I just got an email from Gabriela Schneider at the Sunlight Foundation. She's proud to announce that, thanks to the Sunlight Foundation's supporters, congresscritters are now free to use blogs, Twitter and YouTube. Here's the text of the email:
Dear Sunlighters,
Good news! Thanks to your help, the House and Senate recently updated the guidelines that govern how members of Congress can use the Internet to communicate with us about their work.
The new rules now allow members of Congress to interact with us on sites such as Twitter, YouTube and Flickr. Sunlight advocated for these rules changes through our bipartisan collaborative effort; the Open House Project, http://www.theopenhouseproject.com/, and through our popular Let Our Congress Tweet campaign, the first Twitter-based petition to Congress. Thanks to the hundreds of you who joined our call for change!
To show our gratitude, we've created Capitol Tweets at http://sunlightfoundation.com/CAPITOLTWEETS/. This widget, which you can embed on your site, lets you follow the latest tweets from members of Congress who use Twitter.
Get the code to embed the Capitol Tweets widget here:
http://sunlightfoundation.com/capitoltweets/
While you're at it, be sure to check out PC Magazine's list of the "5 sites That Will Boost your Political Knowledge"
http://tinyurl.com/pcworld5sites
You might recognize a few Sunlight friends such OpenSecrets.org, OpenCongress.org and FedSpending.org, who do great work to bring more transparency to work of our federal government.
Thanks again for your support,
Gabriela Schneider & the Sunlight team
Anytime that We The People win another battle for disinfectant of transparency is a good day. Our work must continue, though, because politicians, by nature, are resistant to transparency. This victory is sweet but the fight continues.
Congratulations to the vigilant efforts of the Sunlight Foundation.
