It’s Sunshine Week in America this week. Here’s a quick description of the initiative, from the Sunshine Week website:
Sunshine Week is a national initiative to promote a dialogue about the importance of open government and freedom of information. Participants include news media, civic groups, libraries, nonprofits, schools and others interested in the public’s right to know.
Sunshine Week as a national effort is spearheaded by the American Society of News Editors. The key funder has been the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation, with significant support from ASNE Foundation. In 2011, The Gridiron Club and Foundation contributed $10,000.
Though created by journalists, Sunshine Week is about the public’s right to know what its government is doing, and why.
Sunshine Week seeks to enlighten and empower people to play an active role in their government at all levels, and to give them access to information that makes their lives better and their communities stronger.
Sunshine Week is a nonpartisan, non-profit initiative.
Readers know that I’ve supported consistently initiatives of this kind. See, for example, Municipal Openness and Transparency, and Their Alternatives (Update). It’s part of the fight against deception, and the hope of a few that residents will be easily distracted, and hoodwinked. That hope, of those few, still plagues Whitewater, recently as much as ever. See, along these lines, Nietzsche and the Dark Hope Against a Better Local Politics.
Well, then — there’s no better time than now to double one’s efforts.