The Lucy Burns Institute is delighted to announce that effective July 1, 2009, it became the official sponsor of Ballotpedia and Judgepedia.
Since the Sam Adams Alliance was established in 2006, it has organized, nurtured and spun-off several important projects, including Common Sense with Paul Jacob, American Majority and Texas Watchdog.
As Ballotpedia and Judgepedia join the list of projects nurtured and given wings by the Sam Adams Alliance, the Lucy Burns Institute pledges to do its best to steward these public information projects consistent with the traditions and quality they have developed under the leadership of the Sam Adams Alliance.
LBI’s interest in wikis began in March 2007 when it established WikiFOIA. The original version of WikiFOIA was hosted on a PBWorks wiki, moving to a MediaWiki interface in mid-2008. WikiFOIA focuses on organizing information about state sunshine laws.
Leslie Graves, the president of the Lucy Burns Institute, worked as a part-time consultant to the Sam Adams Alliance from June 2008-May 2009 and assisted in a variety of ways with developing Ballotpedia, Judgepedia and Sunshine Review.
Graves said that the growing staff at the Lucy Burns Institute has grown into an “all-wiki all the time” staff and that they look forward to building, sharing, and organizing neutral and reliable information about judges, ballot measures and state sunshine laws. “It’s much easier for people to provide effective oversight of their government if they’re able to readily access high-quality information about these subjects,” she said, adding, “We want to make sure that when people look online for information in these less-well-known areas of political life, they’re able to find it.”
