WashingtonWatch.com, run by our colleague and frequent collaborator Jim Harper, announced yesterday that they've added new data for bills' projected cost, through information provided by the National Taxpayers Union Foundation.

The promise of legislation tracking websites comes, in part, from the idea that data created through analysis, commentary, or official sources, should be easy to combine with up-to-date legislative sources, to inform our national debate. It's thrilling to watch a whole host of websites attack the problem of illuminating congressional bills from a variety of approaches, each adding new pieces of context and information. Check out what WashingtonWatch is up to.

In what are otherwise reasonable commentaries on earmarks, a certain meme has emerged in the editorial pages across the land that I’d like to squash: it’s easy to track earmarks. It’s not.

It took hundreds of hours to input the 9,499 earmarks from this past year into the database maintained by Taxpayers for Common Sense, according to Steve Ellis, the organization’s vice president. And that database doesn’t have all of the information that you would need to put earmark information into context, such as identifying all the beneficiaries, but it's not for a lack of trying. Doing so would take much more time and money.

Jim Harper, who crowd-sourced a database for WashingtonWatch.com that tracked 37,000 earmark requests this past year, told me “It sure ain’t easy to track earmarks.” If it takes 90 seconds for a volunteer to enter an earmark into the database, that’s 38 days of non-stop data entry.

The truth is, earmark information is spread throughout more than 500 congressional websites in difficult-to-use formats. This is an improvement over having to scour all legislation to find earmarks in a budgetary game of cat-and-mouse, but there's much more to be done. That’s why the Sunlight Foundation supports the Earmark Transparency Act (HR 5258 and S 3335), which would require Congress to make all earmark information available in one central location with all of the data that we need to figure out what’s going on. (The House and Senate Appropriations Committees already track all earmarks, but that info isn't publicly available.)

If you’re interested in learning more about earmarks, watch this video from Monday with Steve, Jim, and me on the future on earmark transparency, or check out this timeline of earmark reforms and list of bills introduced this past Congress to reform the earmarking process.

Whether you think Congress should ban or embrace earmarks, we shouldn't pretend it's easy to track the money.

Yesterday, the Advisory Committee on Transparency hosted "the Future of Earmark Transparency" on Capitol Hill.

Speaking at the event were Steve Ellis, Vice President of Taxpayers for Common Sense; Jim Harper, Director of Information Policy Studies at the Cato Institute and founder of WashingtonWatch.com; and Daniel Schuman, Policy Counsel at the Sunlight Foundation and Director of the Advisory Committee on Transparency.

The Advisory Committee on Transparency is a project of the Sunlight Foundation, and has 18 member organizations. Background materials on earmark transparency are available after the jump.

Resources

• Timeline of earmarks reforms and all bills introduced in the 111th Congress (via Sunlight)
• WashingtonWatch.com's crowd-sourced earmarks database
• Taxpayers for Common Sense earmarks database
• “Common Sense Earmark Reforms for the 112th Congress,” released by a coalition of good government groups and several Washington lobbyists (via TCS)
• Report on Senate HSGAC hearings on the Earmark Transparency Act
• “Boehner, Cantor vow vote to ban Earmarks next Congress” (via the Hill) 11/12/2010
• “Demint Gathers Earmark Ban Support” (via Washington Wire) 11/9/2010
• “McConnell: Earmark ban won't save any money” (via the Hill) 11/7/2010
• President Obama's State of the Union Address 1/27/2010 calling for a unified earmarks database

To join the Advisory Committee on Transparency's email list, please contact Daniel Schuman at ACT(at)sunlightfoundation.com with your name, email, phone, title, and office.

The Advisory Committee on Transparency's purpose is to support the Congressional Transparency Caucus's mission of promoting government transparency by:

• Providing members of Congress with expert advice and resources on transparency issues, and
• Connecting them with potential partners to advance a transparency agenda.

More information about the Advisory Committee is available here

Additional Resources

• A daily summary of transparency happenings
• Join our public discussion group
• The announcement of today's event

"I can't think of a more important word in politics than transparency."

Those words were spoken by Huffington Post's Technology & Innovations Editor Jose Antonio Vargas at yesterday's launch of Sunlight's Public=Online national transparency campaign. Vargas couldn't have a found a more receptive crowd for that statement as the room was filled with a cross-partisan selection of people ready to geek-out about transparency.

As one audience member noted, Vargas' statement couldn't be more true. House leaders are pledging to provide copies of the health care bill at every iteration online for the public to view 72 hours before coming to the floor. The normal parochial deals cut behind-the-scenes to help secure legislative success are becoming albatrosses for those lawmakers who pursued them. And transparency promises are being publicly challenged and praised as they are raised to a high level of policy importance. Transparency isn't just a buzzword, it's the word.

Public=Online seeks to make transparency an even bigger deal in the coming months and years. The speakers at yesterday's panels helped explain why.

Public Square Project's Ryan Hopkins talked about the importance of transparency at the local level. Hopkins' outfit Public Square Project is emblematic of the exact type of work that people could get involved in to effect their communities. I especially like the Pittsburgh Citizen, a citizen-driven local news organization.

CATO Institute's Jim Harper explained the non-partisan nature of transparency and transparency activism. Harper also discussed his work using create web sites and act as his own media. Who needs the media when you can be the media yourself? All the more reason for more transparency.

Google's Ginny Hunt discussed her work in mining the data that directly effects their lives: voting information, weather data, etc. Hunt explained how Google Public Labs chose the data to work with by figuring out what statistics people were actually interested in.

Which takes us to another classic quote from Huffington Post's Jose Antonio Vargas. Discussing the need for media and newspapers to remain relevant and accessible Vargas said, "We need to meet people where they're at." (Yes, Boost Mobile has infected everyone's grammar.) That statement goes for pretty much everyone involved in politics or media. If you aren't engaging people where they are or talking to them about what they want to hear about, you may as well not exist in these days where we can float about the ether to find whatever it is we are seeking. This also goes to data, as Ginny Hunt explained. We need to focus on data that people want, use and need and then deliver it to them in ways that they can access, understand and engage with.

That's where you can help. Join our Public=Online campaign and tell us what to do and what you want. We don't want you to meet us where we are, but to meet you where you are. Come tell us where that is.

More event pictures below. You can also rewatch the live blog of the event that was hosted by Sunlight Labs' Jessy Kate Cowan-Sharp, GovLoop's Steve Ressler and myself:

Jim Harper, Webmaster at WashingtonWatch.com,  can use our help this weekend.

WashingtonWatch is beginning  a soft roll-out of its new crowd-sourcing effort to capture and display earmark data. (Sunlight has provided partial support for  Jim's project.)  You can find the data-entry interface here (requires login). Jim is asking us all to help test it out by trying to enter earmark data for individual congressional lawmakers, whether your own representative or senator, or maybe one you particularly like or dislike. Jim says that he has found it to be rather addictive fun...And I can imagine many of us would too.

He says that after spending some time getting used to the interface and the buggy way each individual lawmaker listed their earmarks, it should start going  quickly.

Next week, Jim will announce a contest --   WashingtonWatch.com will award an Amazon Kindle to the "earmark hunter" who enters the earmark requests for the most individual lawmakers.

Jim has set it up so that any site can input data to a master database, however, you'll need to get a login and instructions of how to set it up on your site from him. This "definitive" data-set will be freely available in whole or in part to anyone. He also says he is willing to help anyone who wants to write code to scrape data from individual lawmakers' submissions and deliver them in bulk. (Frustratingly, each lawmaker announced and displayed their earmarks differently on their site.) Jim is hoping that those of you who are savvy enough will figure out how to collect data more efficiently by writing code to scrape the earmark data from all of Congress.

Just like Sunlight's Transparency Corp, Jim is asking for volunteers to make government transparency a reality.

This is a neat weekend frolic. Have at it.

Send comments/questions/suggestions to him at webmaster@washingtonwatch.com.