By DEBORAH A. MILES
When state Attorney General Andrew Cuomo’s office decided in March 2007 it
was time to let the average citizen peek over the shoulders of lawmakers by
creating more government transparency, PEF members were there to make it
happen.
Last December, OAG (Office of Attorney General) unveiled Project Sunlight –
an effort to monitor government decision-making. It allows a person easy
access to government information on the Web, and is the first site of its
kind in New York.
Project Sunlight delivers facts on elected officials, details on a bill, who
lobbied on a bill, even information on discretionary funds allocated by
elected officials for specific projects.
Geoffrey Coyle, manager of OAG’s Media Center, said the name came from
Supreme Court Justice Louis Brandeis’ famous quote, “Sunlight is the best of
disinfectants.”
Coyle, a PEF member at the state Law Department, said Albany activist Blair
Horner was the project sponsor.
“Every level at the OAG was involved and behind us,” Coyle said. “From the
top down, we got the green light. Blair guided us down the path on how to
approach government. Our job was to develop a site with an intuitive look
and feel to it.”
Coyle said the project was a challenge but also a great opportunity.
“The Project Sunlight team developed a concept for transparent government
and integrated all the agencies’ databases. My team put the information in a
unified and
organized way for the public and produced videos for the
site. For example, there’s a 30-second blimp on how a
bill becomes a bill.
Nearly two-dozen New York-based newspapers praised the project in editorials.
“We put together something that was a hit, considering all the media exposure it received,” Coyle said.
While Coyle was in charge of the Web design, another PEF member, Judy Simkins,
was the project manager and
coordinated the technical,
video and other teams to get
the project up and running.
Simkins is an information
technology specialist 4 at OAG and
manages the Project Sunlight development team,
“It was a great project to work on,” she said.
One of her biggest challenges was gathering all the data stored at other agencies.
“I’ve worked for state government quite a long time and knew a lot of data could be shared among agencies,” Simkins said. “They use different types of software and different formats, so our challenge was to collect it and find a way to share it.
“Technology is always changing, so there are more ways to share data. There’s a lot more to come,” SImkins said.
To take a look for yourself, visit www.sunlightny.org
