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June 25, 2009 | 01:17 PM
The state attorney general's office offered Smithtown residents June 18 a guided tour of its updated good-government website, Project Sunlight.
The office of Attorney General Andrew Cuomo and The League of Women Voters of Smithtown presented the program last Thursday at the Smithtown Library main branch. The session, titled "Project Sunlight: For Restoring Transparency in Government," provided the public with an overview of the newly revised Project Sunlight 2.0 website, and instructed residents how to use the tool efficiently.
Cuomo first launched Project Sunlight in December 2007 to promote public disclosure of government officials' decisions; who is influencing those decisions; and who stands to benefit. The site includes information on elected officials, campaign finance activities, legislation, lobbyists, state contracts and registered corporations and charities. It offers a broad array of statewide government information that was previously often difficult to access, even with Freedom of Information laws.
Sunlight 2.0 was unveiled in early April 2009, and features "new data, a more user-friendly format, and innovative features to increase openness and accountability," according to a Cuomo release. Many of the changes that were made to the site are a product of suggestions by the public, his office said. One of the newest additions includes an interactive map, which allows users to locate their representatives, get their contact information and links to their individual websites.
Brian Herrington, Cuomo's assistant director of intergovernmental affairs, gave residents a guided tour of the new website last Thursday.
Designed with all users in mind, the website is specifically made to be easy to navigate, and the searches simple to carry out. Herrington stressed that the website was made to be a "one-stop shop." It offers two ways to locate information: a basic search utilizing keywords and a more specific "smart" search.
Other upgrades to the site include links to the 2009-10 state budget; all member items in 2008-09 state budget; an enhanced member-items map allowing for several years worth of appropriations to be searched for at the same time; a map showing the number and types of governments in each county; and a Spanish translation of the entire site. A smart-search feature helps users overcome differences in words due to misspellings, transcriptions, acronyms, nicknames and other common errors frequently found in campaign finance disclosure reports. The redesigned site also allows users to export search data to an Excel spreadsheet for ease in printing and analysis.
The website includes video tutorials on the basics of Project Sunlight and introductions to New York State government and other information that can be found on the website. The earliest data available dates from 2006. The majority of the information is pulled from existing online databases as soon as it is released, according to Cuomo's office.
Since the new version of the site was released in April, it has had 10,700 visitors at an average of 164 per day, according to the attorney general. In total, there have been almost 70,000 visitors to Project Sunlight.
Public feedback on the website is highly valued, Herrington said. "We want to know, we want to make this better," he said. Users are encouraged to submit any suggestions via email.
Smithtown residents last Thursday immediately responded with a number of recommendations. They requested the website delineate election districts in New York and pending lawsuits involving the state, even vehicular accidents that occur in New York.
The site is located at www.sunlightny.com.
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