Zoning impacts the most physical elements of communities and impacts people's daily lives. When it comes to being transparent about the zoning process and its outcomes, many local governments are posting information -- one way or another -- on their websites. It's a varied landscape, but it is worth assessing to see where there might be room for improvement.

WHAT WE TALK ABOUT WHEN WE TALK ABOUT ZONING

It's not surprising, in a way, that so many local governments choose to proactively release various kinds of information related to zoning. Zoning regulations can impact everything from what can be built and where it can be built to how it can be built and more. How a lot is zoned doesn't just determine whether that land can be used for commercial or residential purposes (or something else entirely) -- it can also determine the very structure of buildings down to details like height and square footage. Zoning and planning ordinances can even impact how close certain kinds of buildings may be to one another -- schools and liquor stores are one example of a spatial relationship that is sometimes regulated. Zoning has an impact on many of the most concrete aspects of a municipality, and this makes it an issue that's of interest to residents, business owners, developers, and many other groups. This means zoning can also be a prime target for people who want to game the system to obtain influence over this important aspect of cities.

The zoning process generally consists of elected or appointed officials making decisions about how land can be used and the specifications of structures. It has a direct impact on the shape communities take. The zoning process, and what it controls, however, varies from place to place. That means it's important for each municipality to be clear about what its process is so policymakers, residents, and businesses alike can all understand this powerful issue. For this look into the landscape of zoning data, we're including information most directly related to the process and its outcomes. We're not including other data that might be tied to land parcels, like data about tax breaks or special tax zones.

Not all zoning data is created equal, of course. Some cities simply release a list of the ordinances related to zoning, others release PDF maps of how land parcels are zoned, and some have interactive maps with layers of information. To have open zoning data, a municipality should have structured data available online that makes it easy for people to analyze and reuse -- in addition to information that enables people to understand the zoning process.

 NEWS:

• Conservative members of the House are continuing their ill advised crusade against the Census Bureau, and Stephen Colbert had some things to say about recently introduced legislation that would effect business' ability to plan for the short and long term. (Government Executive)
• Following revelations that the Justice Department obtained a wide range of records about several journalists a bipartisan group of House members is pushing for legislation that would require federal entities to meet certain conditions before taking personal information from a journalist. (POLITICO)
• The Australian government admitted last week that they unintentionally censored more than 1,200 websites while trying to take one allegedly fraudulent site offline. Australia requires ISPs to block sites suspected of illegal activity if asked by the government. (Tech President)
• Remember Buck McKeon (R-CA), the Armed Services Committee chairman whose wife's run for California state assembly was bankrolled by defense contractors? His family is back and trying to use his power for their financial gain. Golden Oak Consulting, run by three of McKeon's relatives, is lobbying for a couple of companies with armed services interests. (Roll Call)
• As immigration reform legislation gains steam in Congress lobbyists are picking up their pace. The Chamber of Commerce, labor groups, and Silicon Valley are making major headlines and a host of other groups are staying under the radar but lobbying hard nonetheless. (The Hill)
• Prosecutors are planning to seek a retrial against five former officials in Bell, California who are accused of rampant corruption. A judge declared a mistrial in March after jurors failed to come to consensus on several counts. (AP/Yahoo)
• The DATA Act was reintroduced in the House and Senate last week. The legislation, which has been slightly simplified from the version that failed to pass through the 112th Congress, was passed out of the House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform yesterday. (Federal Computer Week, POGO)

NEWS:

• A new paper on the UK's open government data policies looks into ways that open data can be monetized and recommends an National Data Strategy. Groups have weighed in questioning the paper's focus on economic growth at the expense of transparency.  (Tech President)
• The NRA PAC kept up a strong fundraising pace during the first quarter, pulling n more than $1.2 million. They have nearly $7 million cash on hand. (Roll Call)
• A day after asserting that his office is exempt from state public records laws Virginia Attorney General, and candidate for governor, Ken Cuccinelli is backing off the controversial statement. Staff attorneys had been claiming the exemption when they responded to public records requests and Cuccinelli has asked them to stop the practice. (Washington Post)
• K street isn't letting the string of scandals stinging the Obama administration, and sucking up lots of oxygen in Congress, get in the way of their priorities. Lobbyists are still working on issues like the farm bill, immigration, and the internet sales tax. (The Hill)
• A new database put together by the Sarasota Herald-Tribune tracks travel by Members of Congress during 2012. While Afghanistan was the most popular destination, members also spent a lot of time in Spain and France, tending to take a few extra days in those more scenic locales. (Washington Post)
• Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington is suing the IRS over the agencies internal rules on reviewing 501(c)(4)'s for nonprofit status. The suit would force the IRS to bring its rules in line with federal law that says 501(c)(4)'s need to be exclusively "social welfare" organizations. (POLITICO)

Throughout the 2012 election cycle, Sunlight followed the unlimited money. From super PACs and corporations to unions and “dark money” we collected, in real time, the political spending reported by these outside groups.

With the 501(c)(4) social welfare nonprofits back in the news again (and the IRS’s enforcement of them), we wanted to take a closer look at how these organizations spent money to influence the 2012 election. We often use the term “dark money” to describe these groups since they can spend an unlimited amount on independent expenditures and electioneering communications yet they do not have to disclose their donors. For more information on how to track all types of federal campaign finance disclosures, check out this handy infographic.

Overall, dark money groups reported $300 million in independent expenditures in 2012. Of the 50 groups who spent the most, 15 are 501(c)(4) nonprofits. Using our Follow The Unlimited Money tracker, Political Ad Sleuth, Ad Hawk and return on investment calculations, here is how they made an impact in the race for the White House and Congress.

TransparencyCamp has come and gone, but the ideas that sprouted at TCamp are just beginning to come to life.

Steve Spiker from OpenOakland shared his insight about the transparency movement in the TCamp wrap up video below, “We’re saying things need to be different in our country and that’s only going to happen if you care enough to persist on it.”

The transparency community understands that progress starts at TCamp but it doesn’t end when you go home.

A few weeks ago, we integrated the full text of federal bills and regulations into our alert system, Scout. Now, if you visit CISPA or a fascinating cotton rule, you'll see the original document - nicely formatted, but also well-integrated into Scout's layout. There are a lot of good reasons to integrate the text this way: we want you to see why we alerted you to a document without having to jump off-site, and without clunky iframes.

As importantly, we wanted to do this in a way that would be easily reusable by other projects and people. So we built a tool called us-documents that makes it possible for anyone to do this with federal bills and regulations. It's available as a Ruby gem, and comes with a command line tool so that you can use it with Python, Node, or any other language. It lives inside the unitedstates project at unitedstates/documents, and is entirely public domain.

NEWS:

• Former New Hampshire Senator Judd Gregg (R) locked down a gig in the private sector. He will serve as CEO of the Securities Industry and Financial Markets Association, a major Wall Street trade group. (The Hill)
• Florida released a new smart phone app to coincide with the current session of its legislature. The app, which has been downloaded nearly 3,500 times, allows users to find and share bill summaries, meeting notices, information about their legislators, and more. (Government Technology)
• Former Montana governor Brian Schweitzer (D) is rumored to be considering a Senate run, but he hasn't let that stop him from taking a new job in the mining industry. Schweitzer is going to chair the board of the Stillwater Mining Company. He was first elected to Stillwater's board only three weeks ago. (Washington Post)
• In an effort to investigate information leaks about North Korea the Justice Department delved deeply into the life of Fox News chief Washington correspondent James Rosen. The DoJ obtained his telephone records, tracked his movements through State Department security badge records, obtained a search warrant for his personal email account. (Washington Post)
• An investigation of subsidies given by the DC government to property developments over the past decade shows that more than a third of the $1.7 billion in breaks doled out by the city went to ten developers that donated huge amounts of campaign cash during the period. (WAMU)
• Russia is stepping back from it's 2012 "letter of intent" to join the Open Government Partnership, instead saying that it will pursue open government "on its own terms". Russia's questionable record on corruption, press freedom, and more had made its interest in the OGP slightly quizzical to begin with. (Open Government Partnership)
• State Farm Mutual Automobile Insurance Company is officially jumping into the political arena with a new PAC. While the company has a long history of giving from it's employees, it had previously been one of only nine companies in the Fortune 75 without a federal PAC.(Roll Call)