It’s Sunshine Week!

We’ll get Sunshine Week started right, with our very own executive director writing in the Washington Examiner about how transparency gives people power to make government work for them, and how Sunshine Week is the time to get started:

State and local governments today face unprecedented fiscal challenges and unprecedented opportunities for fundamental reforms. In the coming weeks and months, citizens can forge truly historic change in state and local government by reforming the budget process, privatizing services, and returning professional full-time legislatures and councils to more traditional part-time bodies, among many other worthy initiatives.

Read about that here.

What is Sunshine Week? As Kansas Watchdog notes, Sunshine Week marks an annual effort to focus attention on the importance of government transparency, with print, broadcast and online news media, civic groups, libraries, nonprofits, school and other open government advocates participating. For example, Open Secrets is participating.

Sunshine Week is already proving worthwhile. For example, the Sunshine Project announced late last week attempts a statewide transparency effort.

We look forward to seeing what other government efforts to be open pop up this week. Spring is the perfect time for sun.