After launching Sunshine Week with yesterday's successful Advisory Committee on Transparency event, it's a good time to reflect on positive transparency developments around the country (as opposed to yesterday's disheartening news).

Among the inspiring stories that we came across recently, Sunlight was particularly struck by the work of a software engineering class at Virginia Tech. As the Washington Post reported, a professor picked up on the students' desire to find their coursework relevant and dedicated a semester to build a mobile app for the university bus system. After a slew of prototypes and some extra funding, the impressive VT Bus Tracker debuted. It's important to note that this application was only possible with a willing and proactive partnership with the bus system operators.

In light of budget shortfalls around the country, many states have yielded to public pressure to open their books and are putting their financial information online. In the past few months both Indiana and New Hampshire launched 'Transparency Portals' that centralize state spending data. These websites have plenty of room for improvement, but the Sunlight Foundation is excited to see the states dip their toe into the growing community of public officials who recognize public information should be online.

Last week we were interested to watch developments in lobbying disclosure at the state level in Georgia. According to an article in the Atlanta-Journal Constitution, the Georgia Government Transparency and Campaign Finance Commission is hoping to vastly expand the definition of a lobbyist and allow e-filing across the board -- both principles the Sunlight Foundation includes in our Real Time Online Lobbying Transparency Act. While the proposals in Georgia are hardly perfect, any serious deliberation of lobbying reform is admirable and the Sunlight Foundation encourages these discussions.

What other rays of sunshine are we missing? Tweet @sunfoundation or use the hashtag #sunchat to join us this Thursday for a special Sunshine Week twitter chat.

Today Sunlight is launching Poligraft, what I think is one of the coolest, most revealing and most interesting tools of the many we have developed.

In fact, this user-driven website and bookmarklet -- which extracts text from any news story, blog post or news release and runs it through a filter to determine the “influence connections” between the entities listed in that text -- is pretty close to a dream come true. And the project has personal roots.

Poligraft creates an enhanced view of the influence connections between politicians and organizations.

More than 20 years ago one of my mentors -- Philip M. Stern, author of The Best Congress that Money Can Buy (Pantheon, 1988) -- put the idea in my head of a one “click” search to see all the influences that focus their attention on Congress. Since Sunlight’s founding that’s been known as “Ellen’s Vision of the One-Click Future” bringing together many disparate data sets to tell the larger story. And while not yet a perfect rendition of that, Poligraft today is one of our efforts to that end, and while not a perfect tool, it’s a very exciting one.

There are knotty problems you’ll find in using it, not the least of which is that without government’s help in establishing a system of unique identifiers for all those who file reports with the government, we still wrestle with lack of name standardization across various filing entities. While we’ve tried hard to sort through that, it’s far from perfect yet.

Poligraft is expandable and to that end in a few weeks we’ll be adding other related data sets -- just as soon as we can get them ready to be integrated. (We’d certainly welcome your suggestions of what else to add as well.)

Here's a short video that explains how to use the tool - it's incredibly easy.

Poligraft is designed for users as both a user-driven website or as a bookmarklet (I prefer this), offering an interactive snapshot of the connections between the players in the text you want to review. All you have to do is to paste the URL or text of a news article, blog post or press release in the text box and Poligraft creates an enhanced view of the interconnections between the people, organizations and relationships described within the text.

Poligraft is built on top of a site we launched a couple of months ago -- TransparencyData.com -- the one stop shop for downloadable influence data sets. And both of these sites are built on the work of the Center for Responsive Politics, the National Institute on Money in State Politics and various other government data sets.

The Knight Foundation funded the work on this project, and we are most grateful for their support of this and many other tools we are creating.

I know this is a couple days old, but it hasn't been mentioned here yet. The District of Columbia's real-time online data disclosure project was one of six winners of the Innovations in American Government awards given out by the Harvard Kennedy School's Ash Institute for Democratic Governance and Innovation. The project was spearheaded by then-D.C. Chief Technology Officer (CTO) and current federal Chief Information Officer (CIO) Vivek Kundra. You can see the two sites singled out for praise below:

• Digital Public Square

• D.C. Data Catalog

According to the Ash Institute, "this is the first initiative in the country that makes virtually all current district government operational data available to the public in its raw form rather than in static, edited reports." Real-time data disclosure is becoming far more common in cities across the nation with San Francisco introducing DataSF.org and the New York City legislature examining open data legislation. (Vancouver, Canada has also endorsed the release of city data in raw form.)

Real-time, raw data disclosure is the cutting edge in transparency and government innovation. While the federal government has released Data.gov, a raw data site similar to D.C.'s, there are countless sets of public data compiled by the federal government that are in one or more of the following three categories: 1) Not online; 2) Not in a structured format; 3) Not compiled and disclosed in real-time. As many public data sets as possible should meet these three criteria. For some data it is unreasonable to ask for real-time disclosure. These sets should then, at least, meet the first two.

Side note: It's great to see my city defy our Rodney Dangerfield-like existence and finally get some respect.

Rob Miller, a Marine and congressional candidate in South Carolina's 2nd district, probably didn't expect to become an overnight star while he was watching the President give a speech to a joint session of Congress on health care reform. Then came Rep. Joe Wilson's rebel yell, "You lie!" Miller is Wilson's Democratic opponent in 2010 and lost a relatively close election to Wilson in 2008 (54%-46%). The money started pouring in almost immediately. Within a few hours, Miller raised over $100,000. Two days after Wilson's outburst, Miller has raked in over $750,000 (while writing he has crept to almost $800,000), likely making him one of the better funded Democrats running for a House seat in 2010.

Nearly all of this money is being raised through the site ActBlue, a fundraising portal set up to allow individuals to raise money for Democratic candidates themselves. One of the best features of the site is its transparency. The site updates as new contributions come in, showing the total on the candidate's page -- or on a fundraising group's page (like this group raising money for Miller). All of this has been written before, but I wanted to highlight one feature of this transparency: real time disclosure.

Current campaign finance laws require only quarterly disclosures of campaign contributions. The unforseen money bomb for Rob Miller exposes a problem with the limited system of quarterly disclosures for candidates trying to increase enthusiasm for and attract small donor money to their campaigns. The transparent nature of ActBlue allows for the snowballing effect we've seen over the past few days. It's a lot more rewarding for small donors to contribute when they can see the group results of their actions. Many campaigns have used transparent fundraising mechanisms at times, the Howard Dean bat and the Ron Paul money bomb are two obvious and innovative examples. By the 2008 campaign this was a pretty standard tactic of presidential candidates; both Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton used this gimic many times in the Democratic primary.

But why shouldn't this just be the norm? Campaign contributions are viewed by the law as a form of speech. If we see real time disclosure of campaign funding help increase individual desire to contribute, isn't this a boon for speech and democratic participation? Donating to a campaign is a step above voting, in terms of participation, and can lead to further political actions like volunteering or even getting involved in local politics. Campaigns could simply forward their contributions on to the Federal Election Commission (FEC) in a timely, maybe not immediate, manner and the FEC could report the contributions in real time. This could increase transparency, campaign enthusiasm and small donor power across the board.

Right now, in the Miller/Wilson example we are seeing how the transparency of real time contributions has helped one candidate over another. Since Wilson's comment, the media has focused on his opponents rapid fundraising as they can see the numbers pour in over ActBlue. It took two days for Wilson to release a number on the amount he had raised, $200,000, in the wake of his outburst. A system where real time contributions could be viewed side-by-side may have helped increase contributions to Wilson. Who doesn't like a little healthy competition?

This is certainly a different argument for disclosure than is usually made, which is that money plays an influencing role in politics and disclosure of contributions is required to allow the public and an enforcement body to hold candidates accountable. This is an important argument and is certainly another reason for real time disclosure of contributions, but as I've stated above disclosure can also play a role in invigorating political activity. Unfortunately, it is the influence argument as the backbone of campaign disclosure that begins to complicate real time disclosure.

One requirement in campaign finance disclosure is the disclosure of names and employment, a key to gleaning the influence of interests and powerful people have with our elected representatives. In Buckley v. Valeo the Supreme Court upheld the disclosure of campaign contributions due to the need to avert possible problems of corruption and influence in elections and determined a minimum threshold for disclosure. It was determined by the court that contributions of a certain value were more likely to cause undue influence or potential corruption than smaller donations. These small donors would be spared disclosure to protect their anonymity as the size of their donation could not reasonably be seen to influence a candidate. Thus we have a system where small donations -- those who contributed less than $250 -- do not need to be disclosed to the FEC with the attendent name, employment and other categories for each individual donor.

How would this work out in a system of real time disclosure? Should we do away with minimum disclosure threshold? There were numerous problems with small donors during the 2008 elections, fraudulent donations and more, that could lead to a reasonable need for small donor disclosure. But would this work counter to the benefits of real time disclosure (increased participation, competition and speech) by scaring off individual donors afraid of identifying themselves? I'm not sure what the answer is to that question. If you care let me know what you think about it in the comments.

From the classic perspective of influence in politics, real time disclosure is imperative to shine the light on contributions as the pour into Congress during bill markups, committee hearings and votes. Similarly, real time disclosure would aid the need for increased competition and speech in our politics. Thanks to Rob Miller and Joe Wilson and ActBlue for showing us that.