As the Campaigns and Engagement Director at the Sunlight Foundation, Jake is responsible for all external affairs and campaigns aimed at making government on the local, state and federal level more transparent. Jake is a veteran national organizer and social entrepreneur, having served as Director of Strategic Communications for the Energy Action Coalition (Power Shift '09), Director of Partnerships at Idealist.org and Director of Education Without Borders. Jake and his team are responsible for outreach and citizen activism campaigns, like the highly successful "Read the Bill" initiative, which helped push Congress to post legislation online for public disclosure and comment. Jake is an expert on the transparency community and the importance of engagement between the public and its government. Jake has most recently appeared on MSNBC, CNN, BBC America and NPR.
The promise of government accountability, better government services, and new economic opportunity is why we do what we do.
At the Sunlight Foundation, we spend each day striving to make government more open and transparent by ensuring government data is easily accessible to the public online and in real-time. Around the country there are countless others trying to do the same.
Government transparency is that rarest of political phenomena — a great idea with support across the political spectrum and popularity among the public. Yet, here we are in the 21st century with every tool we would need to make government more transparent and accountable, and still we are operating with a government that often behaves as it did in the 19th century.
So, transparent government is a good thing, but we do not yet have one. Now what?
As the Open Government Directive was announced in a live webcast back in December, Sunlight tried something a little different by covering the event live in a variety of formats at once.
As is a norm around here, we basically just got a lot of people in a room, tried a bunch of stuff and paid attention to what seemed to work. At the end of the announcement we simultaneously had a tweet stream from across the open government community going, a live blog, and a Google Wave. We threw the obligatory word cloud at it, sent email blasts, and followed up with blog posts about the Directive’s many components.
It was fun and seemed to be pretty effective. And it also got us thinking …
As we’ve written about quite a lot so far in 2010, we are launching a national campaign to make government more open, transparent, and ultimately: accountable.
Today, we’re excited to put out one of the most important parts of building this campaign: the “mark†that will be emblematic of what we as an open government community stand for.
