March 14th to 20th is Sunshine Week; a week long exploration of why open government is important to everyone.
To honor Sunshine week, we thought it was about time we created a Blog Swarm by asking you all to blog about why an open, transparent government is so important. This is an opportunity to tell everyone why being able to hold your elected officials accountable matters, or what changes you hope a more trasnparent government will bring to your communities. Or maybe how open government could help your business?
A few other ideas could be to stress the importance of enuring:
- Candidates for office are more transparent through their campaigns
- Government budget and spending information is easily available
- "Public" government information is "online" through the Public Online Information Act (http://thepoia.org)
- All legislation is available online for 72 hours before it's debated (Read the Bill!)
- Public officials disclose who or what they receive money from, online and in real-time
- Lobbyists are held to greater account for the influence they exert on public officials
- Government is a little less ridiculous :)
Sign up to be a part of the blogswarmbelow. Just give us your name, zip code (so we know your Congressional District), blog name, and the topic you are going to cover so we can keep track of your posts.
We will be collecting these posts and linking to them on the Sunlight Foundation blog and on Twitter to help drive more attention to what you write. We are really looking forward to reading your thoughts and sharing them with everyone!
