A few times today we’ve seen this video cross our desks, where the House adjourns, and House Minority Whip Steny Hoyer... View Article
Continue readingGroups Call for 3 Day Rule
Sunlight has long called for all bills to be posted online for 3 days before they’re considered on the floor.... View Article
Continue readingGetting Around the Political Contribution Limit is Easier Without Corporate Identifiers
Back in May, Roll Call ran a story on how one family, through various subsidiaries of their family business, donated... View Article
Continue readingSecret Meetings with Members of Congress Result in Big Profits for Hedge Funds
While the middle class is facing a tax hike because of yet another congressional stalemate, Wall Street hedge funds and... View Article
Continue readingHappy Holidays from Sunlight!
In case you missed it, I wanted to share this message that Ellen Miller, our Executive Director, sent out this... View Article
Continue readingPresidential Super PAC disclosures may leave voters in the dark
When voters cast their ballots in January’s presidential nominating contests, they may not know the moneyed interests behind the attack ads run by shadowy outside groups trying to influence their votes, despite a Federal Election Commission deadline requiring many of them to disclose information next week.
Although FEC regulations suggest that groups making expenditures in New Hampshire’s Jan. 10 primary must file a pre-primary report on Dec. 29, it’s not clear how many of them will do so.
There are plenty of opportunities for these groups to avoid scrutiny until, in some cases, Jan. 31. The first ...
Continue reading2Day in #OpenGov 12/21/2011
Policy Fellow Matt Rumsey wrote this post. Here is Wednesday’s look at transparency-related news items, congressional committee hearings, transparency-related bills... View Article
Continue readingThe data behind Capitol words
Last Monday we launched an update to our Capitol Words project, which indexes and tokenizes the Congressional Record daily. With the launch behind us and the dust starting to settle, I'd like to walk through how we get from raw text to attributed, searchable quotations, and provide some examples of how you can interact with the data directly.
Before delving into how it works, though, it's important to acknowledge the myriad developers whose work on this project has made it possible. I'm only the most recent steward of the site; the bulk of the data legwork for this iteration was handled by Aaron Bycoffe and Jessy Kate Schingler, and the web interface owes its beauty to Caitlin Weber and Ali Felski. Timball provided the hardware, and the list continues from contributions to the scrapers all the way back to the original conception and implementation of the idea by Josh Ruihley and Garrett Schure. It's the combined efforts of everyone involved that brought us the site that's available today.
Now, without further ado...
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