During Sunshine Week, starting Sunday, even reporters who hue to the tightest vision of objectivity get political. Government should be more open, they cry, and with editorials and stories they actively push for improved FOIA, expansion of FOIA to Congress, and improved transparency in all parts of Government. (Note: I work for the Sunlight Foundation, which does this year round, so my judgment may be clouded...)

If I were a candidate, I would make strong stands on transparency in the Executive and Congressional branches, but I would back up the stands with more transparency on the home front of the campaign.

Maybe they are brainstorming about it now. Pictures and salaries of all staffers? Personal financial disclosure linked from the home page of the candidate websites? Descriptions of all high donor meetings? A tease--a day's worth of phone calls being made to high donors? What will they do, and what would we like them to do? A podcast of a real strategy meeting?

What do William Gibson, George Orwell, Karl Rove, Chris Shays, Wikipedia and the rise of YouTube have to do with each other? Browsing today's news offerings, I find a connection.

Google the words “DailyKos” and you’ll get about 2.6 million results. Google the words “Democracy Alliance” and you’ll get about 44,000 hits, and from them you won’t find out much. That's why I'm writing to praise journalist Matt Bai's new book, The Argument.

Ron Paul's supporters have provided a measure of radical transparency into his fundraising that would make most political operatives suffer heart failure. Going well beyond the now-passe end-of-quarter fundraising "bat," the Paul campaign has set a public goal of $12 million raised for the quarter, posting their current total live on the homepage and including the names and hometowns of donors. If a donation comes in while you're on the site, you'll see it update live.

As if this weren't bold enough, RonPaulGraphs.com has taken it a step further. Using the live data feed that powers the graphic, the site publishes an impressive array of analytics including a minute-by-minute view of donations and projected totals for the month and quarter.

But that's not all.

According to my initial projections off this crowdsourced spreadsheet of Obama donations I set up after the Wisconsin victory, Obama has already raised at least $45 million for February and is on track to raise $60 million for the month.

Semi-pro campaign journalism gets a mid-term review; Republican consultant launches NoJohn.com; Chuck DeFeo shares his secrets for getting attention online; Obama gets naked with his earmarks, will Clinton follow?; and now you can listen in too on those campaign conference calls.

I'm at the National Press Club for the launch of Stanford Prof. Larry Lessig's new project, Change-Congress.org. He's here as part of Sunshine Week, and his speech is co-sponsored by the Sunlight Foundation (which I consult for) as well as the Omidyar Network. As you may know, last year, Lessig decided to shift his focus from the fight for free culture to the fight for a clean government. Here are my notes on his talk, paraphrasing as best as I can...

As fundraising gets more and more transparent, it's important to learn how to read between the lines. As pathbreaking as the Obama campaign has been, they are a step back from the transparency of the Dean bat, which at least gave us real dollar figures in addition to a total number of donors. Neither could beat the transparency gold standard set by Ron Paul, who updated via a real-time XML+Flash element that was scraped for analytics. Moreover, when the Paul campaign bulk uploaded offline contributions, they told people. The Obama "bat" turns out to be an indecipherable mix of real and fake data.

A super interesting controversy has been brewing over LegiStorm, the transparency-obsessed site devoted to bringing public — but buried — documents and data to light.

Confronted by the prospect of internet-driven public participation in crafting legislation, the past head of the American League of Lobbyists says, "What's next? Are we going to let the American people decide our defense policy, our trade policy, our immigration policy?"