K Street Cafe

(cross-posted from the Open Senate Project blog)

Sunlight has just sent out the following press release, announcing the launch of the Open Senate Project.

As Ellen blogged this morning, we’re delighted to have Majority Leader Reid’s endorsement of the effort, so we can apply the same public discussion and analysis to Senate reform priorities as we’ve applied to the House.

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At Sunlight, we’ve been working closely with congressional staff and Members who want to take advantage of new online tools.

This meant that the outdated old restrictions that control how Members of Congress use the Internet had to be updated. Both the House and Senate have recently succeeded in passing new rules governing Internet use, as I recently wrote:

The revisions should cause a renaissance in official political Web-use, with eager new media staff and savvy Members now able to confidently engage with their constituents. We can’t wait to see what they come up with, and can only hope that all government reform arguments have such happy endings.

In celebration of congressional staffers’ newfound online leeway, Sunlight released a new widget that shows all of the recent tweets from Members of Congress, whose twittering population has increased enormously over the last 6 months. You can see the widget below:

I’m John Wonderlich, program director at the Sunlight Foundation.

For this introductory post, I’d like to do two things: explain a bit about what I do, and explain what I’m doing here.

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