More than three years ago, we launched a website called Capitol Words that gave an at-a-glance view of what word was most popular in Congress. Today, the Sunlight Foundation is unveiling the completely revamped and rewritten Capitol Words.

To folks who never had a chance to play with our previous version, Capitol Words scrapes the bulk data of the Congressional Record from the Government Printing Office, does some computer magic to clean-up and organize the data, then presents an easy-to-use front-end website where you can quickly search the favorite keywords of legislators, states or dates.

The new version now allows users to search, index and graph up to five-word phrases that give greater context and meaning to the turns-of-phrase zinging across the aisle. Where we once could only track individual terms like 'health' or 'energy,' now we can break down the issue further into 'health care reform,' 'renewable energy,' 'high energy prices' or however you wish.

The new advanced comparison chart pits two terms against each other in a contest of partisanship or popularity. The simple chart plots the contest winner and visualizes the debate with an embed code as easy to use as a YouTube video. A prime example is the chart generated for the recent health care reform debate and rise of the term ‘Obamacare’:

Capitol Words now pulls in every word and legislator in the Congressional Record going back more than 15 years to January 1996, when Congress first began a digital record of proceedings. For developers who are excited about this comprehensive database, read the details of the API offerings here.

The additional features we've added developed from the strong foundation of the old Capitol Words that bore ongoing fruit in the form of news stories, material for visualizations or just humorous insights. The Washington Post used Capitol Words to looks up favorite words of notable lawmakers from budget hawks to zombies. Reuters used Capitol Words to look back on the year and find the hottest topics and Gawker even indexed craziness using our word counts. CongressSpeaks.com took the Capitol Words API and made a fun animated site matching up politicians. Back at the Sunlight offices, we eagerly played with the data to make a colorful reflection on the year, a mashup of party leaders and an analysis of the effectiveness of a strategist's memo by looking at the use of suggested terms. Capitol Words digs up the data for new stories about Congress every day and the latest version provides an expanded level of detail and history.

Please lose yourself in the sea of Washington babble and let us know what you find in the deep.

A lot of Americans are trying to make their voice heard in the debt ceiling negotiations. So many, in fact, that the Congress’ technology can’t keep up. As the National Journal reports:

When President Obama told Americans to contact their representatives to show support for his debt-ceiling plan, the response was so strong it knocked out several websites for leading GOP House members and nearly overwhelmed telephone circuits in the House.

Non-leadership and some Democrats' sites crashed as well and problems persist today.

So what can you do when Congressional sites are down? Fortunately there are other reliable digital tools that put you in touch with your representatives’ offices. In fact, they're often easier and better than the official sites.

• If you have an Android phone, our free Congress app makes it simple. Just select “People” on the first screen, then search by your current location or name. Tap the desired representative and hit the green phone icon (pictured at right). You’ll be connected in no time. There's also a Windows Phone version too.
• OpenCongress also lists phone numbers, fax numbers and good old-fashioned mailing addresses on members' profile pages. You can look for a rep by typing their name in the search box at the top of any page, or find your delegation by entering your zip code under the “Senators” or “Representatives” tabs. Then look to the right sidebar.
• Twilio created CallCongress, a handy little app that provides one number for all of Congress using our API. Just dial (888) 491-2262. It uses caller ID to deduce your location, then offers a list of local representatives. Select one and it connects you automatically.

Of course, you can also write your Congressperson on Facebook. Check out the GovSM wiki for an extensive social media directory. And TechPresident has a very helpful blog post with even more online resources.

The Sunlight Foundation is proud to announce our Checking Influence tool that gives individuals the power to see the political expenditures of the businesses you frequent. The simple bookmarklet allows users to connect personal spending habits seen on your online bank or credit card statement with the lobbying and political contributions of companies.

As we start to examine how much we spent on Black Friday or Cyber Monday, Checking Influence will let all of us see how effortlessly politics escapes Washington and settles its way into our wallets; often without us even knowing it. We created this tool to help Americans be more informed consumers and citizens. Just as some consumers check to see if their coffee is free trade or if their clothing is manufactured in sweatshops, they can now know if their purchases help fund lobbying campaigns. We’re trying to answer the question: When you buy coffee at Starbucks; refill a prescription at Walgreens; or download a song from iTunes, do you know where your money really goes?

How to Use Checking Influence

Using Checking Influence is simple and secure. First, add the Checking Influence bookmarklet to your browser’s toolbar. Next, go to any web page that shows your spending transactions, such as a banking site, your credit card statement or Mint.com. Then, just click on the Checking Influence bookmarklet, and it will find the company names on the transactions list and show you the “influence data” for the corporations it can identify -- including political campaign contributions and what lobbying the corporation conducted.

Behind the Curtain

The backbone of Checking Influence is TransparencyData.com, Sunlight’s open-source, central repository for federal lobbyist registrations, federal grant and federal and state campaign contributions. Sunlight Labs, the Foundation's in-house team that builds technology and Internet tools to make government more transparent and accountable, developed Checking Influence. The site is built upon the public Transparency Data API, whose data is provided by the Center for Responsive Politics and the National Institute for Money in State Politics.

A Note About Security

We understand that everyone is cautious about banking information online (and rightfully so!), which is why the Sunlight Foundation has taken a number of steps to ensure that Checking Influence is safe to use. Checking Influence uses the same industry-standard SSL encryption that your banking site does to keep your financial information secure and we don't save any personally identifiable information. The tool is simply searching bank statements for transactions with company names that match information from TransparencyData.com.

Please contact us with any feedback and we hope you enjoy playing around with this new tool!

Despite what seemed to be a bruising August for health care reform efforts, Congress still appears to be on a path to pass a bill this year. At the center of that effort is one Republican, Sen. Olympia Snowe of Maine. Snowe is perhaps that most moderate Republican remaining since Sen. Arlen Specter jumped ship to the Democrats. An analysis of her voting record this year shows that she is more likely to vote with the Democrats than to vote with her Republican peers. It comes as little wonder that she would be targeted as the deciding vote on health care reform.

Snowe has a 60% or higher voting agreement with every Democratic or Independent senator for the 111th Congress, while maintaining the same level of voting agreement with only twelve Republicans. The voting similarity between Snowe and Democrats is so similar that she holds a 70% or higher voting agreement with eleven Democratic senators. She holds this level of voting agreement with two Republicans.

The two Republicans that have a high level of voting agreement with Snowe are Sens. Susan Collins and Lisa Murkowski. Sen. Collins, Maine's junior senator, is, like Snowe, often a reliable Republican vote for the Democrats. Collins also cast votes in support of the stimulus bill and other Democratic proposals including S-CHIP expansion and fair pay in the work place. Collins holds the highest voting agreement of any senator with Snowe at 86.92%. Murkowski's voting agreement with Snowe likely results from her support for fair pay in the work place (all Republican women in the Senate supported this legislation) and her support for most cloture votes.

The Democrats with the highest voting agreement with Snowe are also seen as key votes in the health care reform push. Sen. Ben Nelson of Nebraska and Sen. Blanche Lincoln hold the two highest voting agreements with Snowe. Both are seen as key votes on any health reform bill and Nelson, in particular, has been a key player in all major legislation this year. Nelson was instrumental in passing the stimulus bill earlier this year and has recently echoed Snowe in her support for a public option trigger in the health care reform legislation. Lincoln is seen as one of the more conservative Democratic senators and faces a tough reelection campaign in one of the few states that trended away from the Democrats in the 2008 election. Her vote will be crucial to Democrats on health care reform and her high level of voting agreement with Snowe shows how crucial the Maine Republican's support for a bill may be.

The regularity with which Snowe votes with Democrats may be a bright spot for the majority as they push forward in the health reform debate. As some have determined that reform efforts have dwindled as the summer has come to an end, a careful look at the landscape shows that little has changed. All that matters is whether Snowe intends to use her position as the most Democratic friendly Republican to craft a bill she would support.

To see voting agreement with Sen. Olympia Snowe for all senators see this visualization.

The visualization was created using data from the New York Times' Congress API.

Kevin Connor & Matthew Skomarovsky, co-founders of Sunlight-supported LittleSis.org, announced yesterday they are joining forces with The Huffington Post Investigative Fund's Health Care Investigative Unit on a joint research project. They will be reporting on the congressional lawmakers that receive the most money from health care interest groups. Here's a list of those lawmakers, as produced by The Huffington Post and Maplight.org. And you can sign up with the investigative unit here.

Also, within the next few weeks, LittleSis will be launching an application programming interface (API) to provide developers and friendly organizations access to their raw data. Anyone interested in previewing the API can register for a key, and you can check out the API's documentation here.

Our now London-residing designer, Kerry Mitchell, was playing around in the wee hours last night and came up with this terrific visualization that shows the mentions of the word "transparency" in The New York Times from 1990 until 2009.

Think of it as a clock. 1 o'clock would be the early '90s and 11 o'clock being 2008/2009. As you go around the clock the instances of the word increase.  Each line is a month of time.

Kerry didn't write the code that generates the image. The visualization was created with Processing, and makes use of The New York Times Article API. The Processing code comes from a tutorial available from blprnt.com.

Recovery.gov is off to a good start. Good design. Nice visuals. Early opportunity for citizen engagement. (Others think so too.) But I'd like to be the boring person here in the transparency community and say: keep your eye on the ball. For the site to be successful it has to get the fundamentals right -- transparency for the data it will house.

The basics are pretty simple. Recovery.gov must make the raw data available and it must be housed in system so that data can flow in and out easily. There should be open programming interfaces that allow developers to share and analyze data. Timeliness is key, so is accuracy. That, plus a few simple tools for easy citizen access would be a great place to start.

A little blogging now might help with a few of the basics: What data is getting collected and how often? Who has to report? How often will the data be updated and how often will it made available to the public? What's the database going to look like what's the relationship to USASpending.gov? What kinds of content will Recovery.gov produce around the data? (Will there be regular emails when new information is available, blogging with analysis, etc.)?

The Coalition for an Accountable Recovery has some additional ideas.

Sunlight Labs is pleased to announce our new mashup contest for 2009: Apps for America. Inspired by our own mashup contest in 2007, along with the DC Office of the CTO’s Apps for Democracy contest. We’re doing things a bit differently than our first contest in that we’ve broadened the number of APIs that make your app eligible, we’ve increased the prize money, and we’re requiring that all the applications submitted be released under an open source license.

The contest details are here

Basically, you need to use one of the APIs or data dumps listed on this page to make a compelling application. You can develop on any platform you want as long as the judges can judge it. For instance— we wouldn’t recommend making an TI-85 application because none of our judges saved their calculators from high school, but we would recommend web applications, client applications, Adobe AIR applications and the like. If you’re looking for some ideas, check out our Project Ideas page for some inspiration.

Our judges are pretty awesome: Adrian Holovaty from the Django Project. Aaron Swartz, Founder of Reddit.com. Xeni Jardin from BoingBoing.net. Peter Corbett, one of the inventors of Apps for Democracy and founder of iStrategy Labs. We're keeping one slot open for one other judge. I'll be a judge, too.

This marks a shift here in the Labs too, from being an experimentation laboratory to a full-scale open source development organization. After all, we can’t call on Government to be transparent if we’re not transparent ourselves.

So let the games begin! We’ll be blogging about the contest as it goes on through March over on the Sunlight Labs Blog so make sure to stay tuned for updates!

In Ellen Miller's post yesterday regarding the release of numerous API's in one day, concerns were mentioned in respect to the release of the New York Times' Congress API. Sunlight Labs' James Turk wrote up those concerns over at the Sunlight Labs blog, where a conversation is now occurring in the comments. This is definitely worth a read.

Massie Ritsch, the Center for Responsive Politics' communication director, has declared 2009 "The Year for Open Data." And judging by two announcements today, it looks like he's right. CRP is just getting started opening up its vast databases to the world, making regular updates from here on forward. Check out what they are offering here.

Also today, The New York Times. As their announcement says, the API provides summaries of roll-call votes in the U.S. Congress; retrieves lists of members of Congress, vote data, and biographical information for individual House and Senate members. The Time's data includes House votes since 1991 and Senate votes since 1989. Information on House members goes back to 1983, while the info on senators goes all the way back to 1947. Just a heads up: there are some concerns around our office about their TOS. Check the Sunlight Labs blog is a few hours for more details.

This has been a very good day for open data.