E.M.: I don't really know the answer to that question, but I think the answer would be quite simple: it is that power resides in the information and so those who are in power want to hold it close and those who are out of power want it open so they have more access to decisions and to participating in decisions and the understanding how decisions were made. I do not know that there is anything much greater than that in the history, you know? There is a natural tendency among those who are empowered to want to stay in power. They know that controlling the flow of information is absolutely one way to do that and so that has been the default of most governments.
R. K.: OK. So, give me some basic definitions. What is transparency? What is secrecy? And then tell me about the Sunlight Foundation.
E.M.: Well again, secrecy are things that are not made publicly available and open government is really sort of the new term rather than -- I mean transparency is the process, it is the "thing," it is not the "why." The "why" is accountability and open government and a transparent, open government is one that where the data is made freely available, that anything publicly accessible would be online and accessible in a twenty first century style and for twenty first century modern, using modern technology. And it is pretty intuitive I think, Rob, as to what openness in government is and how deep it should go and I think, as I said earlier, we are on a process. We are moving in that direction. It is actually strikingly quickly that this process is moving forward and we do hit road blocks from time to time and we have to fight our way through them, and one of the other big problems of course is we have to get everything put in to law so that it cannot just be voluntary efforts on government, on behalf of government, you know they could change at the whim of whoever our elected leaders are.
R. K.: So, tell me about the Sunlight Foundation.
E.M.: The Sunlight Foundation is non-partisan, non-profit, it was founded in 2006. It really saw the potential of using the internet and the new technologies as a way of engaging citizens to hold it's government officials and government itself, accountable with explicit demand for open data and open information. We do that through our policy advocacy and we really work at this point at all levels, from the municipal level to state level, to the federal level and we work globally as well. And we create tools, both global tools and web-based tools. We do journalism as well and the other thing that we do is we encourage other like-minded young start-ups to get engaged in this kind of work as well.
So, some specifics, we created and just re-launched a site called open-congress, which receives about three hundred and fifty thousand visitors a month. These are people who want to know what is happening in congress. So "opencongress.org" takes the legislative information from the U.S .Congress, makes it easily understandable, easily accessible, and brings together a number of other relevant pieces of information like campaign finance information, like biographical information, like contact information and allows citizens to comment on and become a part of the process of the U.S. Congress. It is a hugely popular site, we have a mobile app. for that. The mobile app is used fifty to seventy five thousand times a week by people and this was a great example. We had no idea how many people would be interested in what the U.S. Congress does. To our astonishment, frankly, lots of people are very interested and engaged in that.
We have another site that is very similar, although was more difficult to create called "open states." For this site we take the legislative information from all fifty states and with volunteer scrapers scraping information and we put it in to a common data format so that at "openstates.org" you can find the information in all fifty states. You can do your homework and see whether certain pieces of legislation have been introduced in other states and if so whether the language is the same and it basically has the same information as Open Congress does. It has campaign finance information, the opportunity to participate. So we constantly create tools where we see or feel or understand there is a demand to be.
We have a site called Scout which enables you to track legislation and regulation from all fifty states and in the federal sites as well. On Scout there are sort of sub-sections so if you are interested in gun control, you can see all of the information that is coming through, all the legislation that is of interest on gun control and you can create your own curated site. So these individual project-based or focused tools that we create are really designed to enable the citizens and journalists to have access to information about what they care about when they care about it. All of this rides on the 24/7 culture that we operate in today and we expect our politicians to respond to us quickly, we expect to be able to converse with them, on Twitter or on their Facebook pages so we are entering in a new era of interactive democracy and that's what is so exciting I think about Sunlight's work, which is that we take advantage of this new technology to engage people.
R. K.: Tell me about how journalists and activists can and do use the tools that you have created.
E.M.: Well, one is when we won...; one stunning example which is Sunlight creates lots of data sets itself. We have data sets of members of Congress and members of state legislature and we are moving in to sort of local official data sets as well and we put technical interfaces on this data so that other people can pick them up and use it, they are called APIs. Our APIs just reached their one billionth use and so part of what Sunlight does, or has become, is a kind of infrastructure, in an institution where we make the data available to other people to do what they will with it. Groups like, people on gun control are using our data, the SOPA/PIPA open internet fight was using Sunlight's data to power that mass movement against those pieces of legislation. So they are just examples everyday, there are a billion examples out there, I suppose it would be fair to say, on how the work Sunlight has done actually empowers other institutions and other advocacy groups. Our advocacy group works specifically on transparency. That is all that we do our advocacy work on. Opening data, moving pieces of legislation that would require electronic, digitized reporting of either existing data or new data, but the work that we produce actually encourages other people to do this as well.
R. K.: So who would the Transparency heroes - the friends in Congress and politics who are really helping your cause?
E.M.: Well there are a lot of people who are helping the cause. I mean, I would -- when you asked about Transparency heroes I wasn't thinking about Congress to be perfectly honest, I was thinking about the hundreds of thousands of citizens around the country who have, in their own way, jumped on the Transparency and Open-Information bandwagon who are demanding this information, who are creating tools and websites on their own. To me, that has been, these people are real heroes. They do this kind of work on a shoestring, they do it because they're interested in different topics. They spend their Saturdays and Sundays at Hack-a-Thons working on civic data and trying to make that information more accessible to their constituencies. Those, to me are the real heroes.
We do have friends in Congress -- in both the House and the Senate. They're doing their job to carry legislation forward and to move ideas or executive orders in to law but the real heroes are the people who have been, the teacher in the school system understands why having access to education data is critically important to make sure that their school district is given the kind of money that the district with a wealthier population lives in, ensuring an equity in that kind of thing; those are the real heroes in my mind.
R. K.: That is a real Bottom Up answer really which is part of my agenda in having you on the show to explore how Transparency contributes to Bottom Up and apparently Bottom Up processes are what is making Transparency work. How many people do you have using APIs?
E.M.: I don't know what the numbers are, the number of keys. I mean, I think there are probably something in the range of five thousand registered users. Or perhaps that is our end-goal for this year, so we're in the range. That's a lot of people if they are activists. We require a sign-in but we don't require them to be publicly discussed so the only ones we can talk about are people who said yes we can talk about what our work is because we want to encourage people to do their own work and not feel that they have to be held up to the light of day.
R. K.: So a little bit more going after the Bottom Up angle of this, how does Transparency empower people from the bottom up?
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