Software Entrepreneur Bill Pease joins the Sunlight Foundation

September 19, 2012

The Sunlight Foundation is expanding its presence on the West Coast with the hiring of Bill Pease as our first full-time employee in California. Pease, a software entrepreneur who served as Chief Scientist at GoodGuide and founded GetActive Software, will serve as Sunlight’s “evangelist” to Silicon Valley, as well as funders and partners throughout the Western United States.

Pease has been a leader in the use of information disclosure in support of social change for more than 20 years. He has actively promoted transparency since creating scorecard.org for the Environmental Defense Fund in the 1990s. This popular environmental information service spotlights the top polluters in local communities and integrates hundreds of data sets about the health effects of toxic chemicals. Most recently, Bill was Chief Scientist at GoodGuide, where he led an ambitious project to provide consumers with information about the health, environmental and social impacts of products at the point of purchase.

“Transparency is not just a Beltway buzzword, it affects every citizen and all levels of government and business. With Bill on board, the information services and technology used by Sunlight to shine a light on Washington can be shared with the developers, companies and investors of Silicon Valley,” said Ellen S. Miller, co-founder and executive director of the Sunlight Foundation.

“I look forward to increasing the collaboration between Sunlight and the West Coast tech community. I know first-hand how open data and public disclosure can improve people’s lives, and believe Sunlight is the leader in winning policy change and developing the technology platforms needed to make government accountable to citizens,” said Bill Pease.

In 2000, Pease founded GetActive Software, where he was chief executive officer and chief technology officer. He sold his company to Convio in 2007 and the combined companies went public in 2010. At GetActive, he developed a software-as-a-service platform that web-enabled the membership activities of nonprofit organizations including the AFL-CIO, the National Association of Realtors and Planned Parenthood Federation of America. He also recently participated in the sale of GoodGuide to Underwriters Laboratories.

Bill’s academic background is in environmental sciences, quantitative risk assessment and informatics. He has taught on the faculty at the School of Public Health, University of California at Berkeley. Bill holds a BA from Yale University, an MS in Energy and Resources and a PhD in Environmental Health Sciences from UC Berkeley. Bill was a Rhodes Scholar at Oxford University, England.