As the second anniversary of the Supreme Court’s disastrous Citizens United decision approaches, the Sunlight Foundation has drafted the Stop Undisclosed Payments in Elections from Ruining Public Accountability in Campaigns Act (the SUPERPAC Act). This bill, if enacted, would be one step towards addressing the corrupting influence unlimited, secret SUPERPAC money has on our elections and our elected officials.

Unfortunately, Congress seems to have given up on efforts to shine a light on campaign activities that are financed by secret money flowing from corporations and unions. First, the DISCLOSE Act was largely derailed by congressional Republicans. Now, by failing to offer new legislation, both parties appear to have abdicated their responsibility to ensure our elections are transparent

We hope the SUPERPAC Act reignites the effort and that members of Congress will decide to stop serving their self-interest and start acting in the public interest by taking a step in favor of transparency. The SUPERPAC Act is designed to be a disclosure only bill, largely including the transparency provisions of the DISCLOSE Act while leaving out some of the bans, carve-outs and other provisions that made DISCLOSE controversial.

We encourage the public to comment on our effort so we have posted The SUPERPAC Act on PublicMarkup.org, Sunlight’s web site that allows anyone to help improve legislation we propose. Highlights of the bill include the following:

• Ensure disclosure of donors who fund independent expenditures and electioneering communications made by Super PACs or other 501(c) organizations. Donors giving to an organization for other purposes may remain anonymous if the organization establishes separate accounts for non-election related spending.

• Require real-time, online disclosure of all reports. Data must be in searchable, sortable, machine-readable formats and reports must include unique IDs for all filers.

• Require disclaimers (stand-by-your-ad statements) and identification of top funders in the ad.

• Require registered lobbyists to report their spending on independent expenditures and electioneering communications.

• Require all candidates and committees to file electronically with the Federal Election Commission.

The SUPERPAC Act is not a panacea for all that ails our elections today. It is a critical first step—one that will arm voters with important knowledge about who is paying for our elections. Other proposals to address the problem of unlimited secret money infecting our democracy include a constitutional amendment, legislation to give shareholders a voice in how their money is spent on elections, and public financing of elections. But, as the Supreme Court and Members of Congress on both sides of the aisle have endorsed disclosure, the Super PAC disclosure-only bill should be the least controversial and most easily enacted of the many proposals.

In politics, the messenger is as important as the message. Voters have a right to information that will tell them whether the Super PAC that paid for an ad they just watched is tied to one of the candidates or was paid for by a corporation or union to whom the candidate will be beholden if he or she is elected. We hope with the new year Congress will return with a new resolve to take up the issue of transparent elections and enact the SUPERPAC Act.

SUPERPAC Act

An awakening call to self educate ourselves on open records and open public meetings came when in June this year, the nation's capital  became the venue where two reporters were arrested for video recording a public meeting. Whilst before, Washington DC was not among the states included in the Reporters Committee for Freedom of the Press' resource on states open records and open meetings laws, this time around, DC is among the 50 states. Most liberating, the revisions on DC's Open Meetings Act allow the recording of public meetings as long as "the person does not impede the orderly conduct of the meeting".

• A new and improved guide on all things open government at the state level has been produced by the Reporters Committee for Freedom of the Press. Some of the impressive features to check for free and also available on both CD and online, include categories on accessing information on government budgets and updates on public records and open public meetings laws. Open government expert Charles Davis offers more on Art of Access.

• In a new effort to open Chicago, the administration of Mayor Rahm Emmanuel announced that all crimes will be posted on line for residents to make their own analysis of crimes in their neighborhood. Blogger Matt Fratz is not too sure this is well-intended. In his opinion, transparency should be implemented through the creation of law not in the number of arrests made by the police. And by not publishing the names of police officers involved in criminal acts -- as the Mayor’s office is doing -- the purpose of transparency is defeated. Read more on the appropriately named Political Fail blog.

• About six months after the U.S. Public Interest Research Group gave Arkansas an F for transparency in their state website, legislators have finally passed the Arkansas Financial Transparency Act which will ensure the creation of a website showing all the state’s expenditures. David Kinkade is singling out an important factor:  open government does not have to be expensive He mentiones how the website creation is on time and under budget. It’s all on the Arkansas Project.

• A special legislative committee has been created to review Vermont’s public records exemptions. Nancy Remsen has the buzz on how the committee has already started prioritising topics whose exemptions should be reviewed -- beginning with the tax exemptions. See how privacy is being redefined by the committee on VT.Buzz

• Following the stipulations of New Jersey’s Open Public Meetings Act, Gloucester County Prosecutor, Sean F. Dalton, encouraged the county’s local government officials to increase their email usage as a way to promote transparency. John Paff has more on NJ open government Notes.

After the huge fight over the House's support for Electronic Government Fund, which pays for many important transparency programs like Data.Gov and USASpending.Gov, we had high hopes that the Senate would restore funding to prior levels. Our hopes have been dashed.

In a vote yesterday on legislation that has only come to light today, the Senate Appropriations Committee dropped E-Gov funding by an additional $11m below the House's levels -- and the House is already $15-20m below the FY 2010 funding level. The Senate merged the E-Gov Fund with the Federal Citizen Services Fund, and appropriated $39m for newly combined fund. The House had appropriated $50m.

By comparison, just two years ago (in FY 2010), the two funds received a total of $71m, with $34m for e-gov and $37m for the Federal Citizen Service Fund. (Last year the e-gov fund was shockingly cut to $8m, far out of line from the previous two years funding and partly the result of a strange budget cycle; the Federal Citizen Service Fund was appropriated $34m.)

What does this mean? It's difficult to know how funds will be allocated between E-Gov and FCS programs, but we have some idea based on this letter from (former) federal CIO Vivek Kundra to Senator Tom Carper. Many programs will be terminated. Data quality will suffer. No fixes or improvements to current programs are likely.

That's too bad. The public's ability to see how the federal government spends money on USASpending.gov, for example, can help root out waste, fraud, and abuse, while promoting smart decisions in these tough economic times. Sharing government information on Data.gov can spur new businesses and more efficient government, if only agencies are appropriately encouraged and helped to make use of it. Senator Carper called earlier proposals to cut the E-Gov Fund "penny wise and pound foolish." He's right.

It's also embarrassing. The President is about to give a speech before the United Nations on Tuesday about our new open government commitments, and this paltry funding level sends the wrong message. We risk abandoning our role as a leading advocate for open government.

Theoretically, the next opportunity to fix these funding levels is when the bill goes to the floor of the Senate. It's unclear whether any amendments can be offered, and if so, what their likelihood of success would be. With the major differences between the House and Senate versions of the Financial Services and General Government Appropriations bill, what's most likely is that Congress will pass a Continuing Resolution to keep the government open while dickering over these differences.

Under a CR, the General Services Administration, which administers these funds, will have to assume that the lower number -- $39m -- is the amount of funding allowed for the year. Programs will come to a screeching halt while Congress tries to agree upon a full year appropriations bill. (This start-again-stop-again approach also wastes tons of money.) With the upcoming election, each day will make agreement harder and harder. It is too bad that the Senate is willing to sacrifice a lot of transparency for such a small amount of money. Especially when small investments in transparency yield huge dividends.

Drupal or Solr may not be my forte, but when Rob Winikates, Deputy Director, Office of Digital Strategy, Online Engagement at the White House asked how many people used Open Atrium, Gov Delivery, a URL shortener or Drupal, I knew that I belonged in at least two of these categories.

Last week’s OpenGov DC conference was filled with an array of interesting speakers, with a keynote from FCC’s Steven Van Roekel. The one-day conference was tailored for open government stakeholders, developers and people interested in open source tools such as Drupal. This is not to say that other open government players, including organizers both on and offline, were not represented, but I found it interesting that out of all the speakers, only three were involved in citizen engagement and, even then, that they were from the public sector. I suppose this means that NASA’s advocate for open government, Nick Skytland’s dream of a future of collaborative code, where citizens develop government websites, will have to wait -- if this representation is anything to go by.

But let’s talk about the fun parts...

Van Roekel mentioned during his keynote that a “site at rest tends to stay at rest”. The premise here is that you should have an evolving website. Understanding that the website you designed is for the people and by the people (though this may not be so with government websites) helps you engage them better, especially when you use a bottom-up approach. And for organizers, it is a useful way of getting feedback from citizens through crowdsourcing while allowing for room to act on the feedback. Van Roekel noted that times have changed, and the culture of government needs to do so as well. Thomas Cochran, the Director of New Media Technologies at the White House, summed it up when he said that “the speed of government is the opposite of the speed of the Internet.”

Overall, the echoing theme was that when it comes to open source, it is important to remember that it is about the people. The software maybe free, but its management is not. There has to be constant involvement of people in the progress of the project.

In the session titled, Collaborative Code: How to Build and Share Inter-changeable Features, NASA’s Nick Skytland made an interesting observation about how the open gov initiative is about culture change. Indeed, there is need for government to move from the machine age that was structured around an industrial model to the information age. One of the suggested ways on how to do this included using participatory exploration (where you think about what your organization can do). Open source software is not just an opportunity, it’s a responsibility, and being experimental with it while soliciting for ideas from outside can transform it from a product to a process. It also increases transparency because the source code is available for those interested.

But what is collaborative code?

Most of the speakers defined it as one of the ways government can realize its true potential, while others thought it is a way of finding a shared need and partnering with the community to find a solution. However, the rhetorical question remains: How do you apply open source to policy?

In the meantime, for Skytland, having to deal with the challenging terms and services that collaborative code presents is a small price to pay to see astronauts tweet in space!

For Jason Hoekstra, the technology solutions advisor in the U.S. Department of Education, the experience of thinking about how to prepare and release open data did not come without headaches. Not only did he find it a mental challenge, but the process was further complicated by releases on different schedules and different keys, making its scalability limited. Solution? Label data consistently!

A tip to bear in mind is that with secure open source information, the maturity of the project weighs heavily on how secure it will be. Also, If you allow users to log into your site from outside entities, then you need to have clear guidelines on what the security controls are. But if you are wondering how you can tell when open source code is secure, the panel on securing open source applications advised that secure code is not pushed through an automated system. It is code that has been through a process that involves the assessment of the code. If it meets the requirements it was designed for, then you know it is secure.

A panel called Design Matters: Why Thoughtful Information Architecture and Branding Matter, concluded the conference with a remarkable walk-through on designing WhiteHouse.gov and Change.gov -- by Design Director at Blue State Digital, Matt Ipcar.

(For more of the pictures from OpenGov DC, check out this Flickr slideshow courtesy of Betsy Ensley of Phase2Technologies )

Broadcastr "is a social media platform for location-based stories. It enables the recording, indexing, listening, and sharing of audio content. Just like in human memory, every story is bound to a place."  Broadcastr simplifies the process of recording your story, allowing you to easily peg it to a location on the map and discovering other shared stories.  Currently the service is in beta, but they were quick to send me an invitation when I signed up.

A brief look at the platform shows stories from all over the world, from the rescue response to the tsunami in Japan to a story about George Moscones's time as mayor in San Francisco. The site adds the context of location and the emotion of human events heard through voice, which isn't always reflected though the written word, lending greater meaning to a story or a movement.

So how does it work? It's simple actually. Either click the 'record' button in the upper left corner or the 'Add a Story' button in the upper right corner. You will then see a screen that will allow you to record your voice through the microphone in your computer in Step 1, add general information about your story in Step 2...

...and pin it to a location on the map in Step 3:

After you've pinned the recording, this is what it will look like on the map -

Using the 'More' and 'Edit' links, you review and change your meta descriptions if necessary.  If you were to do a search for opengov or savethedata, this is what the results would like like on the map -

This platform, even with its weaknesses and quirks, has the potential to add interesting, dynamic context to the stories we share online. Do you have an opengov or savethedata story you want to share? Record it and pin it Broadcastr and we'll highlight the best stories.

While we're still waiting to see the draft copy of the House Rules from the incoming majority today, we're now hearing some of the provisions that will be included in the draft.

Many of these provisions are just what Sunlight has asked for in our proposed Rules reforms.

First and foremost, it looks like a 72 Hour Rule will be included in the House Rules. "In Electronic form" will be the way the online requirement is phrased, and all bills will need to be available to the public "in electronic form" for three calendar days before a vote. This will be a huge victory for the ReadtheBill movement, and for transparency in the way the House considers legislation.

Also, committees are going to be posting far more information online. It's going to become much easier to follow along as committees pursue their work, and to know what's going to happen, online, before it happens. Committees will be required to post notice of markups three days in advance, post committee votes online, post amendments online, post disclosures about witnesses who testify, and webcast hearings and markups.

Again, many, many of these changes are contained within our Rules recommendations, and we're elated to see so many of them included in this Rules draft. While the devil is always in the details, and implementation of these kinds of changes can be tricky, these are the kinds of changes that can change the way citizens relate to the legislative process online.

Update: Also worth reiterating: the Office of Congressional Ethics will continue its operations in the 112th Congress. Even though Boehner opposed its initial creation when it was first formed, the independent Ethics watchdog will continue its vital work. This is fantastic news.

Update 2: Here is Speaker-Designate Boehner's tweet about the 72 Hour Rule: http://twitter.com/#!/GOPLeader/statuses/17584517178986496

The Department of Health and Human Services will be announcing their Open Government plan live via video at 1:30PM ET. Sunlight staff will be live blogging the announcement here. Join the conversation via CoverItLive below the video player.

If you would like to view the live blog and the video side by side, click here to open the live blog in a new window. Your browser settings may open this link a new tab. Either "tear" the tab off to get the side by side or copy and paste the URL of the new tab into a new window of your choosing.

Today I want to spotlight Triad Watch's great post on Greensboro, NC new policy on emails that are sent from City Council members.

On March 19, 2010 Greensboro City Manager Rashad Young sent out a memo to the Greensboro City Council members in regards to e mail accounts and how business is done with the local politicians. Here is what was in the memo . "Council Personal Emails Recently Council has received multiple request for city related emails that are from Council's personal email accounts. We have created an email account named Council_Public Emails. This account was created for your convenience. If you choose to use your personal email account, please forward city business related emails to this address: CPE@greensboro-nc.gov " This is great news to see the City Manager take this step in more transparency in local government. It seems like this move was in regards to request from Kotis Propereties to get emails and text messages from Greensboro City Council members because as we have seen in the past where City Council Member Robbie Perkins was text messaging his developer side kick from the council chambers while the council meeting was going on.. We also had Greensboro City Council member Trudy Wade bust out on Greensboro City Council member Zack Matheny for text messaging Ex City Council Member Tom Phillips during a council meeting so that Zack Matheny can get his marching orders from Tom Phillips.These are just a few examples of what is going on locally but need to be more transparent. It will be interesting to see just how many Greensboro City Council members comply with this new program and if they will start forwarding all city business from their personal accounts to this new e mail. Time for a weekly or monthly access to this email to see who is complying with this memo from the city manager.