Sunlight Foundation: Today in Open Government — 2/13/2012

Today in Open Government was the Sunlight Foundation's daily blog roundup, edited by their policy and reporting team, surfacing federal-level transparency and accountability stories from the prior 24 hours. The 13 February 2012 edition fell at the height of the 2012 election cycle and the FY2013 budget process, and would have leaned on the issues Sunlight tracked most actively: lobbying disclosures filed under LD-2, congressional travel and personal-financial reports, OGE filings, FEC committee activity, and the FOIA-litigation docket.

The Sunlight Foundation in February 2012 was operating at roughly its largest scale: Influence Explorer, OpenCongress (in partnership with the Participatory Politics Foundation), the Sunlight API for legislative data, and Politwoops (the deleted-tweet tracker) were all live products. The foundation's 2010-launched Reporting Group was one of the few in-house investigative-reporting operations focused exclusively on disclosure-record reporting.

Sunlight wound down the Reporting Group in 2016 and transitioned away from technology development soon after, but during the 2010–2014 period it was effectively the connective tissue of the federal open-government press community — and the daily Today in Open Government post was the schedule that connected the data work to the journalism work.