Sunshine Week: Know what your government is doing

Sunshine Week is a national campaign to raise public awareness and support for open government issues

It started when the American Society of Newspaper Editors used a Knight grant to bring together more than 50 journalism groups to launch the first Sunshine Week on March 13-19, 2005.

Hundreds of media organizations published more than 2,000 news stories, opinion pieces, cartoons and editorials. Senators, governors, bloggers, librarians, parents and students joined in the dialogue about why people should have better access to government records. In December 2005, President Bush signed an executive order to speed up the release of government records under the Freedom of Information Act.

In 2006, at least 725 media outlets participated, including broadcast and student media outlets. Public service announcements were aired in English and Spanish. The League of Women Voters distributed a Sunshine Week toolkit to 850 chapters and offered it on its web site, www.lwv.org.

Fourteen leagues in 12 states held forums. A national tele-forum, "Are We Safer in the Dark?'', was held, with the panel discussion linked via satellite to locally-hosted discussions around the nation, most of them in libraries. In 2007, bloggers helped push participation to 920 outlets.

Mexico, Canada and Argentina held their own open government events based on the Sunshine Week model. Sunshine Week also conducted a nationwide information audit, which received broad attention.

To learn more, go to www.sunshineweek.org