 This is going to be a communications forum which is brought to us by Comparative Media Studies and the Center for Future Civic Media. My name is Christian Semihai. I direct the Center for Future Civic Media, which has been going for a little under three years now and we're dedicated to developing technologies for kind of democratic processes in geographic communities. Really with an emphasis on kind of new media and new forms of social action enabled by digital platforms. And we really see ourselves as having feet in a bunch of different areas. We come out of a long tradition in Comparative Media Studies and the MIT Media Lab of thinking through technologies for journalism and kind of reportage. And my own research group specialized in data transparency and to some degree whistleblowing as well. And so you put that together and you have a fairly good excuse for why we invited these two very skilled and talented people. So what I'll do is I'm just gonna introduce them each one by one reading off of bios that you could probably get online. Actually only one of them. And but then they're gonna start by giving short lectures of about 10 to 15 minutes. No more, I'll ask some questions at the end of that. And then we have a full hour for you guys to ask questions. So what I'd encourage you to do is take careful notes because right now it's more of a Frisbee day than a lecture day in the afternoon as one of our speakers pointed out and in fact was asking if we could just cancel. But I said no, no Frisbee for you. So there aren't that many people in the audience here. So it'd be great if you were ready to ask in-depth questions. I'm pretty sure that you'll have time to get follow-ups afterwards. So we'll start with Linda Fanton immediately to my left. Linda has a background in journalism, started out as a journalist in small towns of Wyoming, piecing together newspapers with hot wax and border tape and bailing wire and bailing wire. No, no bailing wire and not just hot wax but also a partnership, a close partnership with the readers. These rural news organizations are incredibly tight with their readers and technology has changed a lot in 18 years since she got started in journalism but her devotion to journalism and a deep connection with communities has not. In January 2008 she joined Minnesota Public Radio, American Public Media, which most of you know and a project called Public Insight Journalism, an initiative that's become a model for making news more relevant and collaborative and for reconnecting newsrooms with the communities that they serve. At the heart of it is a network of 83,000 as of now but it keeps growing, 83,000 public sources who share their insights and expertise to broaden and strengthen news coverage. Insight analysts use online games, simulations and collaborative tools to help newsrooms around the country identify emerging stories, define major news projects and engage citizens. After editing weekly papers in Wyoming, Fanton spent a dozen years as a reporter and editor for the Salt Lake Tribune where her investigative and storytelling skills were frequently honored. She worked briefly for Newsweek before moving to Minnesota and continues to write a monthly column for the Salt Lake Tribune. She's taught and lectured on journalism at the University of Wyoming where she earned a BA in journalism in 1992. So thank you so much for joining us. And next we have Ellen Miller who's the co-founder and executive director of the Sunlight Foundation, a Washington-based non-partisan, non-profit organization dedicated to using the power of internet to catalyze greater government openness and transparency and really the preeminent organization doing this in the United States. She's the founder of two other prominent Washington-based organizations in the field of money and politics, the Center for Responsive Politics and Public Campaign. And I have to say that I first engaged with CRP when one of my students was doing a big government transparency project and found that the CRP database was absolutely the best database on politics and money. And he was basically building a system that merged it with a bunch of other databases by a bunch of other organizations. And then we got a cease and desist letter. But on following up, they were very generous. They had real concerns and we addressed them and so a phenomenal organization. But she keeps producing them one every five years, six years or so, it's just incredible. And she's a nationally recognized expert on transparency and the influence of money and politics. And that's recognized as an expert on commenting on it, not participating in it. Her experience as a Washington advocate for more than 35 years spans the world's of nonprofit advocacy, grassroots activism and journalism. Ms. Miller's work was recently featured in Washington Magazine, Fast Company, who called her one of the most influential women in technology. Wired, who said that she's one of 15 people the president should listen to. And the Chronicle, Philanthropy and many more. She's also served as deputy director of campaign for America's Future, publisher of TomPain.com and a senior fellow at American Prospect. She spent nearly a decade working on Capitol Hill to great effect and she blogs regularly at SunlightFoundation.com. So without further ado, we're gonna have Linda open and give a presentation about public insight journalism. So thank you. Yeah. Yeah. That's the death knell. Well thanks, I really appreciate the opportunity to be here as Chris said. I started my journalism career in a bunch of small weeklies in Wyoming and I always said that people read the paper to find out if we knew what they knew. Which was absolutely true. So I joined NPR, American Public Media, a couple of years ago. And the Public Insight Network, Public Insight Journalism was in full swing. It was founded about six or seven years ago by some really smart people, Bill Kling, Michael Scholar, Bill Buesenberg and a couple of other folks who are still on our staff. And technology has changed a lot since then. I mean seven years in today's world is like centuries with the changes that we're seeing both in media and technology. But there's this basic premise behind PIJ, many of you, if you've heard of it, it's a big database of sources but it's really grown into something much, much more. It's actually almost a community of practitioners, if you will. I mean we're now embedded in so many newsrooms that we sort of see this as a great model for networked journalism and community engagement. And so I'm just gonna take a little time to walk you through a little bit of the particulars but maybe focus on how it's kind of reshaping news gathering in newsrooms around the country. So the principles behind PIJ are pretty simple that people out there in the community have a lot of different expertise, basically through their experiences or maybe they have authoritative expertise and they really wanna share it with us. And if we can tap into this, if we can collect it, if we can tag it, categorize it and infuse it into our journalism on a daily basis, we can make that coverage richer and deeper and more importantly, more relevant. So what's an example of someone who might be in the network? An airline mechanic with 20 years experience of working on Boeing 737s is going to have a certain amount of knowledge about the airworthiness of that plane, maybe even more so than an FAA instructor who's examining data and reports because they've actually generated the reports. So those are the kind of people who are in our network as well as FAA instructors actually. Elizabeth Warren knows a lot about bankruptcy but someone who's been through bankruptcy has different kinds of insights they could share on those issues. And so when people hear their voices and their stories reflected in news coverage, they connect with it, it becomes more relevant and relevancy builds trust and trust is something that's sorely lacking in the media today. But again, PIJ I think is more than that. It's actually grown into this system of engagement if you will and the idea is that as people share their first hand insights and such and they can become more informed about their communities and become more engaged and therefore more able to solve problems and in the case of what we're talking about here today, that builds a much more robust democracy and this is a principle that's fundamental to public media which is why it's not surprising that this whole system sort of took root at a public radio station. So how do we build this network? Well, we do it through a variety of means. We do it through our websites. So every partner that has PIJ embedded in its newsroom will have a website. We will create a web survey forms for the people in the network and we'll post those links on the websites. We'll do call outs on the radio and steer people to it. You see news orgs all the time doing this on Facebook now and Twitter. They tweet out a question, hey NPR national public radio is looking for people age 30 to 45 who just got kicked out of their homes or under foreclosure. We just happen to have a system that captures it all in a database and therefore it's searchable and it kind of changes the way you can approach journalism. We also reach out through, let's see it looks like these things are kind of all on a click here, sorry. They used to be automated. Again, social networking, social media, we use that as well and we also have developed a number of serious games that both work in this area of government transparent providing data and information to people but at the end of each of these games people have the option of joining the public and site network providing some demographic information and then comparing their results. I'll talk a little bit more about budget here on minute. We also meet people face to face. I mean digital tools are great but when you really wanna have engagement with the audience and the public sometimes you have to meet them where they are. Not everyone has access to the internet or a computer to fill out a web survey so it's really important that we do a lot of face to face work. But the important thing is kind of what we do with people's insights. This is what counts, this is why people sign up. When you have a database that's searchable by zip code, by passion, interest, expertise, occupation, you can quickly reach out to people and get insight. If you're familiar with the story of the airplane, the Northwest airplane that overshot the Minneapolis airport several months ago and it kind of became a big national story, we were able to turn to our database really quickly not only identify pilots, but pilots who fly the highly automated A320 plane. And in this case we found someone who had nine years experience flying the plane who was now an FAA consultant and had written his master's thesis on the consequences of boredom in the cockpit. It was incredible. We got him to write a commentary for the website so most news organizations were sort of talking about what happened in this instance and how dare you let people get on their laptops and have conversations. We actually had some real insight into why that's actually a good thing. We also are able to let people's voices sort of be heard on their own terms. So in this case we wanted to find out how on the 50th anniversary of Sputnik how that event had changed people's lives. We focused on the scientific community, we got a survey out, we distributed it, we contacted people who have connections to scientists and we were able to gather a ton of really rich stories that both aired on the radio, became a slideshow and now we have 250 physicists in the network. As a journalist you might think, wow, I need to talk to a physicist but think how it changes the way you do your job when you go, I'd have 250 physicists. What would I like to know from them? It's a much different process. When you have, journalism is often done with this catch and release method. Reporters interview people, they're done with them, they may contact them at another time but it's only when they need something from them. Because we regularly reach out to people, we make it a point to try to contact people in some fashion once a month in the network. We're sort of maintaining a connection or relationship to them over time. And this results in a level of trust so that they will tell us things and talk to us and go on the radio with stories that might be otherwise hard to get. In the case of Oregon Public Broadcasting, they're able to tell stories about, talk to people that the media often just talks about. So they've done series on stories of women who've had abortions, they've talked to people in bankruptcy, they've talked to people who've been in the penal system and this is all made possible by this continuous relationship that we build with the public. One of the sort of, I think really, maybe not surprising but most rewarding parts about public insight journalism is that it often reveals stories that you didn't know you were looking for. So in this case, KUOW in Seattle, the reporter wanted to do a story about condominiums, people who were renting and they got kicked out of their apartment buildings because they were gonna go condo. And because we were open enough about the questions we were asking, what we got was someone who was, used to live in a mobile home park. And two years earlier, the entire community was uprooted for a development that never took place because of the economy. So this reporter wasn't where they were looking but it was a much better story in their opinion. Oftentimes, PIJ can help us get ahead of the story. In this case, we had been talking to military contractors and soldiers about the tensions and experiences that they have, mostly testing a hunch. And so we'd been gathering information and stories from people. So when the Blackwater scandal broke, we had a really rich contextual story to tell about these people, whereas most media organizations were still sort of focused on just the scandal and we were able to add a lot of context to that. Mainly because we had our ears to the ground. And, let's see. PIJ also has the element to really make government more transparent and accountable, but maybe not in a way that you've traditionally thought about. New Hampshire Public Radio decided that they would use the public insight network and those tools as a way to reach out to their, they have something called town meeting in New Hampshire. I don't know if they have it here in Massachusetts too. But they reached out to all these town administrators and they said, we'd like to have some information about what are your budget priorities? What's on your budget agenda? And they got incredible response because people saw this as a public service. They put it on a website and there would be towns and people could click on it and see when the budget hearing was and what the major issues were. But what it gave the station was an incredible amount of information and they were able to spot a trend in how that basically the, I think it was, the towns were actually discouraging reliance on property tax and they could not have seen that. Had they not had this tremendous response and be able to see all that data in one place. In this instance, we had, we'd been talking to a lot of people about the economy. People have been telling us that there weren't a lot of jobs out there with benefits. So when the state issued its regular job vacancy report, we said, well, hey, what we'd like to see is how many of these jobs have benefits and how's that changed over time? Do you track that? And they said, yeah, we do but we've never actually parsed the data that way. Let us get back to you. And when they did, they were really astonished to find that there'd been like an 80% turnaround in several industries or 180 degree turnaround where 80% of the jobs used to be benefited and now only 20% of those jobs were benefited. So sometimes just talking to people and listening to them can teach you what questions to ask. And in this case, push government to think about the data they're collecting in a different way. I mentioned before that I think the public insight journalism is an incredible catalyst for collaboration. We've worked some with ProPublica. We did a big healthcare project with them where we queried our network and their network about what people's most pressing healthcare needs are. They then took that information and they looked at the bills before Congress and they wrote stories about how those bills would or would not meet the healthcare needs as stated by ordinary citizens around the country. We've also got an ongoing project with him right now around unemployment and unemployment insurance that's really interesting in gathering some good stories. I should say that the public insight network because it's self-selecting and it's not representative of the country is not a polling tool. We don't do surveys, we don't say 45% of women age 30 to 45 care about X. It's really a way to just kind of tap into what is important to people and what they're concerned about and what their experiences are and find their expertise and sort of bring that into our work. And so if you think about other ways that you can sort of use these tools, in this case, talk about government accountability. It's a different way. It's not that we started with a lot of data. It's that a reporter wanted to do a story about healthcare in the prisons and after we started talking to people we found that the real story was about all these abuses that had happened and taken place after a big riot in the Chino prison in Southern California. Because people aren't accessing the web and filling out surveys in prison, we actually found people who had relatives who were in prison and they took written printouts of our survey into the prison and had the prisoners fill them out and then we brought them back and entered them in by hand. And this resulted in an incredible investigative report and the state is now taking another look at what happened and launching a new investigation because of this work. So this is just a snapshot of some of the newsrooms right now that have public insight journalism. These tools and someone dedicated in their newsroom to doing this work. We just signed the Miami Herald. These are mostly media public radio partners but we do have an online newspaper in the St. Louis Beacon. We just signed the Miami Herald. We have, we're in discussions with about five other major newspapers in the country and we think that by December of this coming year with a little bit of luck and some funding, PIJ might be actively working in influencing journalism in 40 newsrooms around the country. This is incredible when you think about the network of this community of practitioners. Not only do we have a network of sources, we have a network of newsrooms that could suddenly collaborate with one another using some of the tools that both Ellen and the Sunlight Foundation have developed to document cloud which is a very interesting application that allows people to dissect public documents and make comments. So we think that the possibilities and the promise of PIJ has really yet to be fulfilled. And finally I'll just say that, you know, this is just a sort of a testimonial if you will from Margie Fry Vogel. She's a long time journalist. Now started up the St. Louis Beacon and she's pretty hard to impress but I think she'd be the first one to tell you that the future of news isn't about cheaper journalism, it isn't about citizen journalism, it's about better journalism. And that's really what PIJ I think is all about and with that I'll just end and thank you very much for your attention. Thanks, that was phenomenal. So now Ellen Miller from Sunlight Foundation. All right, so I confess I'm the one who suggested the Frisbee game. And I wanna say to Chris that I was not at the Center for Responsive Politics when they ordered the cease and desist order. And you will be happy to know that all of their data is now available through an open API thanks to funding from the Sunlight Foundation. So things do change in this world for sure. So let's, there'll be some slides coming shortly. Progress, there we are. So thank you Chris for having me. I have to confess this is my very first time at MIT and I'm just wowed by the architecture of this building and the student presentations that I saw this afternoon, it's just, it's terrific. It will not be my last visit here. So thank you for having me. So the Sunlight Foundation is a four year old organization that was designed specifically to use the power of the internet to catalyze greater government openness and transparency and to provide new tools and resources to media and citizens alike. We take our inspiration from Justice Brandeis' famous adage Sunlight is said to be the best of disinfectants and we're committed to improving access to government information by making it available online. Indeed, redefining what public information means as being online. And by creating new tools and websites and using social media to enable all of us to analyze the information and pull our collective intelligence in improving it. Use of technology as a tool for transparency, engagement and collaboration is absolutely corn central to everything we do. We've had this tremendous luxury of having been born four years ago. So we're not a longstanding NGO that has had to make a transition to this new age and it is a terrific luxury. Our work falls primarily into five buckets. I see I'm thinking springtime in the beach. Digitizing data is core and advocating for government to do the same. Building tools and websites on top of that data to make it easier for journalists, citizens, bloggers to use, sorry, citizen engagement and is our fourth category. And the last one is what I think of as the eating our own dog food category which is mostly doing media ourselves becoming a media outlet ourselves. Digitizing data is absolutely core to our work. We fund core data providers because they already do it well the Center for Responsive Politics the Institute on Money and State Politics taxpayers for common sense and several others. And this brings into our four campaign finance information lobbying, revolving door, personal financial disclosure, earmarks. This kind of data we refer to as influence data and it's very core to our mission to follow this kind of data. We've created new data sets and I'm gonna run through these quickly. We can talk about them later if you like. Such as fedspending.org this was the first publicly available free database of all government grants and contracts. Subsidiescope.org this is a project of actually a project of the Pew Charitable Trust a project to follow all government subsidies you've never been able to search them all in one place at one time. The foreign lobbyist influence tracker this is a sunlight database which took handwritten paper records and digitized them one year's worth of these records. These are lobbying forms filled out by individuals who represent foreign governments creating a database that was never possible to see before unless you wanted to go to the basement of the Justice Department and you happen to be in Washington somewhere between the hours of nine and five. So this is also a way for us to put pressure on the Justice Department to actually digitize this information. Another site, Lewis DB. This is a site sunlight created that scrapes the eight or nine different federal documents such as the congressional record and executive orders and the code of federal regulations that is a single search in a single searchable way and a site called Party Time. This is a site that actually tracks the fundraising events AKA parties and so you can follow them. There's Party Time. We actually last week posted on a Google map where the parties are by the, I can't remember, Minority Leader Boehner and the second in command Hoyer. So just to see if they had any overlaps of parties there. We also created databases out of information that the White House has made available. The White House visitor logs. They do put this information out on a monthly basis but it's really difficult to search. So we created a database out of it and then you can look and see whether Patrick AB, you could see his Google profile and if we could scroll over you could see whether he was listed on several other websites you could find out actually who it was and we've created a database out of House expenditure reports. These are office expenses which, unlike pressured the House and the Senate to release, the Senate will come later this year and you can determine how much money actually members of Congress are spending on bottled water in their office or sending flowers or other more important kinds of things. After having built and funded a number of databases, our holy grail is actually to build a data repository to bring these data sets together. We think of this as a data commons and this is our beta site called Transparency Data. Right now on this site, you can see for the first time, any place, a combination, this may be the project you were working on, Chris. This is all the state and all the federal campaign contributions. So you can search this site with someone's name like T. Boone Pickens and you can see all of his campaign contributions at the state and federal level. This week we'll be adding lobbying contributions, I mean, lobbying expenditures so you can see whether he was ever a lobbyist, whether he hired a lobbyist and we will soon add earmarks. You can see whether he received earmarks. To me, the mashing of these data sets together is really gets you sort of close to the holy grail of seeing the networks that make up Washington. Think as being able to look up an individual and who they funded across the board or the personal investments of members of Congress and whether they've received campaign contributions from those interests. This will be a very rich site. Another example of what we're building on top of this data is this site called the National Data Catalog known as Nat Dat Cat for short. So the federal government is now releasing, I has a plan actually to release all the federal government data piece by piece and put it on a site called data.gov. We looked at that and we said, this is great, we really applaud this. However, that's just executive branch data. Where does the regulatory branch data go? Where does the congressional data go? Where is the municipal or the state data, all of which is coming online increasing amounts? So we created the National Data Catalog which will actually be a catalog. The last site I showed you is a repository. We're bringing all the data in. This is actually gonna be a catalog which will be curated and tagged so that you can search according to your interest. You can say Kentucky Environmental Data, City of Louisville and you can see anything that would have pertained to that whether it comes from a federal source or from a state or local county source. Again, this site is in I would say alpha phase but it is actually functioning and this is a participatory source. So we will be asking citizens from around the country to contribute data to this. It will be vetted but we expect it to become a very rich source as we are seeing a torrent of new federal data across the board in terms of issue and topic. We are also to make use of this even easier building a series of widgets based on the very same data. It's another way to display it in web services that make it easier for journalists and bloggers to add all of these rich resources to their websites. I would say this is in pre-alpha. Lots of things in the pipeline. This work, this data focus work really sloshes over into the second bucket of our work which is the development of tools and websites to enable citizens to quickly grasp and understand the data. One example of this is our flagship site called opencongress.org. This is a joint project with sunlight and the Participatory Politics Foundation. This is a site that makes congressional legislative information easily accessible because it's all open source, open code. We woke up one morning and found a site which said Open Mass and it was all the Massachusetts data just dumped literally into this. And we are in the process now of developing an initial five state-based sites like this as an experiment to see if we can roll this out to all 50 states. Or you can go to a site like this called Congrelate, a tool where you can mix and match data sets of your choosing. We'll give you a panoply of them and you can decide what you wanna look at. This is called Congrelate, obviously about congressional information. Or a site like this called Capital Words. This is a website that takes the entire congressional record every single day and creates an algorithm by which it can sort and determine the single most frequently spoken word of the day. And you can use this site to see what your legislator might have said on that particular day and you can search by Congress, you can search by yesterday, by month. It's actually fun but also quite interesting because you can see fascinating political patterns. Or we do things that are a little bit more fun like this, which is an augmented reality app. This one we have plotted recovery.gov projects. And you can see them as you walk down the street. I actually haven't tried it here in Boston. I haven't on my iPhone. But so if you are interested in what's going on in your neighborhood, you could download, you could look at this. We also just plotted those parties that lawmakers are having in the same augmented reality app. And so if you're walking in Washington, you can see where the parties are. We are into the mobile app space as well. This one is for the iPhone called Real Time Congress. I showed this to a member of Congress earlier this week and he downloaded it immediately while we were talking and he looked at it. This provides all kinds of information about what's happening in Congress right now. He looked at it, looked at his staff and he said, I don't need you anymore. I'm not, the staff was horrified, of course. We have an Android app that's been downloaded 10,000 times. So these do seem to be of some interest. And this is our latest tool for journalists which is called Recovery Explorer. It's not our prettiest site but it may be among our most useful. So all this data comes from recovery.gov and in this application you can actually drill down to the recipient by state, by department. It's really quite an extraordinary tool for reporters. Sunlight has always been into the engagement business. We know and we have known from the very beginning that they're critically important to our work, to the huge task we have of making government more transparent. Our sunlight labs has successfully developed and engaged a community of over 2,000 developers with government data. We've done this through two apps for America contests and we just launched our most recent contest which we should talk about sometime. Chris called Design for America which is a proactive attempt to reach out to designers again to engage with government data. Our open house and open senate projects have engaged experts and citizens in identifying easy ways for the house and the senate to use technology to become more transparent. And we of course discovered the same thing that Linda has discovered which is when we do these lists there's the retired ex who spent 25 years working in congress who knows every rule, every regulation and they now live on the west coast. But through the groups that we've developed we can get their expertise and help very much help contribute to the kinds of things we advocate for. We've held two transparency camps which usually have a mix of developers, government, citizen activists and in fact we have one next weekend if people are interested in signing up for it. We've launched an ongoing platform for distributed research called Transparency Core a place for citizens to engage in ongoing research with us. And all of these sites are driven towards nurturing communities to get them more engaged either directly themselves or with sunlight. And our latest effort which was actually launched this afternoon is this project a campaign, the public equals online campaign. What we hope will catalyze a transparency movement around the US of citizens advocating for online, real-time access to government data. Much of this work, this is supposed to be a slide of Transparent Washington is the best we could do. Much of this work really is done in a way to promote a legislative agenda that we have developed really over the last couple of years. We like what we do. We like creating databases. We like creating tools and interfaces for citizens. But we actually have this radical notion that it's government's responsibility to do it themselves. We'll take it and push it to the next degree but government is responsible and so we have been working very closely and meet regularly with the staff at the White House on their open government directive. We work very closely with members of Congress. We have catalyzed a transparency caucus in Congress which was just announced earlier this week. And we've helped introduce a new bill this week, a piece of legislation called the Public Online Information Act and are working with lawmakers as well to enhance earmark disclosure. You wouldn't be surprised to hear we favor systemic lobby reform which means online real-time reporting and dramatically enhanced online disclosure of campaign finance information particularly in the wake of the recent Supreme Court decision Citizens United. The final bucket of our work is really to practice what we preach, becoming a media outlet ourselves. That's the eating our own dog food side of what we do. So this is a shot of our homepage. Where on our homepage we host six different blogs with rapid fire commentary from maybe eight or nine different bloggers. Most of the staff blogs in one direction or another. We have one website that's actually just devoted to our reporting called the Reporting Group website. And this is a site that has a number of interesting features not only a Twitter stream from the staff of this particular group but it has a real-time ticker so as new data is released it actually appears on this site as well. We develop regular visualizations of our work. This is one that shows Senator Max Baucus' former staff connections and where they now work in the pharmaceutical and healthcare industry. Got a lot of attention. This is one people who understand what's happening with the healthcare bill using a reconciliation process. A lot of hypocrisy about whether Republicans voted for bills under reconciliation or Democrats. We said well let's just do a graphic and so we did. So we see this as part of our own media. The most exciting thing I think we have done indeed some have called it game changing is what we did during the healthcare summit that occurred recently. We called this sunlight live and apparently we used it again today. So what you see is an embeddable video of the healthcare summit and to the right of that were industry donors to the person who was speaking. So we had an editor in the room who would put up the leading donors to the members of Congress or how much money they received from the healthcare interest, et cetera. Constantly feeding data into this. We had a live blog just below this in which four or five staff were just throwing data and throwing information onto the screen and then we had of course the tweet stream there and it was an experiment for sunlight. I mean we ended up, one of our staff called it data jamming because if anybody watched the healthcare debate what you saw on cable news was who was up and who was down and who was lying and who wasn't lying and we just pushed it aside and we said there is data here we should let the data do the talking. We had no idea if it would work but in fact it worked remarkably well. We had 50,000 people watching the debate on our site. We had nearly 10,000 people participating in the live blog, several thousand leaving actually comments are interacting with us asking us particular questions. We had 1,300 tweets sent out linking to us more than the White House got linked to I might add and of course if we added up the number of people reached by those 1,300 tweets it was 25 million people. No, I'm sorry it was 2.5 million people even so a silly number but I think it gives you some illustration of how we use social media to promote what we're doing. That's really an overview of what we do and I'd be glad to talk about any piece of it. In closing I just wanna say that we believe that the new technology is pushing the power to the edges and it may be the only thing that can challenge or indeed break Washington's Golden Rule. So thank you. Well I wanna thank you both for two really riveting talks. We're really honored that you could join us and I guess when I framed the event I had originally thought that I would frame it as something like sunlight comes and essentially takes information from the top down from the federal and the governmental level and makes that accessible to the public and public inside journalism on the other hand takes kind of information from the public, pulls it together through journalists and then brings it back out. But in fact both of what you're doing defies that kind of simple reduction. So I find your actual talks of the many, many different ways that the information is being used and personalized by people and thought through different social processes to be really, really interesting. I guess I'd start Linda with a question for you that actually will be relevant to both of you probably which is that you describe this in some ways as a catalyst for collaboration. And you talk about the role the journalists have taken through this process by taking these stories or feedback from people and you contrast it with what you call the catch and release model where a journalist call goes through their Rolodex which is often a very tight Rolodex or sometimes reaches into the phone directory and brings in experts to comment on a particular project. And I think you showed several really interesting different ways that this goes beyond that typical what I would maybe call catch, misrepresent and then release model. I'm talking about you Wall Street Journal but so what I'm curious about though is that how much do you see this as an intermediary step? I mean do you think that the role of journalists is increasingly changing because you have access to these databases in the case of Ellen she's making a lot of data that would have taken a lot of work of a concentrated person to have to go dig out nine to five in DC to be able to access it. Increasingly that data is becoming public and increasingly we're also seeing that a lot of news gathering seems to be happening through distributed means as blogs are doing document dumps and asking for their own collaborative. So to some degree I'm curious do you see the role of journalism changing and do you still need the journalists to do that refining and storytelling or do you see it more as a collaborative process like in those smaller newspapers that you started out in? Well I do think there's a role for journalists. I think journalism is changing and our definition of journalism is changing but there is always a need for sense makers for people who see and are, I mean I think the problem is is that we have reporters because of technology have actually become in many cases handcuffed to their desks and to their computers and they're not out in their communities and they're not talking to as many people as they used to and therefore there's an echo chamber that has developed. I spent 18 years as a reporter and as an editor and there's a reason journalists have usual suspects. It's because they've vetted them in many cases. They know what their conflicts of interest are. They know to some degree when they're bullshitting them and so they turn to these people because they've built some trust but unfortunately that has really cut off access. So I would say that yes it's changing and it's changing as we speak right now so will things always, will citizens just become their own reporters? I don't know. I will say that the people that we talk to in our network don't want to do our jobs for us. They tell us that. They want to be invited into the process and they want to share what they know and they're tired of seeing a story on TV or reading a newspaper on a website and saying they got it wrong, why didn't they ask me and yet they feel like they have no invitation to be part of the process. And I'll just finish by saying that I am constantly amazed at how little demands they make on us. We're constantly asking them for their knowledge and their expertise but even our own capacity if we use their insights for every story we do on the radio it would still not come close to unearthing the insights that they've given us. Rarely does a source say why wasn't I interviewed by a reporter? Why didn't you do a story based on what I told you? They just say thank you for asking, thank you for listening, which is really a key. So I think there is a role for journalists. I think it's constantly changing and they need to be very open to this idea that there are other people out there doing what they used to only be the ones doing. So let me just do a really quick follow up which is that there's a, I think we're both founded by the Knight Foundation and one of the other projects that they funded was a project called MediaBugs which was a very interesting project that borrows a metaphor from software design which is a bug tracking system, much like a ticketing system in a lot of other businesses but basically when someone has a, when their application crashes or there's something, you're getting a template error on a website and you can't explain it, then basically you submit a bug and the bug says this is an open bug, it's assigned to someone and they basically have to respond to it. And so this MediaBug project is basically about how do you actually get a newspaper to be responsible for things that they've mispublished, misinformed. Are you finding that this kind of collaborative approach where you have this database of people who you have long-term interactions with is forcing you to be more responsible to your readers? MediaBugs was created because lots of people send letters to the editor saying you got a factual error and there's never something published to acknowledge that by the paper. Are you finding that that's something in the situation of less because you're in more feedback or? Well I wish I could say that we're a total open process that way in that, yes, in some ways, just being available and accessible to people and having dedicated people in a newsroom whose job it is to interface with the public automatically brings that information closer to the newsroom. So reporters and editors get feedback all the time. They get emails saying you got this wrong or what have you or maybe the web editor but when you have a person devoted in your newsroom to really talking and listening to the public and then they carry that information I think it does bring a little more pressure to bear to correct that information. I will say in the future the way we envision some of our tools right now it's a very transactional relationship that we have with the public. We ask them, they respond. We see in the not too distant future a much more transparent form of journalism almost where people with the insights can come in and they can actually add to a story that's already been created even the people who might have been interviewed for that story. As we all know reporters take a fraction of what they get from a source and put it into a story. There's always so much more to the story. Why not provide an avenue for people to come in and say yes and here's just another point that I might add to that and invite the public. It's not quite wiki news but we do think that there needs to be greater interaction and greater openness and transparency just with the journalistic process. We'll be taking questions in about 10 minutes or so. And so Ellen, this is sort of related but as you're increasingly moving I mean so my first question is is there anything that you guys don't do? But it's a rhetorical question so I'll just move on. So the second question is you're moving from a space where you're putting data online and it looks like you've got a web application. You probably have several different protocols by which developers can access it through an API. But you're increasingly saying that design is really critical. Fostering these challenges for people to design with the data, building designs yourself. And I guess one of the questions I had was after you've done this now for a few years and have thought about it for a very long time what are the principles by which you think about these designs? How do you recognize what an important design process is? Like you showed the augmented reality iPhone app. I wouldn't have thought about that. I'm not sure I would use it or if I would survive crossing the street if I did. But I guess the question is what are the kind of design principles that you've come up with so far? And what are the designs targeted towards? What kinds of interactions are the best designs targeted towards? Well, when it comes to sort of influence data and understanding the connections, the web or one of my colleagues used to say if you could inject a dye into the bloodstream of Washington where would it flow? The interconnections are so complex that even your best writer has trouble articulating them in a way that doesn't lose the most ardent reader. And so for us to the degree we can and this is one area where we actually are we'll be adding staff this year is this whole visualization and infographic sort of approach to our work. We know we will reach a lot more people. A picture is worth a thousand words. I mean, it's not, there's no sort of fundamental principle and there's really one test in our office about whether it works. If Ellen doesn't get it within 10 seconds you got to go back to the drawing board. I mean, this is actually, it's known as the Ellen test and it's written in a public wiki. So whenever a new website or visualization is developed it has to pass my test and I'm a fairly high end user. But for us explaining complicated relationships which are at the heart of Washington or any state capital through a visualization is absolutely key and so we're trying to move more and more in that direction. So I love your analogy of dye in the blood and in the bloodstream and inevitably it ends up in the sore. But I think one of the questions, I know that you guys have funded and I think worked with LittleSys.org which is kind of interesting because they take this graph node model of representing these connections which is of course what the NSA and different intelligence organizations started doing after 9-11 moving away from traditional databases and starting looking at connective databases. And I guess that that leads to kind of two questions for me. One is what areas of professional expertise if you assume that the old user of this data would be an investigative journalist or a regulator or someone from a public prosecutor. What kinds of professional expertise are you drawing in from now or looking to draw in from in the near future? Well it's, I mean the reason for the visualizations I think is to reach to a more popular citizen focused audience. I mean we actually do believe that citizens can go to a site like transparency data or the next version of it which is more easy, I have an easier interface on it and become their own investigative journalists. Now they are not their own investigators not to say they're being investigative journalists but it's sort of the combination of the availability of data, the combining of data with combined with social media and the ability to talk directly to your legislator sort of says well we should be designing for this kind of constituency who will turn around and send an email or tweet or comment on a member's Facebook page and say you just gave an earmark to corporation X and you took money from that corporation explain yourself. I mean until the social media became as prevalent and as part of our daily life for so many people you couldn't have that sort of immediacy of it and so that's the kind of constituency that we're really trying to pull towards. Okay excellent I have one more question for you and then we'll open it up so if I could ask the audience to use the two microphones on either side so that the online audience will be able to hear you later. So the last question is completely self-indulgent. I just wanna know what can we expect from Citizen United? How is that gonna change the game? She says with a deep sigh. It is very hard to predict what the Supreme Court decision Citizens United will have. I mean essentially I don't know if people are aware of it what it said was that corporations can spend any amount of money any way they want directly and prior to Citizens United there were barriers set up they had to spend it through a political action committee or they had to spend it through another organization so now they can spend it directly. My own prediction with respect to political spending is that corporations will not for the most part get into direct spending because if I am Home Depot and I really don't like you as a candidate and I spend $250,000 against your candidacy I could lose a lot of business and I don't know how much business I could lose so I might give it to the citizens against Chris as a conduit. Check it out online. Yeah. As a conduit. So for us from sunlight's perspective we must have real time online disclosure so we can follow actually what the corporations do whether they do spend it directly or whether they use conduit spending. I think the most nefarious impact of the decision might be that the lobbyist from Home Depot just to use an example will have an extra something in their arguments for members of Congress and if I were a member of Congress knowing how timid they all are already and I'm asked to support an amendment I will think twice or three or four times before I say no because perhaps this corporation will go into my district and spend $250,000 and try to knock me off. Okay, great. So Charles DeTar, do you have a question? Oh, William Arquio first. There we go. Sure, so it strikes me that a core question or a core issue is redaction, right? The more information we have the greater the challenge of trying to parse out what precisely we need. The tools, Ellen, that you talked about look great in terms of helping, offering a number of different ways to crack this data and make something of it. And yet we're at a moment where in terms of public discourse the things are kind of more simplistic than ever. It's big headlines, it's CNN and Fox kinds of highly simplistic, highly polarized debates. At a moment when we have these affordances that gives a huge amount of data that require fairly nuanced analytic strategies and fairly nuanced redactional strategies to make some sense out of them. So I guess my question is what do we, how do you see, these are amazing sources. How can we enhance their use? How can we get more people to actually make critical use of these resources? Is this an educational problem? Is this a problem of public culture? Where do you see, well I see barriers to the use of this. I mean, you may be satisfied with the numbers you're getting, but if we were to try to enhance use of this, what might we do? Where might we look to sort of get a more alert and active and redactionally aware public? I think terrific questions to which I do not have the answers. I'll say at the outset. Clearly the success of this lies in broader and broader citizen engagement. We have to enlarge the circles of people who are used to interacting with this information. We have to get it into people's hands. They have to know that it's there when they want to use it. I mean, I think the brilliance of what Linda has done has been to create a community which is growing, I don't know at what rate, but to make sure that there are core users in each community who know that data and information is available. What we are witnessing with the American government is a huge cultural transformation with respect to opening up their data. I mean, the nonprofits are just learning that they have to open up their data as well. And so I think that we have to understand that the government holds data that is of interest to us. We were discussing the other day that the Department of Transportation or FAA has had data on collisions of airplanes with birds for years. Who knew? Who cared, right? Until we have a plane crash. And so I think the first goal, at least for us, is to get the data there and then to begin to figure out what's of use to people and direct people in that direction. It is an educational process, for sure. If I can just intervene for a second. Word engagement is a crucial word, important word. And yet we're living at a moment when there seems to be a highly engaged public and the tea drinkers out there who seem really resistant, who seem very good at sort of replicating a discourse they're given. They're highly engaged but not critical. Highly engaged but not actually looking carefully at the data or if they are, I don't know what data they're looking at. So it strikes me that engagement is a crucial preliminary stance, but it really doesn't get, at least looking at what's happening right now doesn't seem to get very far in terms of turning engagement into critical engagement. It is a challenge. I would agree with you. And from our point of view, if you can put the data out there, perhaps you can change the nature of the conversation and that's what we were trying to do through that sunlight live experiment. I'd just like to add just two points. One is I think we could do a better job of asking people what kind of government information they want. I think we simply presume because we're interested in journalists and certain kinds of information that that's what people really care about. And I know that it's heresy to say this, but maybe there are a certain number of people out there have kind of accepted that money influences politics and we just keep cramming to them that it shouldn't. So I think we can start by asking people a little more about what kind of information they want access to and not solely just provide them what they ask for. And the second thing is, is that certainly with the creation of budget hero, I mean our idea there was who is gonna read the federal budget? Not Congress, let alone their constituents. And so, but not everyone can spend a couple $100,000 to create a serious game that takes CBO scoring for all of these public policy options and then hires reporters to go out and create the pro, the con and the social impact statement and then hire the coders to put it all and then a designer to put it in some sort of interactive gaming format. I don't know that that's a long-term strategy, but behind it it was make it fun, make it interesting. Give people information in a way that they can absorb it and understand it. And so I think what Ellen was saying about data visualization and some of these other techniques, this isn't just shiny object kind of gadget journalism, there's a real purpose to being able to deliver information in an engaging way. And it doesn't have to be complicated. During the Al Franken, Norm Coleman, Senate recount that went on and on and on for months, one of the things that that process did is that it allowed us to take a look at actual ballots that are cast, which none of us would ever have access to or maybe even inclination to see and because there were all these disputed ballots. So we were able to take them all and put them online and allow people to be the judge of who should get the vote. And what was crazy about that is what people do in the voting booth. They draw pictures, they initial things. Oh, I didn't want to vote for that person. If you put any kind of identifying marks on a ballot, it disqualifies it, but who knew that until we actually, and so we did a very simple thing. You be the judge, we'd show them the ballot. We couldn't figure out who that person vote for, but you would get to take a crack at it. That helped them understand what those judges were going through on a daily basis and it cut beyond the rhetoric of, you know, if Franken's doing this and Coleman's doing that and his camp is influencing the judges this way and this way, it actually put the citizen right in the middle of the process. So that would be my answer is that, you know, we just have to, I mean, sadly, we do have to make it interesting. Right, no tool. So thanks for the really engaging discussion. This question's for Ellen. So you said just now that your primary purpose is just to get the data out there and then to figure out how to direct it or what to do with it. And maybe I missed it in all of the websites that you showed, but what kinds of activities are you supporting that are more directed? I mean, there is this like politics built into what you're doing, which is about data sharing and, you know, public disclosure. But I'm guessing that gets used by people who have a variety of conflicting politics. So, you know, do you support those kinds of activities directly, even now that you're supporting them indirectly? The, I should say you raise a really good point that our allies in the fight for greater government transparency come from both the conservative political side of the spectrum and the liberal side of the spectrum. It's fascinating. I've never worked on an issue that had that kind of salience across the political spectrum. To date, sunlight's funding has been just in two areas. And it's a relatively small part of our budget, actually smaller and smaller part of our budget. We have funded people who digitize data. Literally that's what they do. Some of the groups that I mentioned. And we've funded people who have interesting ideas for building tools and websites to access that data. So the project that Chris referred to, LittleSys.org or the Participatory Politics Foundation to Create Open Congress. Some of these are joint efforts, some of them are just out and out grants. And to date, we have not funded any activism around using the data. But the campaign that we announced today, the Public Equals Online Campaign is really designed to be a grassroots campaign for people who want to work on getting greater government transparency at the municipal level, at the state level, at the federal level. And while we will certainly use that campaign to help support some of our own legislative initiatives, we will be, or at least we're thinking, of making small grants to people in various communities who have ideas of ways to pressure their governments, city councils on up, to create more transparency, whether that's for data or engagement or using technology for collaboration. So we will be looking into that. But like much of what Sunlight does, it will be an experiment. We'll have to sort of figure that out as we go along. Charles Dottar. Question that's slightly related to his question. So from an information theory perspective, information is something you don't necessarily want. It's noise. I mean, white noise carries more information than speech, for example. And if you imagine the limits of both of the projects you're working on, if you had 7 billion people in your Rolodex to call, or if you had high-definition video and audio of every square inch of Washington and every municipal government all at once, this wouldn't be very useful to anyone. And the thing that's powerful about what each of you are doing is the narratives that get constructed through that data. And so from an aspirational angle or looking forward to an ideal world, who would you say should be controlling the narrative and how should they be controlling that narrative? I was going to say, Mumble, something about journalists. So I'm just wondering why aren't you? You know, I don't know. I don't know who should control it. I could say that I think that it should be more people who control it now. In fact, I'm glad you brought that point up. I hear people all the time say, well, you know, especially people in the journalism reform movement, that journalism needs to be more like a conversation. Well, I don't think journalism is a conversation. I don't think it's a lecture either. And so, you know, I think that there has to be some people who are paid to do this work. I think some people will be passionate about it. But at some point, it's hard. Good journalism is hard work. So often the information that we get as we solicit with some open-ended questions from people in the network, we don't have people going, you ought to look at this. There's a real scandal going on here. There's really something terrible here or something. We just have people who tell us stuff that they don't even know it might be newsworthy. So it takes someone to read that and kind of have that sense of journalistic curiosity and then the means, both the time and the means to follow up and figure out where that story really is. So I think that we need a robust media. We need paid journalists. I think that's becoming increasingly more difficult as news organizations struggle financially and lay people off. I don't know what's going to fill the void. I mean, as Clay Shirke says, we're in the middle of a revolution where the old model has been tossed out before we know what's going to replace it. So I just don't know the answer to that. And I think I react a little bit to the notion of who's going to control. The control has been, I think, for too long in a very narrow set of hands who have now lost control and that is mostly a good thing, at least at the moment. It's a good thing that not all news flows through the New York Times and the Chicago Tribune and the Philadelphia Inquirer. So the fact that there are hundreds of thousands, millions of bloggers out there, some of whom nobody's ever heard of, but I follow every day until I get bored with them and then I get rid of them and I find somebody else who's writing interesting stuff. To me, that is, it's small d democracy and it's very exciting to see it. Now, am I going to take a fact on something from an unknown blog or no, I'm going to double check it. But this is a very exciting time in sort of the civic education and participation of people and technology is what fuels it. So I'm not so, I mean, I sort of like the fact that control has moved beyond who's going to control the data. Well, I should control the data, right? Government should make it available and I should be able to filter what I want and there should be easy ways to search for it. So again, if I'm interested in immigration, I should be able to type in a website immigration and get all the data about immigration, whether it's state based or federal based. So it's that kind of new approach to lack of control that I think is very important and very exciting. Hi, I just want to say that I really respect and admire what you're both accomplishing right now and I think it really contributes to the shifting landscapes and our understanding of information and journalism and I want to, my question is for you Linda, with Public Insight Network, I wanted to understand in the context of conversations about citizen journalism and social media where everything exploded, everyone said, everyone's a journalist and I sense a bit of a back, not a backlash, but kind of a coming back to center where there's an understanding or respect that journalism is a craft and that you need those voices but they also need to be more open and more listen to people more as you say. I was wondering with the network where it seems like people are submitting their stories and their ideas directly from my understanding of the network and your presentation. What are the expectations you find from the people who do submit their stories? Do they, you mentioned this a little bit but do they want follow up? Do they want to be tracked? Do they want to be notified, credited when their stories are used? Do they have an expectation of privacy or an expectation that you'll share their information and their names openly and what are the practices that you and your team have developed to kind of navigate this new space and kind of as a related question, how do the newsrooms handle that? Are they getting the message from you guys and are they adopting the network? Are they over adopting it? Are they relying on it too much and not getting out enough? And then are they respecting the rules that you've set in place when they use it? Yes, to all of that. Well, I'll start by just explaining a few fundamentals. So not having been around when PIJ was formulated but I think I can kind of figure out what the principles at play here were. It's based on an assumption or a bias toward confidentiality. So everything everyone shares with us is confidential. It's not published unless they give us explicit permission to do so. And so we get that permission in a number of ways. And now it's also implicit that a reporter can contact them. It says so in every message that a reporter or producer may contact you to follow up. Now, we don't have perfect information on all 83,000 people in the network. There are a certain amount of information they have to supply an email address and most of the, I mean, they can come into the network through some of the serious games is a very low barrier to joining the network. The key is in the follow up. So for starters, every person who signs up for the network gets a thank you note and they generally get a few of the queries or the kind of journalistic questions that we might be working on. Everyone who responds to a query gets a thank you note and it's not just sort of an automatic generated thing. It's the analyst who actually issued that query will provide some synopsis of what came of it without violating, when they're not quoting Joe Citizen over here in this community, but they're saying, here's kind of what we learned from this query. And by the way, here are links to two stories that came from it. So if it actually results in a story, everyone who responded gets a link gets, unless it's so far down the line, which gets me to the next part, which is how the newsrooms adopted. We're seven years in and we're still learning new applications and we're still fighting newsroom cultures. I mean, the truth is, and I don't see this ever changing, part of the thrill of journalism is the aphrodisiac of discovery. It's the reporter knocking on the door and being invited in and finding this incredible world on the other side in a story and they get to bring that to light and they get to follow up on it. To the extent that public insight journalism takes some of that away or does that some of that for them, there's a little something lost there. So if you're the journalist on the other side of a pitch from a story that comes from an analyst who's been talking to a lot of people, you may have 10 stories you can't get to already. That may just be seen as another story on the pile of what you might wanna get to. So there's a lot of salesmanship that goes on in what we do. I mean, we do reporting, we don't just sort of say, hey, here's five things people told us, do what you want with them. Some reporters and editors truly embrace it. Again, this idea that you can do prospecting, you can test a hunch as opposed to source finding, which is anyone can say, I used to get these emails as a reporter. Does anybody know anyone who? And I got this, it was very frightening one day when I woke up and realized that a number of stories in the newspaper were built on journalists and people journalists knew personally. So this has put an end to that. I mean, no one sends out emails that say, hey, does anyone know anyone who's going through foreclosure? Because we have a whole network of people that we can look for. But it's getting better and it's getting more exciting. The idea that we can use the network in some incredibly creative ways. We've used a click fix. C-click fix. C-click fix. I mean, Boston did it. I think the Globe did a great pot hole project. I mean, that just makes it very easy. What was interesting about that is that the public officials who are responsible for fixing those potholes get emails and we get a really nasty email from the Public Works Director in St. Paul saying, I'm getting all of these emails and it tried to go in and kind of fix all the potholes so he wouldn't get anymore or someone on his staff did. Until they said, no, you can't do that. So there's a lot of high touch with PIJ. I don't know if we're going to be able to sustain that when we get to half a million people. That's why it's really critical for us to put more control in the hands of the actual source of the person out there. Instead of waiting for us to email them a survey, they have access and there's some collaborative filtering that suggests things to them based on what they've told us about themselves. So, and our strategy is not to prescribe to newsrooms that use this tool and these tools in this network how to do it. And then I'll say one final thing. Yes, it can turn journalists into lazy journalists because if all you have to do is sort of dial a source whenever you want, the idea is it actually could preclude you from maybe doing a little more. So that's really up to newsrooms to manage the expectations and to really think creatively about how they might use this to new news gathering. How many people now staff the network? Well, for the most part, outside of American public media newsrooms, it's one analyst, one newsroom. In some cases, one analyst, two newsrooms. In the case of the St. Louis Beacon, they are jointly building a network and accessing it with KETC Channel 9. The Miami Herald will be working in conjunction with WLRN Public Radio. We're now actually next week, this will be announced at the Corporation for Public Broadcasting is funding several local journalism centers which are basically a handful of public radio stations, all who will hire a reporter to do blogging and reporting around a certain topic area. So, we have one analyst who will be part of an agribusiness reporting network. In that case, it's one analyst in five newsrooms. So it really depends. At American public media, where it was developed just marketplace, the business show has three analysts. So that's quite a different ratio. And at Minnesota Public Radio, we have four analysts in some capacity are doing something, but not all of them are just querying the network. We have one analyst who does nothing but blog full time on the economy based on insights that come in from people in the network. We have one person who focuses solely on outreach. So if we know we need to reach people and we have a big gap in our network, we actively go out and find them, Republicans. When the Republican National Convention came to town, we knew we would need more conservatives. So we sought them and we brought them into the tent. So it really depends. But for the most part, it's kind of right now one analyst, one newsroom. It's cool to hear you guys say that Democrats and Republicans seem excited about transparency in government, but transparency seems antagonistic to those in power. Can you talk about how you make a pitch to someone who's in office to get them to support open records laws and other transparency efforts? Or do you actually leverage that by bribing them with, or, you know, threatening them with dirt that you've already uncovered? It's a tough sell, I have to say, in Congress. We often talk about the notion that Congress has erected a firewall around itself. So, you know, nothing goes out, nothing comes in. But it's breaking down. I mean, I think from our point of view, the whole notion of transparency as a popular position, people in the country like transparent government. When sunlight was founded four years ago and we haven't done any polling, we asked a series of questions about, you know, would you like to see members of Congress disclose this, disclose that, et cetera, et cetera. And everything we polled, and this was a bipartisan, conducted poll and equal number of Democrats and Republicans responded, they all said yes, 80% said yes to everything that we could possibly move. So, it is not an easy sell with Congress because information is power. They get that, right? And we're asking them to let go of information, which is to release power. I mean, it's not unlike journalists. I mean, maybe it's down a notch or two. But, you know, the notion of what do you mean citizens can actually contribute to my journalism. It's sort of a wearing away. The fascinating thing for me, because I've spent so many decades in Washington, has been the new administration's stance with respect to greater transparency. And so we have been encouraged by them and I actually think, you know, I mean, I see our strategy shifting somewhat because the administration has made a number of very important steps. They're not perfect by any means and they still do a lot that's not real transparency, but what stuff that we've put into the category of transparency theater. But we, you know, it was day two of the administration when the president issued a directive and he said, you know, give me a memo, OMB within X number of days and tell me how we're gonna use technology for transparency collaboration and engagement. That's a flag in the ground against which we can measure progress. And so there's been enough positive steps forward. The wind sometimes blows from the White House down to the Capitol. And I think that with the general cultural change of how we expect to access information, whether it's, you know, or make an airplane reservation or order a pair of shoes or whatever we wanna do online, the expectation they'll be able to know more about the government officials is having an impact on them. You know, the argument that we would make is a, this is a good way to connect with your constituents, be people want this, you can't hide from it any longer. It's already public. So what we're asking you to do would just make it public a little bit faster is still a bit of a hard sell. I mean, one very simple change we have looked for for our entire four years is to require senators to file their campaign finance reports electronically. So we would get them faster and save a quarter million dollars a year. We cannot get this bill through the Senate. I mean, it's ridiculous and outrageous because of course they all keep everything. Like barn napkins or what are the? No, no, no, it's worse than that actually. They keep their campaign finance reports on their computers, right? So it's digitally available. They print them out, they carry them the printed records to the clerk of the Senate, which then ferries them down to the FEC, which then sends them out to be key punished, spending $250,000 in six, eight weeks in delay. And then it's made available and literally one button, we could have it available immediately. And that's a bipartisan resistance. So on that approach, we will be asking later this year, we will try to sort of a more positive approach. We're gonna say, you know, you can file your reports electronically if you so choose. And so we'll try to line up a half a dozen members who are willing to do that and begin to try to embarrass the others into moving it since we can't move the legislation. I know that people since the 80s have been basically putting public data online to kind of force the issue, Carl Malmood and other people. And so, I mean, I think you would probably describe your, part of what you're doing is advocacy work by making the data public to show that it's possible, to show that, you know, a small, not that well-funded organization could do it for a fraction of the price that in the 1990s, a lot of government agencies basically hired subcontractors who would, you know, value add the sourcing of public data, you know, for a charge. And so end users ended up having to pay sometimes small funds, but you know, when you're looking for a lot of data, 25 cents per datum gets really expensive. So how much do you see this process of leveraging? And you said your strategy is changing. What's the next strategy after that kind of prying it open by making stuff public? Well, we have, it was an accidental success. We funded, I mentioned earlier, a website called fedspending.org. It was the first publicly available database on government grants and contracts. It was a three-year grant to a nonprofit for $320,000. And it took them six months to get the database up and running, and it was a huge success. About the same time they were building that data site, a new piece of legislation was passed, co-sponsored by then Senator Obama and Senator Coburn, requiring the federal government to create a database nearly identical to the one we had just created. A long and involved story about, it eventually passed, and the very first thing that OMB did to get their government run data set up. No, they didn't scrape it. They actually purchased the license for the software. And so we had two nearly identical databases, and we still do have two nearly identical databases. The fascinating piece of the story was that the appropriation to build the government database was $12 million. Ours cost $320,000. So we thought, wow, we have a business model because the nonprofit got $600,000 from the government. And my colleagues in the nonprofit said it was a nightmare. It easily cost us more than $600,000 in terms of the pro bono time to negotiate with the government. So I think we do feel that we can kind of show them how to do this, you know, in some ways. And, but we're very pleased with the administration and the steps forward they're taking, even though they're somewhat fine. And there's no guarantee that future administrations will be as responsive to this. That is right, which is why we're anxious to pass legislation that requires all publicly available information to be online by law. Because what the administration is doing now is only by directive. It could be pulled at any moment. It will not be in this administration. But it certainly could be by future administrations. Okay, yeah. I just wanna add one thing, which is this idea that there's sort of resistance and how do you get government officials to be, to see the wisdom in sharing information. I think it depends on what information you're asking for. And also, what's your definition of government? If government is just politicians, then yeah, I would agree. But government's made up of, you know, tens of thousands of men and women who work every day and are really proud of the work they do. And so I think we need to think a little more broadly about what we're asking for and who we're asking it of. Now in terms of data and spending and all that, absolutely there are a few people who have their, you know, who have the keys to the safe there or the combination to the safe and getting them to sort of make it readily available is a real challenge. But when you're just talking about information, that example I gave about New Hampshire, you know, it did not take any convincing to get town managers around New Hampshire to submit information about their budgets because they saw it as a public service and they actually appreciated the radio station being willing to help them get the word out. But it was the journalists on the other end who actually looked at the information that was being provided and saw story and then pursued it. So yeah, if you're just gonna ask people how much money is someone giving your campaign, you know, I think there's certain kinds of questions that are going to meet with resistance, but there's a lot of other information and insight and that we could be seeking that we're not. So you're taking a very narrow view of what is government and what information people might want. I think, I mean, we've, something that's in a couple of things. One is we sometimes identify what we describe as low hanging fruit. So we, you know, you ask for information and anybody goes, sure, why not? Then we had one campaign, which I don't think actually really worked although we could claim it was successful. We asked two election cycles ago, we asked members of Congress to post their official calendars online to sign a pledge that if they were elected, they would post their official calendars online. It was fascinating. We had 99 challengers sign the pledge. If I'm elected, I will post my calendar online and zero incumbents sign the pledge. However, there must have been something in the water because, you know, at the end of that election campaign, one of those challengers was elected, Christian Gillibrand. She's now the senator from New York and she continues to post her calendar online, which is fascinating. And now there are a handful of other seven, eight, nine, 10 of members of Congress who will do that. And the value in that I think is my life, you know, is really an open book. And so again, you know, again, this may be overcoming this cultural resistance that we talk about, but it's not easy to change, you know, all the history about withholding information. Did you have a question? We were talking a little bit earlier about the difficulties that there are in getting the public engaged and wanting to be active participants. And I was wondering, this is a question for Linda, how you go about harnessing participation from the public and whether you run into any challenges with self-selective responses. Sure, all the responses are self-selected to what we do. So we have to make sure that if we're seeking information around an issue where, whether it's contentious or not, that we're actively seeking other points of view and not just, I mean, we don't take what we hear from the network and saying, aha, that must be the story because 100 to one, the responses came in this way versus that way. An example for that would be a few months ago, we sent out a pretty broad-race query to Lutherans in mostly Minnesota, I think, and we asked people how the decision by the ELCA to allow actively gay clergy to serve was affecting them, their congregations and their communities. It was a pretty broad, open-ended question. And I don't know, we may have sent it to, I mean, we don't ever send one question to 83,000 people. I mean, we, you know, that would be a nightmare. So we sent it to maybe, I think, 1,000 people in Minnesota or so, and we got 2,000 responses. So clearly there was a little network effect going on there. And we found out later just by, because you can find these things out, that it was kind of passed along with a little bit of a push behind it. Advocacy, people who want to advocate for a certain position and they want the media to take notice will say, make sure you fill this out and send it, we want them to hear our voice, which is great. Then we have to take some extra steps and go out and actually find people who have the other point of view. And it's actually a pretty good selling point. When you go to an organization and you say, we're hearing a lot of this side, we really want to hear the other side. Can you help us get this survey into the hands of some of the people that you represent or some of the people we really want to hear their stories? I think the difference is that, as a journalist, I often had organizations offered to put me in touch with people. And then I always felt really uncomfortable that they were kind of controlling the message behind the scenes, like they'd coach them. In this case, they're just posting a link on a website or sending it out to in a newsletter. And we still get all the raw responses back. So, and the other part of your question was, oh, about engagement and getting people to kind of show up. Well, it's a strange thing. When you ask people for their thoughts, experience, their knowledge on things that they really care about, it doesn't take much more than that. We do beta testing on subject lines, on other things, you know, short messages, long messages, long survey forms, short survey forms. We do lots of different, you know, we're always looking at the kind of question that'll really spark a great response. We find the question, tell us a story that helps illustrate your point of view, really works well. People actually will then, and we've learned a lot of lessons about yes, no questions often give you yes, no responses. So there's some of that about just getting a certain level of response back. But there are times when we will send something out, we think we'll get a great response and we get nothing. And there are times when we're really surprised. Does that answer your question? Sometimes our individuals, I mean people in the network themselves, we can contact them and say, we see, you know, you've told, you mentioned that you're a member of these organizations and we're wondering if you'd be willing to sort of, you know, kind of contact them on on behalf. It's often not, well, here's a quick example. So when Sarah Palin was the vice presidential nominee, she made a statement that if she were in the White House that families with special needs kids would have a friend in the White House and that really resonated with a lot of people. And we wanted to tap into that and say, wow, these people clearly feel like their stories aren't being heard. So a few months after the election, there was a documentary on special needs families and special needs kids that was going to air in a community a few hours away. We didn't have enough advanced time to get someone up to that screening, but we called the filmmaker, knowing that they were probably gonna stand on a stage and introduce their film. They had 400 people highly engaged on that issue and we said, hey, would you just be willing to tell them that we wanna know more about this issue? And here's the link and it's on our website. Just get up and tell them. And within a few hours of that screening, we had 80 people respond, 80 out of 100's huge response rate. I mean, we usually get five to 10% on any given issue, but we're usually sending it to 2,000 people. So that's pretty good. That's a lot more sources than a journalist usually talks to on a given story. So a question, base curiosity, Ellen. So your work is on publicly available information. And as we discussed a bit ago, that notion of what's publicly available shifts a little bit, presidential regimes or whatever. And I noticed when you were running through your slides, one of the headers was information about a dam project was being banned or something was a dark spot. Could you just say something about the dark areas that currently exist? Areas you wish were currently available that aren't? I know the terrorist discourse has been used a lot to block public photography in some municipalities. That's information, but it's apparently secret information. What sort of stuff, what are the odd things you're finding and what are the areas you think should be addressed that are currently dark? Interestingly, we do work mostly with publicly available information, but we're starting to say that information is not publicly available unless it's online. Just let's get over the fact that it's nothing as publicly available if you have to go to a warehouse in Maryland and dig through file cabinets or file a FOIA request even if it's public information. So that's sort of our starting point, but we actually just funded a joint project with the Center for Public Integrity in Washington, which we're calling the DataMind Project to identify useful information that is not classified in any fashion and is not publicly available without a FOIA request. So what you saw on that website was one of those products and we were blogging about it twice a week. And I mean, you name your agency, there's information that you could imagine would be of use to someone that's just not publicly available. So identifying it really comes from, I mean, the person who's doing this project for us over at Center for Public Integrity is a long time investigative journalist and through his telephone calls, information gathering for particular stories, he ran into a data set and he said, my God, I never knew that existed. So one of the things that we said very early on to the administration, which they did take to heart, is every agency has to account for, has to do a full audit of the data they collect and how they collect it and how it's made available because nobody knows. I mean, the agencies don't know, right? So this little pocket in this agency may be collecting X, Y, and Z, but nobody knows what they're really collecting, especially if it immediately is, I mean, if it's filed on paper and then filed in a middle of folder and then shipped off to a warehouse in Maryland. So our understanding is that as a result of the Open Government Directive on April 6th or 7th, we will have a list of, we will have that audit agency by agency of the data that's collected and how it's made available and then there's supposed to be some priority set for how they move that to being available online, including with public input into that on the agency's Open Government website pages. So they're asking for public input, which is a good thing because the very first piece of the directive ordered all the agencies to put three high value data sets onto data.gov after the first 45 or 60 days, which agencies did. We looked at these and we said, huh, the wild horse population from the Interior Department is a high value data set to whom we said, what is with that? And then there were some other things that were equally ridiculous. And then we turned around in the government and we said, look guys, the term high value data set, just do away with it because maybe we're wrong, maybe wild horse population information is a high value data set, but you gotta justify it. Someone may wanna know that, but is it just someone so inviting the public in to participate and say, okay, here's our laundry list, what do you think is high value? And while again, it's not a statistical sample, you'll get some sense of anything that deals with perhaps health and safety would be high value to an interested citizen. So I think they're beginning to work through this, but it's not an easy process, but it starts with an audit so we know what's available. I was in Phoenix recently and went to a spring training game with my brother, who's a vice president of a local hospital and I just said, hey Doug, what kind of information do you have to report to the state? Do you have to report all adverse incidents? I mean, it's just, he's just telling me, but I think sometimes you can ask people who work in jobs that you think might have to report something to government and then you have a sense of what government has. So there's sort of the, there's that route, but I mean, that's the thing. We probably have no idea what information is locked away that would be fascinating and I think it starts by finding out what do you wanna know and who do you wanna know it from and then trying to find those people and gather that kind of information. And then there are clearly categories of deliberate, not deliberately withholding information. So there's a lot of drug testing information. There's a lot of information at the FDA over this device or that device that are tested. It's not secret information. They do not publish it. But we need to know what it is before we can request it. You don't know what you don't know. That's a great segue to a question that I had which is you talk about the fact that the data is not provided and it's data that is on the operations of private institutions of pharma companies or I guess the question for me is that we're seeing radical shifts in public and private data. There were these safeguards put in place with things like social security numbers to say we want to prevent corporations from being able to use data about people that are gathered by the government. But in fact, at this point, corporations have far more data about people in the private record than the government does. So you talked about how politicians are, you want to be able to tell where their bottled water and their flowers are going, MasterCard has that data for me right now and I'm not in the public domain. So how do you approach this question of public and private data? I mean, obviously your mandate is on the public data but increasingly we're seeing real changes in people's lifestyles where I'm not actually surprised that new politicians are better about posting their calendar online because in fact, that's a choice that like 14 year olds are making nonstop. So you won't actually have to go and photograph them with their mistresses. They'll be posting on Facebook. So the question then is how do you see as the shift between data ownership between private and public has shifted so much, how do you see that relationship and do you think there's any room for an organization that concentrates on that? Well, there is, I mean, we are certainly well aware of the privacy concerns. Private information that may be collected by a corporation, let's say it was testing, a new device that was implanted in people to do X and it might have the patient's name there. I don't actually know whether the patient's name on whom the device was tested is reported to the FDA. I don't know that, but let's assume for the moment it is because they may need to track that person in case there's ever a recall or problem or update. Obviously we have to ensure that the privacy information is redacted from the information. And then we have to trust government that what they have redacted is actually appropriate. At the moment, I don't think any of us have that level of trust. I mean, there's an interesting story, the White House visitor logs. The administration is doing this voluntarily and they said we will post them but we'll take, I think it's 90 to 120 days to scrub them because when you go into the White House you do give them your birth date and your social security number and your place of birth. So obviously they said we don't want that information, we wanna make sure all that gets taken out. And then they said, and then we'll redact or withhold information for people who are visiting the first family, their personal friends and anyone else where national security might be compromised, like whoa. So this is a funny story. So I have a daughter who's doing a graduate class at NYU and she decides she's gonna review the White House visitor logs. And I see her post at the end of the assignment and she says, you know, we have no idea how many people have been redacted. We don't know if it's a hundred a month or if it's 500 a month. It's the problem with the electronic document side. It's the problem with the electronic document side. And I thought that was a stunningly good point, which I then raised with the folks at the White House to which they have not responded yet. So I think, you know, it's- The response was redacted, I mean- Yeah, the response was unspoken or unprintable. So I think, you know, we are all moving into this era, you know, sort of step by step. And I think what, you know, we are realizing is it's okay to try something and not have it work. It's okay to have to try something like recovery.gov and get data on the stimulus projects and then realize that some of the garbage is just, some of the data is just garbage, but it raises the issue of what are we doing about data quality? How do we ensure that the numbers are right? And this is a remarkable conversation to be having. I don't care whether the data is perfectly clean, but to actually see government saying, how do we do this? How do we do it in a way it's responsible? How do we do it in a way that's trustworthy? How do we do it in a way where the data is clean and available? We've never had this discussion before and I think it really is a part of everything that happens in Washington right now. Ellen, you set me up really well because I just have to know what do you have on all these people that they seem to listen to you? I mean, is this, how you seem to really have influence and access in order to make not only requests for data but demands on what should be in that data set and I'm curious what the sunlight foundation and what your leverage is in all of this. I'd like to say it's all us, but I have to say it's a confluence of ideas. We have a wonderful chart which I didn't show you today of the mentions of the word transparency for the last 20 years in the New York Times. So one of our data visualizers did this great chart and I asked him last night to double check the numbers and when sunlight started in 2006, I think the number was something like 410 mentions of the word transparency in the New York Times and last year it was nearly double that. I'd like, of course, to take full credit for that. I can't. It is, I think I said this earlier, it is a cultural shift that's happening. We expect stuff in real time. I wanna know what the weather is. I wanna contact my other daughter. I do it by text messaging. Government is playing catch up I think to where the rest of us have moved in terms of real time information and how we live our lives online. So I'd like to say that sunlight's fully responsible for it but we're not. I guess I'm kind of following on that too. I'm just curious whether you have, like who are the advocates within government that are communicating most with you and most receptive to your mission? Politicians but also within the different departments. Are there particular departments that you're speaking with more? And then related to that also, we were talking about who controls information, what gets released, how much in the designing of your transparency kind of platforms are you also thinking about getting information that's not publicly available but that could be made publicly available to people within the government who wanna leak information, whistle blowers or other people? There's a large community of nonprofits in Washington who have been in I would say the public information space. There's actually a coalition called the Open the Government Coalition and I believe it has something like 50 or 70 members, the different nonprofits who have joined it. It is a coalition, it has fought in the past mostly on FOIA related issues. Within that there are probably five or six major organizations who are part of the constant discussions, arguments, lobbying that goes on both on Capitol Hill and in the White House. What the administration did which was rather remarkable is they appointed a federal CIO who was the former DC CTO, a man by the name Vivek Kundra who understands this space and seems to understand the politics of how you move people who are not like the people who report to him into this space to understand why this is important for delivering services, why it's important for economic development, why it's important for democracy and so he has been a terrific leader alongside the federal CTO which is a brand new position which is headed by Anish Chopra who likewise really understands this space and so they along with the White House Ethics Council Norm Eisen and the head of the regulatory section of OMB, Cass Sunstein have formed a kind of very close group which have been driving these White House based initiatives and that's tremendous, it makes all the difference in the world. On the hill, the allies come from across the spectrum. One of the early users of social media is one of the most conservative congressmen from Texas, his name is John Culberson, direct tweeting me at 7.30 in the morning, quick viewing, whatever it's called, all of his meetings, his conferences and he gets a lot of attention for it and he gets a lot of kudos for it and so other people look over their shoulder and they go, wow, maybe I should do that. To Nancy Pelosi who has a very active blog who really understands the space and has been very instrumental in some of the big successes we've had like getting the White House expenditure reports online. So there are a lot of allies both in the House and the Senate, the transparency caucus that's about to be introduced and one of the most conservative members, Issa from California, one of the most recent freshman members, Quigley, Democrat from Illinois, that's actually Rahm Emanuel's seat. I mean, you see these strange bedfellows of things happening all the time so it's finding people who want to be leaders in this space. We find a lot of Republicans calling for a lot of transparency now that they're out of power but there are plenty of Democrats who call for it as well. So we try to walk this fine line between both of them to get something that really does make sense. I have a question, how do you deal or how do they deal with transparency when so much of what Congress has has always been protected from FOIA? So some of their own records and things like that. So I'm wondering, are we gonna see a big change in that? Well, we have said that FOIA for Congress is certainly in our sites. I think it will be a long time coming actually. So Congress is more resistant to this trend than the administration has been. There is absolutely no question about it. So that's why we wanna try some of the more positive things in making sure that members who use social media who do communicate directly get the rules committee to change the rules about how they can use social media. So we launched until a year or so ago, maybe 18 months or so ago, members of Congress were actually forbidden from using social media on their websites. So we launched a let our Congress tweet campaign. I don't know, coincidence or not, they were already thinking about changing the rules but two weeks later they changed the rules so members can actually tweet from the house floor and use video and have interactive sections of their websites. So it's just pushing open the door a little bit at a time. I find it really interesting, not only the CTO positions that you talked about but also in state, Alec Ross. I mean, you're really seeing, because Silicon Valley seemed to contribute quite a bit to the Obama campaign, there are a bunch of people at all levels of the federal government now who represent the concerns of Google and other organizations like that. And of course, every time you get someone from industry who takes a turn in government, they create a government that's gonna be a little bit better for them. And so I find this really kind of an interesting side effect of how people are. It is fascinating to, I mean, the State Department under Alec Ross's leadership has been terrific and they're doing really amazing stuff. And so, you know, we can- It's not serene yet, but they're trying really amazing things, yeah. They're trying and I think the fact that government is being allowed, that people inside government are allowed to become experimental the same way that we on the outside just like, well, try that, didn't work. We tried that and wow, what a success. That represents pretty much of a major transformation in the way that button down government usually works. And certainly states, I mean, there are a number of states out there I think who without pressure from organizations like Sunlight or anyone else are just sort of doing some of this on their own. Now they may not be doing it quite to this extent, but I know when I was in Utah, you know, all campaign contributions are electronic. They're searchable. You can follow legislation. You can sign up for email alerts every time a bill is amended. So there, you know, I think it would be wrong that the assumption that all government wants to keep all government information secret, but there's certainly, you know, there's enough resistance out there to make us cautious. But- And enough cities now have made like, DC has made their information available, San Francisco has made their information available. I'm trying to think, I know that there are at least another half a dozen cities that are moving in the same direction following DC and San Francisco so that citizens can have access to information that they want, whether it's information on bus stops or city parks that need repair or, you know, whatever that, all information is local. Did we answer your question on whistleblowing though? Yeah, that was the second question, was just on leaks and whistleblowing. To what extent are you thinking about strengthening the role of internal, you know, agents of- Yeah, sorry. Doesn't really deal in the whistleblowing, you know, the sort of that method for reporting information, but one of our close colleague organization does. The Project on Government Oversight has a series of recommendations with respect to whistleblower protections to protect them. They also deal in the area of government contracting and oversight in that arena as well. So I'm gonna have to call an end to this, but I just wanted to mention that we have a reception upstairs at the R&D Cafe and assuming that some of you have kids to get home to, I think we have enough drinks for everyone. So please come upstairs. I also wanted to mention, I mean, if there had been more time, I actually would have asked you both about taking these models that are working really well in the United States internationally and the State Department seemed like a good segue, but we don't have time for that. But so the segue that I'll make is that April 15th, we have another communications forum. This will be hosted by Ethan Zuckerman. If you don't know him, he runs Global Voices or was involved in the founding of Global Voices. He founded Geek Core, the kind of Peace Corps for Geeks and is really tied into a lot of these questions about transparency, accountability, citizen journalism internationally. And so that session's gonna be quite different. He's basically gonna be bringing in by Skype people from around the world for like five or 10 minute sections. People are involved in the Twitter revolution in Moldova or in Iran. People are involved in developing Ushahidi in Kenya. So it's gonna be kind of a low res. Everyone's gonna sound like robots, but a very, very wide cast question about civic media in different places, April 15th, same time, same place. So thank you so much for coming out and come on up and have a drink with us.