Mobile access to Sunlight content -- across our main site and many of our projects -- has grown exponentially year-on-year since 2006. It's safe to assume we'll see this growth trend continue as smart phones, iPads and tablets continue to proliferate.

That being said, I've been a fan of how the Flipboard app for the iPad (and now the iPhone) has made social media and other forms of news accessible and easily digestible. I've gone as far as to contact Flipboard with the thought of creating a Sunlight channel to access an emerging mobile audience, ultimately to no avail. At the moment users are only able to access their own social media feeds and pre-selected partner feeds, with self-service coming in the Spring.

Luckily for Sunlight, Google launched a product called Currents, which allows content creators to publish their own content to mobile devices in a user friendly magazine-style layout, very similar to how Flipboard displays media. This self-serve platform gives Sunlight an accessible mobile venue for content promotion and user engagement.

As the video above shows, Google Currents, which launched yesterday with over a dozen featured media partners, makes it simple to set up your own mobile channel. The process is as easy as adding a few RSS feeds and customizing a handful of options (which are only accessible through Google Chrome for the time being) before publishing.

In another post I'll walk you through setting up your own channel, but in the meantime you can check out The Daily Sunlight here. You'll need to install the Google Currents app on your mobile device, but once you do, you'll be ready to go.

It's often the case that your signature is required for various documents, whether paper or PDF, to carry out your work. I would personally prefer to skip the process of printing, signing and then rescanning or faxing documents if it can be helped, and I bet you would, too.

A colleague alerted me to the fact that the Preview app in Lion, the latest version of Apple's OS X, was catered to folks like us: Using the built-in iSight program, Preview makes it easy to capture your signature and apply it to a PDF form. This allows you to skip the printing, scanning and faxing of anything requiring your signature, so long as you already have a PDF of the form you need.

TUAW -- a.k.a. "The Unofficial Apple Weblog" -- does a great job of breaking down how this feature works:

Lion's version of Preview comes with a built-in signature scanner that makes signing documents far simpler. In the Annotations toolbar you now have an option to create a signature from your Mac's built-in iSight camera. All you need to do is use black ink to sign a piece of white paper, align your signature toward the camera using the onscreen guides, and take a snapshot of the signature.

As TUAW notes, it's solid step in the direction of a truly paperless office.

(h/t from our own Joshua Hatch)

It's been a while since I've posted a round-up of the latest Tools for Transparency posts. Take a look at the posts you may have missed over the past few months:

Google+ Pages - November 10th, 2011

Fundraising with Square - November 3rd, 2011

Chat With Your Audience on Google Hangouts - October 21st, 2011

Use Topsy to Track Your Content - October 14th, 2011

Use A Cell Phone to Collect Campaign Signatures - October 6th, 2011

Finding Uses for SoundCloud - September 29th, 2011

Monitor Your Site with Chartbeat - September 23rd, 2011

Managing Contacts with Rapportive - September 15th, 2011

Digest Content in Minutes with Topicmarks - August 18th, 2011

Track the People Tracking You with Ghostery - August 11th, 2011

As I continue writing about Tools for Transparency, do you have any thoughts on topics I should write about?

On Wednesday Sunlight released a list of lobbyists tweeting online, allowing for collective insight into their world; who they follow; what they're promoting; and a view of how they operate through the prism of Twitter.

Yesterday Tony Hirst, lecturer in the Department of Communication and Systems at The Open University and author of ouseful.info created a series of visualizations delving deeper into our Twitter lobbyist list.

(Please keep in mind that this is just a sampling of lobbyists active on Twitter and a snapshot of their activity, I find these visualizations more interesting than instructive.)

Public social connections between members of the @SunFoundation/lobbyists list

"Popular" friends of folk on the @SunFoundation/lobbyists twitter list

That is, folks who are followed by 20 or more people on the list...

People who follow large numbers of @sunfoundation lobbyists

Method: grab the followers of folk on @sunfoundation/lobbyists, generate a net from follower to list member, filter list to nodes of degree>=20, size nodes according to out-degree, colour according to modularity statistic identified cluster.

Snapshot of US politics?

So the methodology is a little bit involved and completely made up on this one...

For each of the folk on the @sunfoundation/lobbyists list, grab a random sample of 97 their followers (or all their followers if they have less than 97). Find the people from those samples who follow at least 2 members of the list and generate the graph of those followers and all the people they follow. Filter that graph to show nodes with degree >=100, lay it out using a force directed layout in gephi, sizing nodes according to HITS Authority, then filter it again to only show nodes with indegree of 2 or more.

The intuition is that this view shows people who are followed by large numbers of people who follow 2 or more of the lobbyists.

Bear in mind that there may be all sorts of sampling errors...

If you want to do a bit of sleuthing yourself, please take a look at the Twitter lobbyist list itself or you can download this .csv file of the last 50 tweets from 191 of these lobbyist Twitter accounts to draw a bigger picture.

I don't usually write non-social media related Tools for Transparency posts, but I couldn't pass up the opportunity to write about Square, a simple mobile app and hardware accessory that turns your mobile device into a credit card reader.

This simple app allows anyone with an iPhone, iPad or Android phone to take credit card payments, bypassing much of the hassle required with traditional credit card readers and transactions. The app makes it simple to collect payments, and donations, on the go, sending funds directly to your bank account.  The process for ordering the device and setting up the application was simple and Square takes a small 2.75% fee from each transaction.

A small nonprofit that I volunteer with recently held a fundraiser and as most supporters are accustomed to, they arrived with cash in hand for event tickets and donations.  A few came with less cash than they had realized but we were able to accommodate them because I had downloaded the Square app for my iPod and ran their credit card through the attached reader. An elegant solution for people that don't walk around with much cash.

Here's how it works.

Once you've received the card reader, plug it into the audio jack of your mobile device.  Open up the Square app (make sure that you're connected to the web) and you will be shown a screen asking for the amount and type of transaction:

Next you'll need to swipe the credit card:

Sign for the card using your finger:

Once the card clears, the receipt can either be sent to a cell phone or an email address:

The potential for fundraising, as in my example, is obvious and of course, can be applied to any transparency project and cause. I think it's important to note, when you're accepting donations, where the money is going and whether or not the donation is tax deductible.

What are your experiences with Square? Have you used it in the past?

• New York Governor Andrew Cuomo has made good on his campaign promise to increase his own transparency by launching a new website called CitizenConnect. This website provide citizens with details about his schedule and allows them to conduct online town halls with him. Jimmy Veilkind has been critical of Cuomo's transparency record in the past and sees this as a step in the right direction. Cuomo hopes the site will provide “an open forum for New Yorkers to interact and participate in their government.” Find out more on Veilkind's take on the new website at Capitol Confidential.

 

• According to a study done by The Sunshine Review, a nonprofit that uses a transparency checklist to evaluate state and local government websites, the state of Florida has a B grade for online transparency. Despite several Florida county websites receiving A+ grades for online transparency, the overall grade average was weighed down by the low marks given to the state website MyFlorida.com. The site earned a B due to its tough-to-navigate search function, not providing information on state-paid lobbying and agency lobbying contracts, and not providing "comprehensive information" for making public records requests. Find out more about Katie Sanders' take on Florida's ranking at the Miami Herald Naked Politics Blog.

 

• Cook County, Illinois just launched an online open county data catalog. For its template, Cook County used the Model Local Open Government Directive, which was designed to fill a need for open government policies  expressed at CityCamp Colorado. Bryan Gryth, Vice-President and Director of Colorado Smart Communities maintains, “Today is a good day for open government and the citizens of Cook County because they have a more transparent county government and that transparency will hopefully lead to a more informed citizenry that can hold their government accountable.” Check out Sebsatian James' take on the  campaign on the Cook County Blog.

• San Francisco's oldest municipal Sunshine Ordinance was established and extended thanks to the San Francisco Bay Guardian.  They are now reporting that enforcement of this ordinance was left to an ethics commission that simply would not discipline recalcitrant officials, thus leaving the task force powerless to give citizens the openness they have a right to. She maintains that this oversight allows government departments to lie about embarrassing public records with little impunity. See why Terry Francke describes the Sunshine Ordinance as a "cloud of inaction" at CalAware Today.

 

Rapportive is a browser plug-in for Firefox, Safari and Chrome that offers further context on the people emailing you by adding related links and information in a side panel in Gmail. The service adds contact links for Twitter, Facebook and LinkedIn, other links to sites like YouTube, Flickr and Quora and recent emails. Rapportive also offers Raplets, plug-ins that add more specific types of content, like your contact's Klout score, Lanyrd info, related Crunchbase information. If you're a developer, you can even create your own Raplet.

You'll quickly see the value in the service when you're in need of a bit more information on one of your contacts and don't have the time or bandwith to search for, say, their the professional history (via LinkedIn) or their social media prominence (via Klout). For more info, check out this video from Raplet:

Google has a similar tool called People Widget, which I'm not overly familiar with. What about you? What do you think of Rapportive and other related tools? Have they proven useful in your work?

Need some help getting to the point? Topicsmarks is a summarizing service that analyzes large amounts of text and draws out the main points in a coherent format.  According to Techcrunch, the service "uses semantic text extraction and personalization technologies" to draw information from links, documents and other content types.  It currently works with desktop files, urls and your Evernote or Google Reader accounts.

I ran Sunlight reporter Ryan Sibley's post from last week (HAMP helps few homeowners, but program continues) through Topicmarks, and asked her to comment on how well it did on summarizing her piece. This is the Topicmarks summary:

Sibley's thoughts on the summarization:

The Topicsmarks service summarized the main points of the article, but it also misinterpreted some facts presented in the original piece. By moving sentences around after summarizing them, it incorrectly presented a contrast between facts that were not supposed to be considered that way. In short, the context for what I wrote was removed and the results it produced are misleading and just plain wrong. I'd suggest reading an original piece over using this service.

We haven't tested very many posts and wonder whether the piece is too complicated for the service or if Topicmarks has a hard time parsing the writing style.  Have any of you tried this service? What are your thoughts?

Federal CIO Vivek Kundra identified ten principles for improving federal transparency in his testimony before a House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform subcommittee today. They're worth repeating here:

1. Build end-to-end digital processes – Automate transfer of data between systems to increase productivity, protect data integrity, and speed data dissemination. Capitalize on game-changing technologies to increase transparency.
2. Build once, use often – Architect systems for reuse and share platforms to reduce costs, streamline systems and processes, reduce errors, and foster collaboration.
3. Tap into golden sources of data – Pull data directly from authoritative sources to improve data quality, shorten processes and protect data integrity.
4. Release machine-readable data and encourage 3rd party applications – Make data machine-readable to allow the public to easily analyze, visualize and use government information.
5. Use common data standards – Develop and use uniform, unique identifiers and data standards to ease the flow of data and reduce system complexity.
6. Validate data up front – Correct errors during collection and at the point of entry to block bad data from ever entering the system.
7. Release data in real time and preserve for future use – Release data as quickly as feasible to enhance its relevance and utility while maintaining future accessibility.
8. Reduce burden – Collect data once and use it repeatedly. Pull from existing data sets to reduce costs and burden and to increase productivity and uniformity.
9. Protect privacy and security – Safeguard the release of information to increase public trust, participation, preserve privacy, and protect national security. Open Government doesn’t mean vulnerable government.
10. Provide equal access and incorporate user feedback – Provide a common view of data to all stakeholders to foster collaboration. Incorporate user feedback to help identify high-value, meaningful data sets, set priorities, to continuously drive and improve future planning and processes.

Data.gov, USASpending.gov, and other Obama tech innovations face virtual extinction if the FY 2011 budget bill passed by the House of Representatives in February or considered by the Senate in March becomes law. The funding source for these e-government initiatives is the Electronic Government Fund, a $34 million bucket of money that would be drained to $2 million for the remainder of this fiscal year. The House and Senate’s inability to agree on long-term budget legislation has kept these initiatives alive at FY 2010 levels.

Some projects facing defunding include the recently-launched cloud computing initiative, the information repository data.gov, the government-spending reporting site USASpending.gov, citizen engagement tools, and online collaboration tools. Altogether, six project areas apparently will be affected by the cuts. Vivek Kundra, the Federal CIO who is responsible for allocating the Electronic Government Fund, will have to make some very difficult choices.

Although the Electronic Government fund was never allocated the kinds of money envisioned by the authors of the E-Government Act of 2002, starting in FY 2010 the fund was beefed up to $34 million by the incoming Obama administration and Democratically-controlled Congress. Funding levels for the past decade hovered around $2-3 million.

The funding necessary to keep these programs in place is illuminated by the IT Dashboard, one of the spending-tracking initiatives under Vivek Kundra's leadership. According to the Dashboard, over the last few years data.gov has cost $8.3 million; the cloud computing initiative has cost $1.4 million; and USASpending.gov has cost $13.3 million -- the legislation creating USASpending.gov was co-sponsored by Senator Coburn and then-Senator Obama.

The returns from these e-government initiatives in terms of transparency are priceless. They will help the government operate more effectively and efficiently, thereby saving taxpayer money and aiding oversight. Although we have significant issues with some of these program’s data quality, and we are concerned that the government may be paying too much for the technology, there should be no doubt that we need the transparency they enable. For example, fully realized transparency would allow us to track every expense and truly understand how money -- like that in the electronic government fund -- flows to federal programs. Government spending and performance data must be available online, in real time, and in machine readable formats.

Ultimately, it’s unlikely that either budget bill will be enacted into law in their current forms. But there is reason for alarm. Each house has considered providing only $2 million for the Electronic Government Fund, although the six continuing resolution have so far sustained current funding levels on a pro-rated basis. Looking ahead, the Administration called for $34 million in its budget request for FY 2012. The unsettled financial climate means that we can expect this funding fight to continue.

An open and accountable government is a prerequisite for democracy, and keeping these programs alive costs a mere pittance when compared to the value of bringing the federal government into the sunlight.