Keeping track of local government just got easier with today's beta launch of OpenGovernment.org, a joint project of the Sunlight Foundation and the Participatory Politics Foundation. The project is a free, open-source web application that allows users to dig into local, city and state level government with unparalleled transparency. This inaugural launch debuts with data from five state legislatures: California, Louisiana, Maryland, Texas and Wisconsin. Residents in these five states can now easily watchdog their state legislators through an online portal of public information. An engaged community is key to creating greater awareness on the importance of transparency in state and local government and infusing greater trust in our elected officials.

OpenGovernment.org will serve as a hub of local government information in a similar manner to its popular sibling that deals with the federal level, OpenCongress.org. The project pulls together official announcements, news coverage, blog posts, social media alerts and more to give a truly illustrative picture of local government. OpenGovernment.org also makes it easy for citizens to self-organize around issues they care being debated by state legislatures and contact their elected officials directly from bill pages. The Sunlight Labs Open States project built the legislative backend for the project with support from volunteer contributions. The Open States project collects and scrapes legislative data from all 50 state legislatures and makes it available in a unified, developer-friendly format.

As you check out this exciting new project, be sure to heed the words of David Moore, the executive director of the Participatory Politics Foundation:

This is indeed a beta version of the site, so keep in mind that we expect there to be a few kinks, and much more data & features are forthcoming. In that context, our small non-profit development team is incredibly excited to get this new project out onto the open Web and in front of people — we’ve been working on it for three-fourths of the past year in partnership with Sunlight, and we’re excited to roll it out to all 50 states and to foster a diverse (in terms of skills, time, and other) community of volunteer developers around it to remix it. There are a lot of factors involved here that really motivate us: fighting systemic corruption, liberating public data, advocating comprehensive electoral reform, facilitating peer-to-peer communication about our government, empowering citizen watchdogs — but one of the primary ones is creating user-friendly interfaces for this baffling and arcane world of legislative data.

More data and additional states and cities will be added as they become available. Please test it out and let us know what you think!

Wikipedia is the world’s most successful model of citizen engagement and collaboration. It began ten years ago as an experiment in information that challenged the top down approach to developing encyclopedias and now boasts millions of active users with 400 million visits a month. Its staggering popularity ultimately proved the power and wisdom of the crowd in developing online resources well beyond simply creating an encyclopedia.

From the very beginning of the Sunlight Foundation, we were impressed by the philosophical ideals of Wikipedia and sought that kind of access and collaboration to government information. This shared ethos brought Jimmy Wales, the founder and public face of Wikipedia, to our advisory board and soon after our founding we pursued a wiki model for Congressionally oriented research.

The first project the Sunlight Foundation launched in April 2006 was Congresspedia, a collaborative wiki project with the Center for Media and Democracy that was designed to shine more light on the workings of the U.S. Congress. It was an explicit homage to Wikipedia and operated on the belief that a healthy democracy is built on a public informed about the inner-workings and connections of government and its officials. The Congresspedia project followed relevant public figures and tracked special interests in the wiki collaborative writing format that Wikipedia popularized ten years ago. That project eventually became part of Open Congress (which Sunlight proudly supports as its core funder) where the Transparency Hub page is a great collection of resources coordinated by Sunlight’s policy director John Wonderlich and our policy counsel Daniel Schuman.

Happy 10th birthday Wikipedia!

Check it out. Our friends at Open Congress have the Senate health care bill online. This way you can read it on a single page and you don't have to worry about loading a pdf.

David Moore at Open Congress has an excellent post up explaining how the current life of a bill in Congress is riddled with disclosure holes. I can't do more than say, go read David's post. Here's some choice graphs:

The reason is that the “Baucus Bill” is only a “mark”, not yet an official Senate bill, which means (to summarize reductively) that the digital text that constitutes the .pdf does not make its way off internal government web servers to the official website of the Library of Congress, THOMAS — and in turn, does not make its way to government transparency web resources such as GovTrack and OpenCongress. Before that happens, this mark of the health care bill needs to be reconciled with other Senate committee versions of the same, which will then be put forward for consideration to the U.S. Senate as a whole. Health care reform is leading news coverage & blog analysis of American politics right now, this is a major document in the mix, and there’s not a widely-recognized, user-friendly resource for online examination by the public at large. You should have better access to this info! You should have — at your fingertips — immediate, unrestricted digital access to the full text of any piece of legislation the very moment it’s released publicly by Congress.

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The current Congressional process for publishing data is, to borrow a phrase from the Free Software Foundation, Defective By Design. As we see in many proprietary, top-down systems affecting the public interest, it’s insistently closed-off. Congress’ processes for distributing legislative info is fundamentally broken — it could and should relatively easily be fixed, starting now. Whether or not you support the Baucus markup or the House version of the health care reform bill, we hope you agree that the public has a right to read this important iteration & political volley in the process.

In a foot race, there is always a starting point and an end point. There is no confusion or ambiguity as to when or where the runners started. That is not so when measuring the public availability of legislation. In our Read the Bill campaign we are advocating that all bills be placed online for 72 hours prior to consideration. Specifically, the Read the Bill campaign asks that bills be accessible, in text format, online and posted to a commonly visited web site, GPO or THOMAS. So far, 3476 people have joined the #ReadtheBill campaign. You can sign up here.

While researching and measuring the length of time for our case studies and for the Open Congress Rushed Bills feed we discovered that pinpointing a time when bills become publicly available was not so easy.

Nancy Watzman pointed out last week that the OC Rushed Bills feed relies on the Government Printing Office (GPO) bill feed. The GPO feed of legislation is what feeds THOMAS, the commonly used Library of Congress legislative search engine, and so this marks a very good point to judge public availability. Looking backwards, at bills that will not, through the magic of the Internet, appear in the GPO feed, is much more difficult as there is no legal definition of public availability of legislation.

Bills can become available in many ways. Most commonly they are posted through the GPO and then to THOMAS, but committees sometimes preempt the printing body and post PDFs of legislation to their web site. When the stimulus bill and the bailout bill first became available, it was through committee web sites. Does this mark a publicly available moment? Or should we only call a bill publicly available, in text format as opposed to PDF, when it has been published to a commonly visited engine (GPO or THOMAS)? We believe the latter—and we urge Congress to clarify this crucial point.

Meanwhile, in some cases in our Read the Bill research, we have had to rely on information from the House Rules Committee. Most bills in the House require a rule to come to the floor and thus wind up getting posted to this committee. Many times, the PDFs of bills posted to the Rules Committee web site will have a time stamp on the lower left corner. That marks the moment that a bill has been filed and thus the first time it is available to lawmakers, but not necessarily to the general public.

Neither Congress nor the public will be able to form well informed decisions on legislation unless bills are posted online 72 hours before debate.  While we at Sunlight—with the help of Open Congress—are happy to decide when the clock starts ticking, it really is up to Congress to make the decision to consistently post bills to a publicly available site in a searchable format. Join us in urging them to do that.

One week into the 111th Congress and lawmakers have already introduced hundreds of bills. Of those few hundred bills some are bound to be concerned with what we're concerned with: transparency and government ethics. Using Open Congress' awesome bill tracking powers, I've compiled a list of the bills that relate to Sunlight's work. You can find them by joining the Open Congress community and becoming my friend, or just keep reading below the jump.

H.R.36 Presidential Library Donation Reform Act of 2009

H.R.35 Presidential Records Act Amendments of 2009

H.R.311 To cap discretionary spending, eliminate wasteful and duplicative agencies, reform entitlement programs, and reform the congressional earmark process.

H.R.420 To prohibit the use of Federal funds for a project or program named for an individual then serving as a Member, Delegate, Resident Commissioner, or Senator of the United States Congress.

H.Res.40 Amending the Rules of the House of Representatives to require each standing committee to hold periodic hearings on the topic of waste, fraud, abuse, or mismanagement in Government programs which that committee may authorize, and for other purposes.

S.49 A bill to help Federal prosecutors and investigators combat public corruption by strengthening and clarifying the law.

S.103 A bill to require disclosure and payment of noncommercial air travel in the Senate.

S.104 A bill to prohibit authorized committees and leadership PACs from employing the spouse or immediate family members of any candidate or Federal office holder connected to the committee.

S.105 A bill to amend the Ethics in Government Act of 1978 to establish criminal penalties for knowingly and willfully falsifying or failing to file or report certain information required to be reported under that Act.

S.133 A bill to prohibit any recipient of emergency Federal economic assistance from using such funds for lobbying expenditures or political contributions, to improve transparency, enhance accountability, encourage responsible corporate governance, and for other purposes.

S.162 Fiscal Discipline, Earmark Reform and Accountability Act

These last two bills are of particular interest. The latter bill, S. 162, is the previously blogged Feingold-McCain earmark reform legislation. I've attached the actual language below (unfortunately it takes the Government Printing Office a while to get legislative language online) for you to peruse.

Get your own - Open publication

Sen. McCain, can you hear me now? Sen. Stevens pays for his own lunch like a big boy. And Rep. Rob Bishop of Utah continues his annual tradition of earmarking funds for his biggest campaign contributors. That and more in today's news:

The Atlantic's Joshua Green takes a look at the Verizon and AT&T cell phone tower plans for Sen. John McCain's ranch and determines that the defenses offered by the companies and the McCains are simply not sufficient. The excuse for the now-derailed permanent installation of cell phone towers at the McCain ranch in Sedona was that Cindy McCain had made an independent request for cell service. Of course, the rapid and costly effort undertaken by the two companies had nothing to do with her husband's public role as a United States Senator and possible presidential candidate. Except that Verizon referred to the Sedona ranch, not as Cindy McCain's ranch, but as "John McCain’s cabin." Green writes, "So while Cindy McCain may indeed have requested the tower over the web like an ordinary millionaire rancher with spotty phone reception, Verizon was well aware that she was anything but that."

Sen. Ted Stevens emphatically denied any wrongdoing as he took the stand yesterday in a federal corruption trial in which the senator is accused of filing false statements on his personal financial disclosure reports. Sen. Stevens stated outright that, "I don't allow people to buy my lunch or buy my dinner; wherever I am, I pay my bills." Prosecutors have sought to show that the Alaska oil company VECO, headed by Stevens friend Bill Allen, paid for renovations to Stevens' house in Girdwood, Alaska and Stevens and Allen colluded to hide the expenses by filing false disclosures. Stevens' examination continues today.

Utah Rep. Rob Bishop has an annual tradition: earmark hundreds of thousands or millions of dollars in earmarks to ES3, a company operating at Hill Air Force Base and then attend an August fundraiser thrown by ES3 after the earmarks are secured. This year, Rep. Bishop secured $800,000 in earmarks for ES3 whose employees have generously donated $22,000 in August of this year to Bishop's reelection bid. Over the past five years, Rep. Bishop has secured $9.8 million for ES3.

Sunlight's Nancy Watzman has the final disclosures for the party convention committees over at Party Time. Democrats raised $60,966,482 for their convention, while Republicans raised $51,229,299 for theirs.

Open Secrets now has lobbyist campaign contributions available in their lobbying database. The Honest Leadership and Open Government Act of 2007 required the disclosure of lobbyist campaign contributions for the first time.

Open Congress' Donny Shaw continues his excellent series of posts comparing the legislative achievements of John McCain and Barack Obama by using actual data rather than stump speeches and press releases. Today, Donny is looking at the two candidates' voting records. Hurray, factual data comparisons!

And for something slightly different, here's a great article from Reason explaining, by way of Cindy McCain's beer distributor fortune, how the government aids and subsidizes certain parts of the beer, wine, and liquor industry, in the process raising the price of that frothy cold one waiting for you at that happy hour around the corner.

Sometimes congressional seats come fixed with a superstitious quality; a curse, perhaps. North Carolina's Class 3 Senate seat is famous for only electing one-term senators. No senator has served for more than one-term since Sam Ervin retired in 1974. Now, a spooky air covers Florida's 16th congressional district as a sex scandal, unearthed by ABC News, has hit freshman Rep. Tim Mahoney. This marks two elections in a row where the incumbent in Florida's 16th is hit with a sex scandal reported by ABC News just weeks before an election.

During the 2006 elections, ABC News reported that incumbent Rep. Mark Foley was engaged in improper relationships, both on- and off-line, with teenage male congressional pages. Foley resigned his seat immediately. Mahoney's scandal is a bit different from Foley's attempts to sleep with teenagers. Mahoney is accused of paying hush money, to the tune of $121,000, to a former mistress and ex-employee who is suing him for wrongful termination after she was fired soon after their affair went sour. Mahoney is also accused of arranging a $50,000 a year job for the woman with a public affairs firm that his reelection committee pays to do advertisements.

For the guy challenging Mahoney this cycle, watch out, ABC News has their eye on you.

What could be more annoying than tens of billions of taxpayer dollars used to bail out a huge, irresponisble corporation, essentially nationalizing the company? That corporation spending that money to lobby the very government that owns a majority stake in it. And that, children, is the story of AIG as told by AIG spokesman Joseph Norton, "We are not a GSE [government-sponsored entity] and are therefore not restricted. We remain a share-holder owned entity and continue advocacy activities." That is correct, the only problem being that the majority share-holder is the United States government.

Members of Congress are still looking to party for campaign contributions and Party Time is still tracking the fund raising events in Washington. This week we have a Janet Jackson concert, a Browns-Skins game, and a pheasant hunt. I hope that there are no wardrobe malfunctions, Redskins losses, or friends shot in the face at any of these events.

And our friends at Open Congress were profiled on local New York show Brian Lehrer Live. Watch the interview with OC's David Moore: OpenCongress.org with David Moore from Brian Lehrer Live on Vimeo.