Our nation’s founding documents state clearly that the people, endowed with fundamental, inalienable rights, are the masters of government, which derives its just power from the consent of the governed.

But, can consent be given without knowledge of what is consented to?

Citizens are in an uphill battle against the inertia of decades of apathy. Adding urgency to the battle is the dramatic growth of government influence, power and complexity both nationally and locally.

Unfortunately traditional media, reeling from its own financial troubles, is retreating from investigative journalism of years past. Traditional media is also slow to engage the growing ranks of citizen and alternative media watchdogs.

Sunshine Week marks an annual effort to focus attention on the importance of open government and freedom of information. Participants include print, broadcast and online news media, civic groups, libraries, nonprofits, school and others interested in the public’s right to know.

Open government isn’t the work of any one organization or of government alone. The Sunlight Foundation illustrates the point with the Transparency Cycle which illustrates the process of creating a government “more deserving of our trust, and ultimately, a government that allows its citizens to fully participate and hold government accountable as our Founders intended.”

It’s clear that there is a breakdown between conceptual support for the idea of government transparency and enacting the changes necessary to make it so. There is fear and resistance to change inside government that requires cultural, political, and attitude adjustments. And there’s a large gap between the good intentions of citizens and watchdog groups and think tanks and reporters, and translating those good intentions into effective results. Many people want to act, but they rarely know how or where to begin.

KansasWatchdog and its parent organizations, the Kansas Policy Institute and the Franklin Center for Government and Public Integrity, are engaged in nearly every aspect of the Transparency Cycle.

• KansasWatchdog: Investigative reporting on state and local issues
• KansasReporter: Original reporting from the statehouse
• KansasVotes: Tracking bills and the Legislators behind the bills
• KansasOpenGov: Your portal to the money and contracts in state government

KansasWatchdog will mark Sunshine Week with daily articles on government transparency:

• The Sunny Awards for the best in open government
• A Kansas transparency report card, why Kansas isn’t the Sunshine state
• How to: The basics and beyond of Kansas Open Meetings and Open Records law
• A look back at important transparency reporting by KansasWatchdog reporters
• Government to Government Lobbying, a new study by the Pacific Research Institute

The future holds peril and promise. If the trends of the past decades continue, government will become ever more complex and small increases in transparency will be overwhelmed by the volume and complexity of hidden government.

But the future holds promise too as tools and technology provide new opportunities for newly-engaged citizens to monitor government actions, collaborate with others and publish their findings.

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“The people of every country are the only safe guardians of their own rights, and are the only instruments which can be used for their destruction. And certainly they would never consent to be so used were they not deceived.”

Thomas Jefferson, to John Wyche 1809