E.M.: Well you know if you're standing in your neighborhood with your cell phone and you're waiting for the next bus to come and you go to your app on bus schedules and there are many of these, and you see the next bus is due in fifteen minutes and you wait your fifteen minutes and the bus doesn't come, if you could then also press a button to be in touch with, send an email or a text or an SMS message to your local city council official and say, "My bus is late, it's been late for the last two weeks" or "my bus never comes" that's the kind of accountability that we want to be able to offer to people. That is sort of still in the dreamlight phase but we are not that far away from that. So it literally can help people in their everyday lives from "when do I catch the bus" or "why does my neighborhood never get their streets plowed in the winter and other neighborhoods do?" and it's just sort of an every day, in small and big ways.
Of course we think all of this is really important when it comes to election time and making sure people have the information that they need to decide who they want to vote for. And putting this information in a place where people have access to it, on their mobile phones or on the web is a terrific, terrific asset. We actually created a website and a protocol for people who don't have access to mobile phones and that's of course fewer and fewer people but some people don't, so that you can actually call in to our databases and we advertise this basically to our public libraries and it had some pretty interesting pick-up.
R. K.: Interesting pick up?
E.M.: Yes, the people were using this site, the numbers were not dramatic but as best we could tell they were really people who might have been handicapped in some form or fashion or they were older and not familiar with the technology.
R. K.: Ok great. Just getting it out there more and more accessible
E.M.: And that's what the technology does. It allows us to contact more people who are not in the normal, what we think is normal, the normal supporters of something like Accountability which sounds very grand and policy-oriented. These are just ordinary people who have cellphones and you can engage with them in ways that were never before possible.
R. K.: You said, and I quote, "connections between us are what are so critically important." Now I believe we are in the midst of a connection revolution. Can you talk about the tie between connections and transparency and secrecy?
E.M.: Sure. I mean I think it's fairly obviously, Rob, that we are more connected through the various social media that so many millions, tens of millions participate in. I know not everybody does but in some fashion it does connect us in at least cursory ways with a lot more people. We have relationships with people we've maybe even not met and so become the networks and the networked world we live in become a way to spread the information, the knowledge that we have, and becomes a way to not only inform our family and our friends, but also people that we are not that closely connected with, so the technology becomes a tool to create a demand for more transparency.
R. K.: You just talking about it as you did made me think of Edward Snowden and NSA and all of the ways that it's looking at all the connections between people. I wonder if an enormous amount of the technology that you're trying to create has not already been created by the government as part of their spy apparatus and it could be that maybe all we need to do is get them to turn the lights on and let us see what they know about so much of this stuff.
E.M.: I think the likelihood of that happening is, ah, small. The issue I think is to create tools that people want to use, that will give them the information and so Sunlight has turned in a substantial direction this year into actually asking people, "Take a look at this website" "What's easy to use?" "What do you like about it?" "What would you wish you had?" "What kind of information would you like to have?" It's a whole field called human-centric design, and it's not that the tools themselves have to be so sophisticated, it's really what people want and being more responsive to their design ideas and thoughts than just being very academic or policy-wonkish about what we do think people need to know. Let's just go out and ask them what they want.
R. K.: Okay. This is Sunlight Foundation and this is Sunlight Network and this is Transparency Camp. Can you talk about Sunlight Network and Transparency Camp?
E.M.: Sure. The Sunlight Network is our associated 501 C4 Organization which is essentially defunct. We used it a few years ago to run a campaign to ask members of Congress to sign a pledge to publish their official calendars online but really
R. K.: Good idea!
E.M.: since that time we haven't done any of that kind of political work at all. So that it really doesn't have a director. It does not have any income. We are not using that in the political sense at all, or any sense frankly.
The Transparency Camp, it has become Sunlight Foundation's major annual gathering and this is an "un-conference." Last year we had I think five, six hundred people registered for it. It now has an international component as well so this is a weekend in the spring, usually early in May in which people come together without a conference agenda and we allow people to ask and to say what they want to talk about. They create their own sessions. The participants, everyone is equal, everyone can decide if they want to do a session if they want. There's a big board and everybody puts their ideas up on the board and then the conference begins, basically. But it is created in real time, in a real place. The composition of the conference usually includes a lot of technologists, a lot of people who work for government, a lot of people who are in the non-profit space as well, and who are interested in both talking about what work they're doing and figuring, or identifying other potential collaborators for their work.
R. K.: Okay. That is exciting because I know it's really grown quickly.
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