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Remember that Rep. Dennis Cardoza's spokesman wouldn't say why the Merced congressman wasn't attending first lady Michelle Obama's speech to UC Merced's pioneer class?
- Time Magazine - Fulfilling a Campaign Promise: Better Access to Useless Junk
In an effort to make good on his campaign promise to increase government transparency, President Barack Obama's Administration has launched data.gov, a website intended to enhance public access to vast troves of previously inaccessible government information. Sound exciting? It isn't. Conspiracy junkies hoping to tap into secret CIA files or to find out who really killed JFK are out of luck. The data catalog includes just 47 documents—most of which would only appeal to those desperate for information on migratory bird patterns or unconsolidated stream sediments. Read "A Brief History of the National Archives.
- Washington Internet Daily - Administration Web Sites, Comments Process, Promise Change
Government is becoming more open in fits and starts, a sampling of activists' opinions shows. The much-anticipated Data.gov and a plan to overhaul the much-derided Regulations.gov are a good start, as is the comments process for open government ideas in general, the activists said. The sites are hardly perfect, they said, saying they don't expect perfection. They do expect some basics, though, and at least one critic thinks the Obama Administration is letting the bells and whistles get ahead of simple ideas like providing information that can be found easily.
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In “The Purloined Letter,” the stolen missive is hidden in plain sight. Edgar Allan Poe lived long before the Internet, but members of Congress have only gained creativity in hiding things that are supposed to be in plain sight.
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Democratic Congressional leaders can legitimately pat themselves on the back for increasing the transparency of the earmarking process — which only raises the question, “Why not make it perfectly clear?” Right now, it’s far from tha
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Sunlight Lab's Director Clay Johnson was a guest on the nationally-syndicated The Kojo Nnamdi Show, a program produced by National Public Radio-affiliated WAMU FM, where he joined a panel discussion on how non-profits and cities like Washington, D.C., are enlisting help from civic-minded developers to help make government data more open and usable.
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When he was information technology chief for Washington, D.C., Vivek Kundra delivered huge caches of information to the Web for public use -- from controversial hourly pay rates of city contractors to the daily pickups of road kill. We hope he does the same and more, now that Mr. Kundra is chief information officer for the federal government.
- American Public Media - Data.gov opens for business
The Obama administration has launched Data.gov, a much-anticipated site where citizens can download raw data from federal agencies. The idea is to encourage programmers and others to make new applications and mashups based on information from such agencies as the National Weather Service, the Census Bureau, the U.S. Geological Survey and the National Center for Health Statistics.
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The Obama administration promised more transparency and collaboration when it took office exactly four months ago. And yesterday, it started to show what it means.
- Roll Call - Senate Earmark Disclosure Varies Widely
Most Senators appear to be technically complying with the chamber’s earmark disclosure rules, but a lack of uniformity in how earmarks are reported can make it difficult to get an accurate picture of how the practice is being used by different Members.
- Associated Press - House members seek $136.3 billion in road projects
WASHINGTON -- Abiding by a new policy of openness in seeking projects for their home districts, House members have requested $136.3 billion in earmarks in a highway and transit funding bill the House will take up this summer.
- Washington Post - White House Rolls Out Web Site, Initiatives to Boost Transparency
On his first full day in office, President Obama issued his first executive order directing federal officials to come up with ideas for making government information more visible and accessible to the public within 120 days.
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Significant milestones for the Obama administration's transparency initiative today.
- Associated Press - Lawmakers flood House with pet highway projects
There are lots of bridges to cross and roads to travel for lawmakers bent on ending the time-honored practice of funneling money to their home states: at least 6,800 of them.
- CongressDaily - Public Interest Groups Want Transparency In The Spotlight
As OMB, the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy and the General Services Administration prepare to issue recommendations for how agencies can show transparency, public participation and collaboration outlined by President Obama on his first day in office, public interest groups want a chance to weigh in.
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One of the unsung heroes in the nation's capital is Bill Allison of the Sunlight Foundation. Bill is a former investigative reporter and has for the past three years at Sunlight been a leader in the trans-partisan movement for greater transparency and accountability in government.
- Politico - GOP cashes in on The Boss
Bruce Springsteen campaigned aggressively for the past two Democratic presidential candidates, but that didn’t stop Republicans from joining Democrats in cashing in on the Boss’ Monday night concert in Washington.
- WUSA - Using Springsteen To Raise Political Dollars
Popular culture and political expediency met in an everlasting kiss at Washington's Verizon Center Monday night as Members of Congress and their political action committees used a Bruce Springsteen concert to raise money for the everlasting needs of their campaign coffers.
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Sunlight Foundation's Bill Allison explains how lobbyists and PACs cash in on Bruce Springsteen's DC concert with WUSA Channel News 9 :
- Politico - Lawmakers like Barney Frank score campaign cash on their way to work
On a recent Capitol Hill morning, House Financial Services Committee Chairman Barney Frank stopped by a swanky bistro for breakfast — and walked out with another $18,000 or so for his campaign coffers.
- Washington Internet Daily - Washington Internet Daily
The OpentheGovernment.org coalition urged the Senate Rules Committee to hold hearings and vote on a resolution making Congressional Research Service reports publicly available.
- Roll Call - 83 Lawmakers Reveal Transportation Earmark Requests
Of the 321 lawmakers who made requests, just 83 House Members disclosed their transportation earmark requests for the upcoming transportation reauthorization bill, according to a government transparency group.
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The Internet age demands that states and cities have easy-to-use, searchable databases that account for how tax dollars are spent. Yet, as the April 30 Fed Page article "Tracking How Stimulus Dollars Are Tracked" pointed out, this is not how information is currently reported. All too often, data that are to be "publicly accessible" are viewable in nothing more than incomprehensible spreadsheets posted on Web sites.
- Santa Fe Reporter - Crocodile Tears
One major difference between conventional journalism and the blogosphere, according to journalism scholar Roy Peter Clark, is the first has a well-established tradition of “finding out, sorting out and checking out,” while the latter is still a chaotic laboratory of ethical experimentation.
- The Hill - Chamber adds voice against White House lobbying rules
The U.S. Chamber of Commerce has weighed in with the White House against lobbying restrictions placed on the stimulus package, arguing the rules could limit its members’ First Amendment rights.
- Washington Times - Forecast cloudy for transparency
It's an open secret on Capitol Hill that most laws get passed without being read in full by lawmakers.
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It's a shame the program to track federal stimulus funds won't be active until October – and not fully online even then.
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The Congressional Research Service investigates important issues and produces detailed, well-written reports that are available to members of Congress but not the general public. A resolution has been introduced in the Senate to make these reports freely available online. It would be an important step forward for government openness, and it would narrow the information gap between Washington insiders and ordinary Americans.
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When it comes to government spending, waste and graft are always a risk. So it was laudable of President Barack Obama to seek full transparency in how the $787 billion stimulus package was to be spent -- with the details center stage for all to see.
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Ellen Miller was interviewed on CNN's Special Investigations Unit to discuss the stimulus plan and tracking the money.
- Mother Jones - Meet K Street's Worst Nightmare
It's mid-March, and the marble-walled hallway of the Dirksen Senate Office Building is scattered with lobbyists and congressional aides who are gathered in huddles of two and three, chatting in hushed tones. Meetings like this are as much a fixture of Capitol Hill as the famous bean soup in the Senate dining room, but there is something decidedly peculiar going on today. One of the lobbyists is doing the unthinkable. She's lobbying for more oversight and regulation of lobbying, and she's throwing around the T-word ("transparency") with abandon.
- Information Week - Microsoft Offers Cloud-Based Public Data Hosting With Azure
As the American public and the Obama administration push the government to post more public data online, federal agencies are struggling with how to do so, and how to make that data available in a form that's usable to the public and to third-party developers who want to use the data for their own Web applications and services.
- Politico - Senate picks up the slack on data
The stodgy Senate is finally ready to embrace technology and put roll call votes in an easy-to-use format for tech geeks.
- USA Today - Details thin on stimulus contracts
Although President Obama has vowed that citizens will be able to track "every dime" of the $787 billion stimulus bill, a government website dedicated to the spending won't have details on contracts and grants until October and may not be complete until next spring — halfway through the program, administration officials said.
- Roll Call - Hanging Tough on Lobby Restrictions
The White House’s top ethics cop said on Tuesday that “there is a process” in place for enforcing the new lobbying rules on the books since President Barack Obama was sworn in on Jan. 20.
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Sometimes it seems that encouraging greater transparency in government is the only issue that still attracts bipartisan efforts. Be that as it may, Sen. Jim DeMint, R-SC, and Sen. Dick Durbin, D-IL, deserve praise for persuading the world’s most exclusive debating society that it should post its voting record on the Internet using the most advanced technology possible. In this case, that means posting Senate vote data using what is known among Internet programmers and entrepreneurs as “XML” programming language. Briefly put, as the Sunlight Foundation’s John Wonderlich explains, XML-based posting “encourages advanced processing and analysis, making votes legible to both humans and computers, and giving us a new view on how Senators vote.” It is no exaggeration to say XML is the key element in making possible Web 2.0, with its marvelous inter-activity among multiple users and sophisticated visualization applications that draw from multiple web sites and databases.
- Politico - Stimulus memo has lobbyists on edge
The White House doesn’t want lobbyists bugging it about economic stimulus funding decisions, and it seems to be getting its way.
- New York Times - Group Seeks Public Access to Congressional Research
American taxpayers spend more than $100 million a year supporting the work of the Congressional Research Service, a little-known but highly regarded division of the Library of Congress.
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Tom Lee appeared on C-SPAN's "Washington Journal" and took questions about Recovery.gov and Sunlight's work.
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When the question is whether to make information public or hide it, the federal government's default button has long been stuck on concealment.
- Politico - Group wants Senate to get 'techy'
A bipartisan group of seven senators would like the upper chamber to join the digital age.