituency for Sunlight Media Services among working journalists by launching an ambitious effort to train reporters across the country on the service and its underlying databases. The training would familiarize them with the wealth of information available through the Journalist’s Desk, a tool designed to enhance the content of written political or government news stories with additional, relevant data from Sunlight Media Services. We will conduct one-on-one training, training for groups of reporters and editors in newsrooms, starting with about two-dozen leading Washington bureaus and at journalism conferences like Investigative Reporters and Editors and the National Institute of Computer Assisted Reporting. We will host regular classes at the National Press Club as well. Second, we will work with organizations like the Associated Press Managing Editors, which advocates best practices to daily and weekly newspaper editors at more than 4,000 papers, the Online News Association, the Radio and Television News Directors Association and the National Press Club Foundation to advocate adoption of Sunlight Media Services as a “best practice” for media Web sites. Finally, by reaching out to independent media, including bloggers and nonprofit organizations, through online “Webinars,” screencasts and interactive online training curricula, we will rely on the viral nature of the Web to draw public attention to Sunlight Media Services.
Do you have any other funding or investment? We’re interested in knowing who else is interested in your project.
In the early stages of development, Sunlight committed significant resources to the core development of this project. This included making grants to organizations like the Center for Responsive Politics and OMB Watch to digitize federal data, as well as developing the internal capacity (by creating and staffing Sunlight Labs) to undertake such a project. Since that time, the Pew Charitable Trusts has expressed some interest in the project, and is considering making, for each of two years, $150,000 investments in Sunlight Media Services.
Are you working with anyone else to complete this project? If so, please give names and what they would do?
We have a consortium of grantees who will supply a good deal of the data. For the initial prototype of Sunlight Media Services (being developed for the site MinnPost.com, the nonprofit journalism enterprise, which has agreed to serve as a proving ground for the concept), Sunlight will work with three primary groups. The Center for Responsive Politics, the venerable transparency group that tracks campaign finance and political influence, will supply information on donations from individuals and PACs, lobbyists, congressional travel and conflicts-of-interest data. OMB Watch, creators of FedSpending.org, will provide data on all federal spending, including contracts to individual companies and grants to individuals and organizations. Taxpayers for Common Sense, the premier resource for information on congressionally directed spending, will provide earmark data. As we expand the array of data available through Sunlight Media Services, we will work draw data from sites like GovTrack.us and others, many of which we feature on our “Insanely Useful Web sites” page online at http://www.sunlightfoundation.com/resources. We will leverage their work to bring greater utility and prominence to their work by integrating their data.
Who else is working in this area? How does your work fit into the larger context of work in this area?
While we are aware of a number of groups (including members of our consortium) who digitize government data, no one else is currently working to aggregate and integrate the data in a distributed system that can be accessed at multiple points, in the way that Sunlight Media Services envisions. The Sunlight Foundation has already catalyzed an exponential increase in the amount of digital political information—all freely available to the public—and will integrate it and distribute it inexpensively. While some for-profit groups (CQ’s PoliticalMoneyline) offer for purchase some of this data, they do not have plans to make it as widely available as Sunlight Media Services.
What do you guarantee will happen if you complete the activities in this proposal?
Sunlight Media Services will be a permanently available research resource created and used by our organization, our partner organizations, other organizations with an interest in transparency, good government, and specific policy outcomes, and the general public. It will give a huge boost to the journalism community by providing a treasure trove of resources and data that will change the way reporters research and write about government, and the way editors assign and evaluate stories. By saving innumerable person-hours once spent in dimly lit basements of federal office buildings or in front of computers downloading and building databases for local coverage, it will greatly ameliorate the budgetary hurdles news organizations have when they want to provide substantive coverage of Congress. It will raise the bar of expectations the public has of media organizations in reporting on the federal government while lowering the bar for journalists to meet those expectations—regardless of how large or small the organization might be. By providing both localized information and access to national data, it will enhance reporters’ ability to provide relevant and contextualized information to their readers. And it will point to the remaining gaps in our knowledge about the actions of Congress and government, inducing citizens, organizations and even members of Congress to embrace transparency and further open the workings of government to the oversight of an informed citizenry.