The Foundation Center has launched glasspockets, a website designed to encourage openness among foundations about their activities. The term, whose significance scarcely needs explanation, apparently derives from an assertion made by a Carnegie Corporation of New York board chair at a congressional hearing in the 1950s that ‘foundations should have glass pockets’.

Prominent among the site’s features is the use of new media. Features include Foundation Transparency 2.0, which gives details of foundations that are using social media; Who Has Glass Pockets?, which sets out individual foundations’ online communication practices; and real-time Twitter feeds on what foundations are thinking and saying. It also contains data on all of the US’s 97,000 foundations and examples of the impact of philanthropy on social issues.