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.

Last week, Stephen Carter, the U.K. government’s minister for communications, technology and broadcasting, released an interim report on the state of Britain’s digital capacity with recommendations for enhancements. The report, “Digital Britain – Interim Report,” is the result of a review Carter launched in October with the mandate of providing a comprehensive analysis of Britain’s digital economy.

Bill Thompson, BBC technology columnist, criticized Carter and his agency for producing a report lacking public engagement and that “reflects an approach based around control and secrecy.” Thompson points out that it’s 72 pages into the report before the authors added an invitation with an email address (digitalbritain@berr.gsi.gov.uk) for interested citizens and organizations to offer suggestions and join the discussion. Thompson added that it would be up to Carter and his Digital Britain team to follow up on these expressions of interest, “which is nice of them, and we must just hope that Carter and his expert panel will be carefully reviewing every blog post and online comment to ensure they don’t miss anything important.”

Tony Hirst, an Open University academic and author of the OUseful.info blog, realized it didn’t need to be this way. He twittered the question, had anyone put the report into an online environment that would allow comments and discussion. Joss Winn, a technology officer at the University of Lincoln in the U.K., twittered back that the WordPress theme CommentPress would be a good application for breaking down and commenting on the report paragraph by paragraph.

Earlier today, Hirst reports, that “two evenings (incl. a rather late night, last night), a lunch break and morning coffee later, Joss has WriteToReply.org up and running (I got in the way not getting Daily Feeds working;-), a CommentPress site for commenting on public documents.” And the first report they posted is Carter’s Digital Britain, of course. The site allows users to comment in considerable detail, with texts broken down into their respective sections for easier consumption. The site encourages users to comment on specific paragraphs, rather than comment on the text as a whole. Users can subscribe to the feed of comments, as well.

The concept is similar to Sunlight’s Public Markup, an experiment to open up bills online, such as last fall’s Emergency Economic Stabilization Act. Kudos to the authors of WriteToReply for harnessing the power of collective action and providing greater transparency.