March 10, 2014 | Read Time: 5 minutes
When Ellen Miller helped found the Sunlight Foundation eight years ago, she was heeding the calls of journalists, citizen activists, and others who worried that too little public information was reaching the average citizen.
Now, as Ms. Miller prepares to step down from her job at the end of this year, the world is awash in digital information. That fact marks a triumph not only of the Chelsea Mannings and Edward Snowdens of the world, who have released large caches of sensitive data against the wishes of the U.S. government, but of advocacy organizations such as Sunlight that have worked to legally obtain and package public data so that activists and voters can get it.
“There’s been this enormous culture change about how open governments should be and how government data should be handled,” says Ms. Miller, 68, who last month announced her plans to leave the Sunlight Foundation.
At the same time, digital technology has made it easier to put dispersed data sets together and make them available for people to use.
“More people expect public information to be online,” she adds. “Even governments have changed their thinking on that.”
Attitude Shift
Sunlight’s work in helping to bring about that sweeping change in attitude is one of the organization’s major accomplishments during her tenure, says Ms. Miller. Other successes she cites include making information about the election finances of government officials available to more people and bringing citizens, hackers, and journalists together to find ways of making huge stores of facts useful to the public.
The Sunlight Foundation has amassed extensive electronic files on campaign finances, the flow of lobbying money, the relationships between lawmakers and high-powered finance companies, and federal budget earmarks, among other issues. Each month, more than 300,000 people visit one of the group’s websites, opencongress.org, to mine financial-disclosure and voting data on House and Senate members.
“That’s a lot for a wonky site,” Ms. Miller says.
Sunlight’s ability to work both ends of the information system—finding data and then presenting the information in a way that makes it accessible to large numbers of citizens—draws praise from other groups that advocate for more access to government data.
Many tie its success directly to Ms. Miller, who herself has been open about what it takes to run such organizations. She is a veteran when it comes to creating public-advocacy groups: Besides founding Sunlight, she created the Center for Responsive Politics and Public Campaign.
Craig Aaron, president of Freepress.net, a group that fights corporate influence in media, says Ms. Miller has been a role model. He appreciates that she “has never hesitated to share her insights with those of us trying to build institutions of our own.”
Data Expansion
Ms. Miller has a long history of advocating for more public disclosure. After working with Ralph Nader’s Center for Responsive Law in the 1970s, Ms. Miller served as an aide to congressional committees that, in part, sought to publicly release details on the activities of U.S. intelligence agencies.
Since forming the Sunlight Foundation with a $3.5-million gift from Michael Klein, a businessman and lawyer who was one of the organization’s founders, Ms. Miller has overseen its growth into an $8-million-a-year operation, one that early on consisted mainly of her and a journalist partner but now has 50 full-time staff members.
The organization has benefited from a total of nearly $18-million in grants from the Omidyar Network, started by Pierre Omidyar, the founder of eBay, and an additional $5.6-million from Mr. Klein.
The annual donation by Omidyar is drying up, says Ms. Miller. “But more traditional funders are now understanding how new technologies can get information to people,” she adds. “We’ve been able to tap them.”
In recent years, Sunlight has garnered six- or seven-figure grants from the Ford, William and Flora Hewlett, John S. and James L. Knight, Open Society, and Rita Allen foundations, as well as from Google and the Rockefeller Family Fund.
That money has been used partly to expand Sunlight’s advocacy efforts to persuade the federal government to release more data. Late last year, the organization filed a Freedom of Information Act request with the White House and the federal Office of Management and Budget to obtain lists of all the data the federal government amasses about its operations. Each agency has created a list, but they have yet to be released, Ms. Miller says.
“The challenge is to keep developing a public inventory of all the data the government collects,” she says. “Businesses will be built with that data.”
She suspects, however, that the White House is holding up the release out of concerns that some of the information might be militarily or politically sensitive.
The fight over access to those lists may end up being fought by her successor. Ms. Miller says she is ready to pass the baton. “This is the third information-based nonprofit I’ve started from infancy and ran up until its preteen years,” she says. “This isn’t a race for the short-winded. One thing I can say for sure is that I do not intend to start a new organization again. Three is plenty, thank you.”
Ellen Miller, executive director, Sunlight Foundation
Education: B.S. in sociology, Cedar Crest College; also studied urban planning at George Washington University.
Career highlights: Founder, Center for Responsive Politics; founder, Public Campaign
Salary: $200,000
Future plans: “I’m trying not to think about them,” she says. “I’d like to read more. And I wouldn’t mind not getting up at 6 a.m. every day to get to the gym before my workday.”
