It's quite surprising, but the UK's House of Commons does not put the text of its bills on the Web in a user-friendly manner, making it bloody difficult -- as they would say -- for British citizens to know what's really going on in Parliament when it comes to legislating.

Earlier today, our friends at MySociety.org, the U.K.-based nonprofit that builds Web sites to open up government and its services to benefit citizens, launched a campaign to convince Parliament to embrace the Internet Age.

The goal of the Free Our Bills campaign is to have Parliament put the text of bills online. The effort is titled "The Nice Polite Campaign to Gently Encourage Parliament to Publish Bills in a 21 Century Way, Please. Now." (We'll give it an award for simply being the best named campaign ever.) How polite and British. (American style would be something like "Just Do It.")

That's what Micah Sifry, Sunlight's senior strategic consultant and executive editor of the Personal Democracy Forum says today, about an E-Tech on a panel on "civic hacking" -- online activists taking government data in its raw and user-unfriendly state, and making it accessible and helpful to citizens.

Sounds familiar.

The panel discussed a number of British sites launched by our colleagues at mySociety.org as well as the hacking of the UN at UNDemocracy.com, where you can now get easy access to the transcripts of the U.N. General Assembly and the Security Council in structured formats, information that was previously very hard to get your hands on. Neat stuff.

"When an institution is broken," Micah writes, "more scrutiny can only help fix it."

Yup.

Several of us from Sunlight spent the past weekend in the London environs sharing organizational stories, strategies, challenges, and blue sky thoughts with the good people who founded and operate mySociety.org.

As Micah Sifry said it later: It's not just that we keep hearing about mySociety whenever we meet people and tell them about Sunlight. It's that we definitely knew about mySociety when we were starting Sunlight and definitely knew that we wanted to take a similar approach: Broadly speaking, to use the web to open up citizen understanding of Congress and to open up feedback loops to produce a more responsive institution.

From TheyWorkForYou,WriteToThem,to HearFromYourMP, to the e-petition site produced for 10 Downing Street, mySociety has made extraordinary use of the web to connect citizens and their elected representatives in groundbreaking ways. While their effort differs in various ways from Sunlight because of the different ways our systems operate, their thinking has already inspired our work. And naturally, we are already conspiring to bring some of what they have done directly to the US.

Ron Brownstein of the LA Times has a really thoughtful column today on what transparency means in the Internet Age. Keying off Sen. Barack Obama's announcement a week or so ago about the need to create more transparency for the work of government, Brownstein highlights the need to go beyond the simple provision of information about what government does in useable ways online (we agree that's necessary but not sufficient) to developing the kind of interactivity between citizens and lawmakers that is the hallmark of our colleagues in England at MySociety.org. That nonprofit's creative use of the Internet to engage citizens to collaboration with government (and the other way around) is setting the standard. Sunlight's already begun a series of conversations with MySociety that we expect yield some ways for us to experiment here in the US. Several future Sunlight efforts are looking in this direction.