The Sunlight Foundation’s ultimate goal is to strengthen the relationship between citizens and their elected officials and to foster public trust in Congress. The organization uses technology and the power of the Internet at the core of all of its efforts. Micah Sifry, the foundation's Senior Technology Advisor joins Phil and Scott to talk about a number of his projects.
In addition to the Sunlight Foundation, he discusses his work with Personal Democracy Forum and the technical aspects of the work. He reviews the API used for the Sunlight Foundation and discusses how it works and how it can be used by others.
Micah L. Sifry is the Executive Editor of Personal Democracy Forum, which he helped co-found in May 2004. Since 1997, he has been a senior analyst with Public Campaign, a non-profit, non-partisan organization based in Washington, DC working on comprehensive campaign finance reform. In that capacity, he has published articles and op-eds in The Washington Post, The Los Angeles Times, Newsday, The American Prospect, The Hill, Salon.com, IntellectualPolitics.com and many smaller papers and magazines. He is also, with his colleague Nancy Watzman, co-author of Is That a Politician in Your Pocket? (John Wiley & Sons, 2004), a book on how money in politics affects people in their everyday lives.
Prior to joining Public Campaign in 1997, Sifry was an editor and writer with The Nation magazine for thirteen years, writing widely on domestic and international politics, especially the Middle East, his first love and specialty. He is the co-editor, with Christopher Cerf, of The Iraq War Reader (Touchstone, 2003), of which the Weekly Standard said: "Most public-policy anthologies are a bore--either too slight in substance or too academic in tone. Not so The Iraq War Reader. It combines polemics with solid policy statements; forceful opinion pieces with scholarly analyses. Readers will find in its pages key documents, speeches, and essays that give depth to the debate about American policy toward Iraq.
He is a graduate of Princeton University (B.A. in Politics, 1983) and New York University (M.A. in Politics, 1989). He is also an adjunct professor at the Political Science Department of the City University of New York/Graduate Center, and a founding member of its Independent Politics Group.
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