Wednesday, March 19, 2008

Going on Now - Sunshine Week


Sunshine Week is a national initiative to open a dialogue about the importance of open government and freedom of information. Participants include print, broadcast and online news media, civic groups, libraries, non-profits, schools and others interested in the public's right to know.

Sunshine Week is led by the American Society of Newspaper Editors and is funded primarily by a challenge grant from the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation of Miami.

Though spearheaded by journalists, Sunshine Week is about the public's right to know what its government is doing, and why. Sunshine Week seeks to enlighten and empower people to play an active role in their government at all levels, and to give them access to information that makes their lives better and their communities stronger.

Sunshine Week is a non-partisan initiative whose supporters are conservative, liberal and everything in between.

7 comments:

Susan said...

This is cool. I had no idea bout it either so very interesting.

Unknown said...

Very cool! Thanks for sharing. How was the work travel?

NoRegrets said...

I didn't know about it either!

In honor of Sunshine week some friends and I are having a Sunshine viewing Friday - it's a movie that's supposed to be good.

The meeting was very productive but it was exhausting. And the hotel smelled like bug spray since they had fumigated the kitchen on Friday. Ugh. And two people in my group got food poisoning by eating mussels. Never going there again~!

Churlita said...

That is really interesting. I had never heard of it before.

Anonymous said...

Here is where I get off the bus. I'm all for open government, but the Freedom of Information Act is the biggest pain in the behind. I would like to see Congress subject itself to it. So instead of working on implementing or enforcing the laws, every so often I have to pass hours and hours of my working time culling through emails that are several years old in response to a request for information. What is the middle ground? I don't know but most folks are not aware of the huge amounts of time and money that request cost government workers.

NoRegrets said...

DBN, isn't it because there isn't a good system of archiving information?

Anonymous said...

I have heard of it. I am cynic, hear me roar.

The government does what it wants, when it wants, and however it wants. Anything that is released for public consumption is generally fairly common knowledge to those who pay attention. Fortunately for the government, most people in this country would rather pay attention to Brittany, Lindsay, and Paris. Sad, but true.