December 27, 2007

Up For Grabs: Our Right To Govt. Info

Posted by Larisa Mann at 5:30PM

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When you apply for or pay down loans, check healthcare costs, or look for your tax information, you'll be reminded of some of the ways Congress can affect your life. Debates in Congress and in committees, and their outcomes in bills and laws, are technically public documents that we can have access to. However, not all are available online, and those that are, are hard to sort through, and lack contextual information like the lobbyists involved with those people whose words we can read.

Luckily for us, there are some new online tools that can help us extract and collect this information. This is good because we need to know when those in powerful public positions are charging off on harebrained schemes to monitor our every move, hand them over to our bosses or cave in to corporate interests in the allocation of federal funding for education and even (de)regulation of media.

When a bill is put before Congress that affects the cost of education, health care affordability or the right to express ourselves using available technology (or any other issue you might care about), it helps to know what's happening in those meetings, and how much money is backing the various arguments. More importantly we need to know what our government officials are doing, and where they get their money from.

The Sunlight Foundation has stepped up to this project: combining public information from different government transparency websites like GovTrack.us, the Center for Responsive Politics, GovernmentDocs.org, to provide "one-click disclosure" on important issues, politicians or a bill, all in one place.

Since government officials make decisions that affect everyone (regarding environmental degradation, education access, affordable housing, work safety, and privacy at home and school, for starters), the public has a right to see the context in which those decisions are made. Politicians take donations, meet with lobbyists, then retire to become lobbyists or work for the corporations whose business they formerly regulated.

Groups like the Sunlight foundation help us find that information out. Even better, many of their projects use citizen journalism -- since lots of this info is technically available but needs to be combined, projects (like this one that tracks down where staffers of resigned, retired, or jailed congresspeople work after they leave) rely on people like us getting involved in order to collect that information.

They enable citizen journalism too. Pick a subject you care about: toxic chemicals in your home neighborhood, availability of housing loans, health care, federal funding for education, the affordability of textbooks. These sites can help you figure out if anyone in the Federal government is working on these issues, what they are doing, and who helps fund it.

Many of the Sunlight projects rely on citizen research and journalism, but they also inspire it. Data is the starting point, as these open government campaigns make clear. But data really is only the beginning -- the next step is drawing your own connections and asking your own questions.