First and foremost, we’re excited to welcome the new members of
Transparency Bloggers to our community!
We are excited to have great voices like Tracy Viselli writing over
at Reno and Its Discontent (http://www.renodiscontent.com/) and Chetly
Zarko from Outside Lansing (http://www.outsidelansing.com/)
participating in the conversation - and new voices like Sunlight's new
engagement director Jake Brewer. We also wanted to take this
opportunity to update you on new developments happening around the
Sunlight network and ask for your feedback.
Sunlight has recently expanded its teams and projects, and is now in
an even better position to support our efforts towards greater
government transparency through technology, policy and citizen
engagement.
Citizen engagement and citizen journalists like all of us, in
particular, are playing an ever more important role in ecosystem of
making our government more transparent – and as such, this list has a
tremendously important place in the Sunlight ecosystem.
In these next months, as the elected officials vote on bills that will
shape our collective next decade, our voices will be needed more than
ever to ensure our local, state and federal governments are
transparent and accountable to us.
We believe local bloggers are the backbone of citizen journalism and
good government initiatives, and this list is here to support you as
best we can.
This list is seen as a place for you to share your work with each
other, seek advice when government information is being evasive, and
share ideas about what’s working and what’s not as we propel the
transparency movement forward.
We also need your ideas for engaging new audiences, what data you
would like to see, projects you might need help creating, and
resources you need to be connected with.
The real sources of transparency are the people that work tirelessly
to hold those we elect to the highest standards – and that’s us.
So let’s get to work.
The first thing you can help with is to fill out this simple form
which will be shared with the group, letting others know who you are,
where you’re from, your topic of focus and your URL.
Form is linked here: Transparency Bloggers Form
We can’t wait to work with you all more over these next few months and
years!
Nisha Thompson
P.S. Please let us know who is missing from this conversation. We
need as many voices as possible to help strengthen the movement toward
accountable and transparency governance. So feel free to let us know
who should be invited.
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Due to my personal history with "classified programs" in the past I am a firm believer in "sunlight being the greatest disinfectant" and I support all moves towards transparency and accountability for elected officials and appointed government employees. Not everything is done with the best intentions as we are all well aware of, i.e the current mess with "enhanced interrogations" and "torture" the difference being how the term is apparently being used and by whom.
Friday, May 15, 2009
Transparency Bloggers to our community!
