• Following the Penn State child sexual abuse scandal, lawmakers want to strip state-related institutions’ exemption from Pennsylvania’s right-to-know law. State Representative Eugene DePasquale announced that he would introduce legislation making state-related institutions subject to the Act 3 of the law which requires all records of state and municipal governmental agencies to be open to public access, including financial documents, contracts and emails from university officials. State lawmakers and open government advocates said the legislation would increase transparency for institutions that receive taxpayer funds. However, in 2007, Penn State officials opposed the right-to-know law because of fear that it would result in less revenue from donors and private companies. Terry Mutchler, executive director of the Pennsylvania’s Office of Open Records matains that the law should be enforced, arguing, “anytime you have an entity that receives state dollars, there should be transparency.”‘ For Caleb Taylor’s take, read his post on Statehouse News Online.

In continuing with our series on OpenGovernment.org, this time we take a look at how you can learn more about your state representative. What is your district for example? If you are among the six states already highlighted in the OpenGovernment.org state profiles, you can search for your district using either your address or zip code. You will then be provided with information on your state legislature including Senate and Assembly. In case you are not sure who your House of Representative or Senator (in Congress) is, the search also gives you specific results right up to the national level.

Using our earlier example of SB 22 as a bill that is still being deliberated on, we are going to do a walk through on how you can engage your legislature regarding this bill (or any other). A click through the ‘recent actions’ shows the bills that had the most recent action taken on them. We can see that SB 22 was sponsored by Joan Ballweg (R-41) , Garey Bies (R-1) and Alberta Darling (R-8). What is cool about OpenGovernment.org is that is shows the key sponsors of a bill and includes their profiles to illustrate what they are interested in and the issues that are important to them. At the same time, if you are curious about the status of the bill, you can tell that it was last voted on on September 12 and was referred to a joint committee on Finance by committee on Senate Organization, with 5 Ayes and 0 Noes.

OpenGovernment.org summarizes the issues within a bill, providing you with a better understanding of what the bill is all about. So for SB 22, the main issues are Labor and Employment, Senior issues, state agencies, education, business and Consumers and insurance. Say you are passionate about labor and employment issues, you can contact Rep. Joan Ballweg (R-41), one of the co-sponsors of the bill, either through her District or Capitol address letting her know how you feel regarding your particular issue. The background information on a specific legislator provided by the site enables citizens to make informed outreach to their leaders. And for bloggers or political writers, it is a resourceful way of staying on top of time sensitive bills while following the influence behind the legislators. Also, constituencies governed by Rep. Ballweg can track her legislative profile, and see that she is a member of the Wisconsin Assembly Committee on Rules, the Wisconsin Assembly Committee on Colleges and Universities, and, of course, the Wisconsin Joint Legislative Council. With this kind of information, you now know that she is one of the Representatives with major influence, whose vote you may want to influence -- depending on what you are advocating for.

To top it all up, a history of all the bills that have been sponsored by a specific legislator, is displayed under ‘bills sponsored’. A quick look at the most recent bills sponsored by Rep. Joan Ballweg (R-41) all reveal that they all relate to education or insurance. The dynamics between legislators and their constituents does not always have to be complex. You can start by learning more about the people who draft the rules that govern you and Opengovernment.org helps you do just that!

In the next segment will talk about the most prevalent issues in states and how you can track the bills around them.

A new initiative to track, learn and share state legislative information was hatched last year when Open Government.org launched its website. Created by the Participatory Politics Foundation in partnership with Sunlight Foundation, OpenGovernment.org is a free and open-source public resource website for government transparency and civic engagement at the state and local levels. So far, portals for legislative data have been created for six states including California , Louisiana , Maryland , Minnesota , Texas and Wisconsin with plans to expand to all 50 states.

One of the most viewed bills on OpenGovernment.org so far has been SB 11 - the controversial bill about Wisconsin’s state finances and collective bargaining for public employees. The fact that it has been viewed 2,184 times is indicative of the public’s interest in learning more about the specifics of legislation that will affect them. Using state legislative data from Sunlight’s Open States Project, the site lets state-focused activists track updates to the bill, read aggregated news and blogger updates, and contact their state representatives.

To illustrate how OpenGovernment.org provides an interactive bill tracking experience, let’s take a look at an on-going bill. SB 22 , another Wisconsin bill proposes the creation of a Charter School Authorizing Board that provides additional charter school authorizers while eliminating the limit on the number of pupils who may attend virtual charter schools. Education bloggers interested in seeing any actions taken on the bill, can view the number of votes on it since it was introduced in February this year to its current status. You can also check out their free and open-source Miro Community for videos on various branches of state legislature to embed in your blog post.

For political bloggers and issue-based organizations, OpenGovernment.org offers a great way to stay current and updated on a given piece of legislation. If you’re a developer and interested in adding data to the site for the benefit of the public, check out OpenStates.org to learn more about what’s underneath the hood of OpenGovernment.org.

Perks, anyone?

And if you are still wondering why or how you should get involved, why not take a look at the perks of joining the OpenGovernment.org platform:

Badges: Still looking for cooler ways to be involved? How about you check out OpenGovernment.org’s state badges  promoting your use of open data with easy-to-embed code that you can use on either your news site or blog.

Email list: You can also sign up to keep up-to-date with developments this resource as they roll out to all 50 U.S. state legislatures and more than a dozen major cities.

Open Government Google group: If you prefer keeping the conversation going in the developers forum, you can join the Open Government Google group

This is the first of a weekly series on OpenGovernment.org and how you can use it to make state legislatures more interactive. Next week, we will take a look at members of state legislatures and how you can contact them.

Yesterday we were tweeting (follow us) the Influence Explorer profiles of members of the Wisconsin State Senate. With so much news focused on the state's upper chamber it's important to get available data out on who is contributing to these 33 lawmakers. Below you'll find a chart linking to all the available Influence Explorer profiles of the state senators. (Profiles for some of those elected in the 2010 election were not readily available.)

Wisconsin like the federal government and every other state has lobbyists who contact lawmakers about legislation.  However, Wisconsin has a different way of having those lobbyists report their activities.

When a lobbyists makes first contact regarding a piece of legislation or rule they have 15 days (pdf) to report that contact through a form on the state's Government Accountability Board’s Web site. This form is then verified and posted online in real time.  Just the first contact is reported this way, lobbyists fill out more detailed reports about the rest of their interactions with lawmakers every 6 months.

Even though this is not nearly what we would like to see in terms of real time lobbying reporting it is a great first step.  Wisconsin demonstrates that lobbying disclosure of contacts with lawmakers can be processed and posted online in real time.  If lobbyists are already conditioned to report first contacts online relatively quickly then how much harder could it be for them to do it more frequently and with all contacts not just the first one.  It would be interesting to see if Wisconsin can actually be pushed to shorten the 15 day grace period and have lobbyists report the rest of their interactions more frequently then 6 months.

Every week I climb into the depths of the local political blogosphere to find the Sunlight. I use this series to highlight local blogs that do a great job of covering local, state, and congressional political news.  This week I have highlights from Wisconsin, Illinois, Idaho, Georgia and Hawaii.

In Wisconsin, the Critical Badger, has an interesting post about the current state of journalism and the future of Web 2.0.   The post is interesting because it talks about the important role of trained journalists to the blogosphere and that they can't be replaced.   Another problem is that the decrease in newspapers causes large parts of  public life to go unmonitored, which can make elected official less accountable in their actions.  The post also looks at the sustainability problems of political blogging.  Definitely read it, as well as all the great research the author sites.  How do we create a sustainable system that will compensate skilled journalists, as well as, the hard work bloggers put into keeping track of their communities and disseminating information.

In Illinois, Prairie State Blue points to a new county Web site that shows employees salaries and expressing support of the Clout Wiki started in Chicago that connects officials and the influence they have.  This is exactly why the work that LittleSis.org is doing is so important.  Creating comprehensive maps of influence can help paint better pictures of what is going on.

New West Boise has a post on how you can't look at government officials emails with the state's FOI laws.  The article goes on to say that there is very little in terms of email retention policies at the state level.  Given how email is used in this day and age it would be extremely valuable for states to start having email retention policies, as well as, making sure emails are available via Freedom of Information.

In Georgia, Peach Pundit has a post comparing Ethics Code and points out that there is little teeth is the code because it doesn't require lawmakers to be removed from office if they violate it.  There needs to be clear consequences when lawmakers violate ethics rules.  This is one of the first steps to clearing up some of the corruption that happens.

ILind.net has a follow up to Lt. Governor Duke Aiona's out of state fundraisers.  Apparently the video of the fundraiser was deleted from Youtube.  Was this a response to the criticism?

Cross posted from Open Records Blog

In the case of Lautenschlager v. Gunderson, a Wisconsin appeals court has dismissed an appeal by Peg Lautenschlager of a lower court ruling. The lower court said that under Wisconsin’s sunshine laws, legislators are allowed to share drafts of legislation with lobbyists, while still being able to withhold drafts from the public.

The appeals court dismissal does not speak to the underlying merits of the lower court ruling. Instead, it dismisses the appeal because it was brought by Lautenschlager as a private citizen, when the original lawsuit was filed by the Wisconsin attorney general’s office during her tenure as head of that office. She no longer holds the office, and the current occupant of the office elected not to appeal the lower court ruling.

Thus, the lower court ruling stands. One interesting aspect of it is the claim by the judge that Wisconsin courts should not interfere with how state legislators draft legislation because that’s a core legislative function. This is a separation of powers argument.

Apparently in Wisconsin the separation of powers guarantees lobbyists access to draft legislation but keeps the public away.  It's great to know that PublicMarkUp, a transparency bill drafted to be open to everyone, is illegal in Wisconsin.  I pretty sure this is not what our founders had in mind when they wrote about checks and balances.