Ellen Miller

The Portales News-Tribune also posted the editorial board memo as an Op-Ed written by the Sunlight Foundation's Gabriela Schneider. - Ellen Miller

The Nashua Telegraph also posted the Sunlight Foundation's editorial memo as an Op-Ed written by communications director, Gabriela Schneider. - Ellen Miller

The National Journal Magazine's latest cover story addresses the challenges of the Obama administration with lobbying influence that quotes the Sunlight Foundation's senior writer, Paul Blumenthal: Tauzin's group spent more than $150 million in advertising to support the Democrats' health care reform plan and received assurances that Democrats wouldn't push for the reimportation of U.S.-made prescription drugs from developed countries, something Obama had backed during his campaign. "What Obama found was the reality that these interests are very powerful and that he had to deal with them," said Paul Blumenthal, a senior writer at the Sunlight Foundation, a nonprofit that uses technology to make government more transparent. "He reneged on his promise on drug cost control policies to get the millions of dollars in advertising that PhRMA spent on promoting health care reform." - Ellen Miller

The Society for Scholarly Publishing has a blog post about visualizing data that discussing the work of Sunlight Labs: Sunlight Foundation’s Sunlight Labs is also aiming to make complex data and information more usable for the greater good. Sunlight’s mission is to open government and “make it more transparent, accountable, and responsible.” To accomplish this, the Sunlight Labs site is a community space where staff and community programmers can share open-source code, APIs, publicly available data sets, and ideas — resulting in co-created utilities that help the organizations and the public interpret public data, often aided by mobile apps or Flash visualization technologies. Currently, Sunlight Labs reports that community members have contributed more than two-thirds of the apps and APIs found on their Projects page. Sunlight Labs also hosts a wiki that includes a list of yet-unbuilt project ideas, - Ellen Miller

The Newseum's Future of News site has a blog post about transparency and the Sunlight Live project. They also have an embedded clip from a panel discussion with the Sunlight Foundation's executive director, Ellen Miller: “Television requires performance,” observed Paul Blumenthal of the Sunlight Foundation, an organization that advocates openness in the government through the Internet. During an event called Sunlight.Live, which occurred on the day of the health-care summit, the Sunlight Foundation used various forms of new media to give context to the health-care conversation. The foundation streamed the summit through its Web site; an informational graphic displayed data about each speaker, specifically, his or her campaign contributions, connections to lobbyists and past votes on health care. - Ellen Miller

The Nieman Journalism Lab at Harvard University has a post about the differences between non-profit and for-profit journalism that mentions the 'excellent work' of the Sunlight Foundation: Does your organization produce news and/or commentary daily, weekly, monthly, or in some other regular interval? It’s a simple criteria that weeds out nonprofits that sporadically put out reports. It also excludes transparency groups, many of which do excellent work, but are not in themselves journalists. (To help clarify this point, imagine that instead of transparency, these groups were focused on any other topic. A searchable database is useful and interesting, particularly to journalists. However, providing access to information is not the same as producing news and commentary. It’s a service or a tool provided to allow journalists to build narratives, which is part of a broader strategy of using the media to advance their cause.) - Ellen Miller

Federal Times has an article about Obama's transparency record that quotes the Sunlight Foundation's Ellen Miller multiple times: "What the administration has done is gone from nothing to creating a full-blown discussion about the need for greater government accountability and transparency," said Ellen Miller, co-founder of the Sunlight Foundation, one of the leading non-partisan advocates for more government openness. The Sunlight Foundation's Miller agrees that access to information is more important than perfect data. "The fact that these two [Web sites[ exist is a remarkable transformation in the way the government has held its data for decades," she said. - Ellen Miller

The Day, a paper based in Connecticut, has an article about earnings for top health care executives that mentions the Sunlight Foundation's report on PhRMA and the White House: ...a recent report by the Sunlight Foundation, a private nonprofit dedicated to more transparency in government, indicates Kindler's extensive role in negotiating a deal for the drug companies with the Obama administration and Senate Finance Committee Chairman Max Baucus. The Sunlight Foundation reports Kindler and other drug company CEOs worked hand-in-hand in negotiating health care reform with Billy Tauzin, a former chairman of the House Committee on Energy & Commerce, who ended up with a lucrative job leading a pharmacy industry trade group after crafting a bill while in Congress that protected drug companies from Medicare drug price negotiations... - Ellen Miller

A blog post about the new Public=Online campaign of the Sunlight Foundation: "I really like the Sunlight Foundation’s work. They are working mostly at the National level to bring the same transparency to government that I work for here in Georgia and Lee County. They’ve got a new campaign they are gearing up for that sounds REALLY good, which is the title of this post." - Ellen Miller