Startup Grind's Washington DC chapter was pleased to host at 1776's campus a local legend to the DC scene, both in the political realm and in the entrepreneurial community: Ellen Miller, founder of the Sunlight Foundation. We were honored to have Ellen as our first female speaker, and especially someone who represents the true disrupters of the DC region.
Ellen's story is very humbling, being a woman from rural Kentucky who had ambitions that led her to seek greater opportunities. She never thought that she would ever be a social entrepreneur, but had a "political awakening" in the 60s through mentors and the current events that "shaped the vision for the work that [she] did for [her] whole life." After working for Ralph Nader during the peak of his political career, she learned a lot as a 22 year old intern, like "what not to do." She learned to treat employees with respect and to recognize their work and effort. She used this experience to drive her career on Capital Hill for over seven years, and began to become exposed to the inner workings of politics as she raised through the ranks at the Senate for Responsive Politics.
As she got a strong understanding of political money and PACs, she left the Senate for Responsive Politics to start her non-profit Public Campaign. Being deeply rooted as an entrepreneur, she saw problems that she wanted to fix and worked in political organization to help remedy these issues. She spent a lot of time in researching better ways to structure organization in a campaign, like funding and staffing, which led to her vision of creating the Sunlight Foundation.
The Sunlight Foundation was something Ellen did not plan for, but actually happened out of sheer destiny. After successfully running two non-profits, Mike Klein approached Ellen about incentivizing reporting to exposure data about political financing and campaigning. This information would assist in getting better political stories out there by sourcing more convincing and infallible data that supports various political stories. Upon starting the initial structure of this political data technology, Ellen was funded for over $3 million dollars by a client, and the Sunlight Foundation was immediately founded.
Ellen was inspired by Supreme Court Associate Justice Louis Brandeis' quote that said that "sunlight is found to be the best of disinfectants, electric light the most efficient policeman." During Ellen's initial meeting with Mike Klein, they both remarked on how Brandice's quote has inspired them both, and thus agreed that "sunlight" was necessary as the Foundation's inspiration and core values. This "sunlight" would shine in the dark corners of data and information so that political secrets can be revealed. Although they were uncertain whether Sunlight would initially offer large grants or data packets, one thing was for certain: Sunlight would strive to provide honest information to help eradicate misinformation and corruption in politics.
After the funding of USAFunding.com, Ellen thought that it should not be the responsibility of anyone but the government to host government and political data, but sought to use Sunlight's resources to create tools and insight that would force government to be more transparent. Ellen reinforced the startup culture at Sunlight by allowing staff to create and deploy tools deemed useful, but regularly the team would elect to discard tools not used; a veritable lean model working in the chaotic world of politics. Ellen believes that "if you build it, they will come," therefore Sunlight was busy creating wikis and widgets and apps, and the political arena began to take notice.
Sunlight Foundation built up an empire of something called "influence data," which is the crux of Sunlight's disruption. By connecting the dots between the lobbying and the spending and the fundraising at the state and federal levels, this massive endeavor of dot connect led to Sunlight's "data commons" or Influence Explorer. This data commons tells the story of how policy is made in the United States, and according to Ellen, it's "not a pretty story" when you actually can conceptualize how much money influences the American political system. This massive database of "input and output funding" tells a vast "story without words ... a story of data," where journalists and political correspondents can string narratives to tell the real story that is politics.
Ellen remarks on the discrepancies between various political fiscal reporting, like margins of error in the trillions of dollars. It then becomes unclear which source is correct over the other, or even their level of data accuracy. The Sunlight Foundation works with USASpending.com and with Congress to minimize the size of these reporting gaps, thus leading to annual reports like ClearSpending.org. Ellen wishes to continue to work with the current administrations in keeping political and government data open, accessible and transparent, by providing machine-readable data, not apps that poorly display data. Additionally, Ellen wishes to help government regain the trust of American citizens who believe that government is apathetic to their needs.
Ellen reinforces her stance on FOIA (Freedom of Information Act), saying it "should be the government's responsibility to provide this data, and not be on the backs of its citizens." Unfortunately, the current process is terribly slow and outdated, making it nearly impossible for the data (when supplied) to even be utilized. Of course, certain governmental data (like Homeland Security) should be accessible only to those with high security clearances, but information from the EPA, DoD and more interior branches must be readily available for the American government to truly embody a democratic system.
Ellen closed out her talk saying that Sunlight Foundation does offer a variety of innovation events and grants that aim to help small businesses and startups with a social entrepreneur focus the ability to grow. Ellen advises for all social entrepreneurs that you must have vision (and truly believe it) in order to succeed, and to also hire to your weaknesses. She recommends know "what your role is" in the company, whether you're an "inside player" or an "outside player", and structuring your role around where your skills are best aligned. "Once you're an entrepreneur, you're always an entrepreneur," Ellen concluded.
Ellen's idol is Supreme Court Associate Justice Louis Brandeis, for Louis believed in "fair and equal representation, and was incorruptible," tenets that she holds true to herself and to her work.
Ellen will be retiring from her post as head of The Sunlight Foundation at the end of 2014.
Thanks to our sponsors 1776 and 43North.
WRITTEN BY CEDRIC CRAIG, STARTUP GRIND