Seeking Online Exposure

Charity devises Web tools for keeping tabs on Congress

When the Sunlight Foundation, an organization here that uses Web technology to expose the workings of Congress, decided it wanted to know how many members of the House of Representatives had used campaign money to hire their spouses, it turned to its phalanx of researchers — the American public.

The organization issued a call for help on its blog at 5 p.m. on a Friday — “which of course is absurd,” says Ellen Miller, the group’s co-founder and executive director. But Sunlight was behind schedule in announcing the project, she recalls, “so we said, Let’s just put it out for the weekend.”

Ms. Miller, a veteran open-government activist, was delighted at what happened next. “By Sunday, it was all done. All 435 members of Congress had been investigated.” People from across the country had filed online reports — uncovering 19 Congressional spouses who had earned a total of more than $630,000 from campaign money during the 2006 election cycle.

As that 2006 project demonstrates, the digital age has given charities and advocacy groups powerful new tools to connect to and mobilize their supporters. And Sunlight plans to make full use of those tools this year as it marshals forces across the country to keep tabs on the 2008 Congressional candidates.

Collecting Data

Started two years ago by Ms. Miller and Michael Klein, a wealthy Washington lawyer and business entrepreneur — and advised by several Internet-industry leaders, including the founders of Craigslist and Wikipedia — the Sunlight Foundation has become a leading force in developing and using new technologies to make government more open. Since its start, it has spent more than $6-million on a wide array of projects to collect massive amounts of data about Congress, lawmakers, their staff members, and lobbyists.

Members of Congress are under growing pressure to disclose more about how they spend their time, especially their involvement with companies and trade groups that hope to influence legislation. Bills passed last year, for example, require lawmakers to attach their names to “earmarks,” or money they slip into bills for pet projects, something they previously could do anonymously. The House and Senate must also now set up a public database of reports members file about their travel and personal finances, and lobbyists must file reports about their activities electronically. The Sunlight Foundation has pushed for those changes, and has devised projects that make existing information easier for the public to find.

“That’s been our first goal, to get that information out of the basements and put it online,” Ms. Miller says.

With the help of a group of technology experts it calls the Sunlight Labs, the group has developed Web sites that allow people to search government records, track legislation, and view Congressional correspondence to federal agencies.

It also offers grants to other organizations for digital open-government projects. For example, it provided almost $235,000 to OMB Watch, a government watchdog group, to create FedSpending.org, a database that tracks recipients of all federal grants and contracts. The project was so successful — the database has been searched more than six million times, Sunlight says — that when the White House budget office was required by Congress to develop a similar site, unveiled last month, it worked with OMB Watch to model the technology on FedSpending.org.

Call to Action

In addition to ferreting out information, Sunlight works to get citizens more involved in monitoring Congress. It issues calls for help through news releases, e-mail messages, its blog, and a network of friendly outside blogs. Hundreds of people have responded, taking advantage of the Internet-era ability to do research any time of day or night from home.

Sunlight points the researchers to databases where they can find the relevant information. For example, for the investigation of Congressional spouses, it referred them to biographical information posted on VoteSmart.org, and then to campaign-expenditure information posted on OpenSecrets.org, operated by the Center for Responsive Politics.

Sunlight knows little about many of the researchers, as they are not required to identify themselves in detail (though it double-checks much of the information they supply). But some do so much work that their monikers become household names.

When Sunlight asked for help on the Congressional spouses project, about 40 people responded — including one known as “Beezling,” who alone investigated 116 representatives. While that was impressive enough, Beezling topped his own performance the next time Sunlight asked for help — to find out whether any campaigns had hired businesses that were owned by or employed a Congressional spouse. That time, he researched 319 members of Congress, again over a weekend.

“Beezling,” it turns out, is Alex Brant-Zawadzki, a law-school student who at the time was a reporter for the Orange County Weekly in California. Mr. Brant-Zawadzki says he was motivated by the same instincts that drove his reporting: “If I can supply enough information, maybe the right people can do something about it.”

While it is not illegal for members of Congress to hire family members for their campaigns, Sunlight argues that it allows “special-interest cash to enter their family budgets.” Its investigation found that Patricia McKeon, the wife of Rep. Howard McKeon, Republican of California, earned the most money from 2006 campaign funds during an 18-month period — $78,287. Mr. McKeon defends the payment. “Patricia is paid for the work she does on the campaign and that’s the right thing to do,” he said in an e-mail message.

After Sunlight and other groups publicized such activities, the House passed a bill last July to ban campaign committees from making payments to spouses, either directly or by hiring a company they are involved with. The Senate has not yet voted on it.

Not all of the citizen researchers spend enormous amounts of time on their projects. Elaine Nelson, a Web designer in Olympia, Wash., for example, reviewed the Web site of one member of Congress — Brian Baird, a Democrat who represents her district — for a Sunlight project to rate how much information Congressional Web sites provide. She says she heard about the project through one of the blogs she reads regularly.

“It took me less than a half-hour,” she says. “It’s nice to be able to help out on something like that where you’re not doing a lot but you’re doing something useful.”

‘Electric Light’

The seeds of the Sunlight Foundation were planted in summer 2005, when Mr. Klein read an article in The Washington Post that infuriated him. It described a provision tucked into the 2005 energy bill that relaxed export controls on weapons-grade uranium to benefit a Canadian importer — following a campaign by Washington lobbyists who had contributed money to House and Senate energy-committee members.

Mr. Klein began exploring ways to entice the news media to probe more into Congressional activities.

A mutual friend put him in touch with Ms. Miller — then head of a Congressional-accountability project for the Campaign for America’s Future, a group that advocates liberal economic policies — and they met for lunch. Ms. Miller recalls Mr. Klein telling her he liked former Supreme Court Justice Louis Brandeis’s quote: “Sunlight is said to be the best of disinfectants.”

She responded: “And I’m one of five people in this town who can finish the quote for you, because no one knows that: ‘…electric light, the most efficient policeman.’” (The quote gave the Sunlight Foundation both its name and its motto.)

Ms. Miller and Mr. Klein began consulting seasoned reporters about ways to promote more investigative journalism. Mr. Klein drew on his experience as co-founder of CoStar Group, a company that gives customers access to a database with information about commercial real-estate properties. He agreed to put up $3.5-million for a new organization to collect and post online information about Congress for journalists, bloggers, and everyday citizens.

The pair recruited several technology heavyweights to the group’s board of directors (Craig Newmark, who created Craigslist, the online classified-advertising service, and Esther Dyson, a prominent Internet commentator and investor) and advisory board (Kim Scott, director of Google’s online advertising sales, and Jimmy Wales, the head of Wikipedia, the collaborative encyclopedia).

They raised more than $4-million in additional money, including $2-million from the Omidyar Network — the foundation in Redwood City, Calif., set up by Pierre Omidyar, the founder of eBay, and his wife, Pam — and $1.9-million from the Rockefeller Family Fund, in New York.

With a $4-million budget and 18 staff members, the Sunlight Foundation is now nurturing projects that include:

• Congresspedia, a joint project with the Center for Media and Democracy that is billed as: “the citizen’s encyclopedia on Congress that you can edit.” The Web site displays information about every senator and representative and about legislation and issues before Congress. Using the “wiki” software that was pioneered by Wikipedia, Congresspedia allows anyone to contribute and edit the entries, backed up by professional editors.

  A related project, “Wiki the Vote,” asks people to submit information about the 2008 Congressional elections. Users can click on any state on a digital map to find (or submit) background and articles on its senators and representatives, potential or announced challengers, and lists of local political blogs.

• Earmark Watch, a joint project with Taxpayers for Common Sense, which asks citizens to help Sunlight uncover information about more than 3,000 pet projects that members of Congress have inserted into spending bills. More than 560 people have signed up to help and so far have completed questionnaires and shared comments about the sponsors and recipients of 128 earmarks.

Among the more enthusiastic researchers on earmarks has been “Mrs. Panstreppon” — in real life, an accountant on Long Island, N.Y., who prefers to remain anonymous. In an earlier Sunlight project to analyze 2007 Congressional spending bills, she highlighted three earmarks worth more than $1-million for the Friends of the Congressional Glaucoma Caucus Foundation, in Lake Success, N.Y.

Brian Quinn, vice president for grants and communications at the Glaucoma foundation, agrees the public should know more about how earmarks are allocated. But he faults Sunlight for failing to offer a “thorough” report.

“They never went back and said, This foundation that was blogged and attacked for use of federal money also screened 53,000 people [for glaucoma] during the past year,” and always got good marks in annual audits, he says. The Glaucoma group never actually got the earmarks that were unearthed by Sunlight because negative publicity about such spending prompted Congress to remove all earmarks from its 2007 budget — forcing the charity to cut back on glaucoma screenings, Mr. Quinn says.

Making Corrections

So far, Sunlight has not been burned by anyone providing bogus information, says Bill Allison, a senior fellow who supervises the citizen researchers. The closest call came after 300 researchers graded Congressional Web sites on a 100-point scale, based on whether they provided information about the member’s legislative activities, disclosure forms, and daily schedules.

After the group issued its report, which gave the average score as just 29, Congressional staff members began calling to complain that their sites included information that Sunlight researchers had overlooked.

The group ended up issuing a corrected press release, lowering the number of sites that got “failing” grades from 499 to 374. While in some cases, the information on the Web sites was hard to find, the researchers were simply wrong in the case of Rep. Jane Harman, Democrat of California, Mr. Allison said.

One person who called to complain, Matt Dinkel, press secretary of Rep. Mike Doyle, Democrat of Pennsylvania, says he has no hard feelings. Sunlight immediately changed his boss’s grade once he pointed out where to find information about the congressman’s committee assignments, he says.

Sunlight’s efforts have also prompted members of Congress to make changes. A lobbying effort by the group’s advocacy branch, the Sunlight Network, has so far persuaded eight members of Congress — including the entire Montana delegation — to start posting their daily calendars online.

“That may seem small,” Ms. Miller says. But in the halls of Congress, she adds, it’s a “sea change.”