Sunlight’s International Fellow presents an up-for-grabs contracts monitoring platform and year-one takeaways. In late 2011, the government in the small country of Slovakia took a bold policy step mandating almost all public contracts and invoices be published online. A reaction to series of scandals this was done in hopes of bringing unprecedented levels of transparency and accountability (read more here). However, the official portal government launched in early 2012 was half-baked, missing full-text search, documents preview or space for comments. While the policy produced more data (“transparency,” if you will), it left accountability untouched.
Continue readingFinancial public information slow in coming
Six months old today, the Dodd-Frank Wall Street Reform and Consumer Protection Act provided vast new powers for federal regulators... View Article
Continue readingTools for Transparency: Google Fusion Tables
Just look at any one of Sunlight’s projects and you’ll realize that it takes a mountain of data to help... View Article
Continue readingWhy everyone should know what makes a good data set; it’s not as hard as you think
In many offices, when technology questions arise, the answer is to reflexively trust the technologists. These are often the folks... View Article
Continue readingHearing on Contractor Database Transparency
If you’ve ever tried to research federal contracts you’ll find that the databases used to house those contracts online are... View Article
Continue readingA Mandated Database: 16 Years Late
Public Citizen reports that a federal database will soon go online that will give car buyers information about individual cars... View Article
Continue readingPolitical Web Innovations
The political Web continues to grow as new databases are established every week regularly using new technologies to present important information. I came across three new Web sites, one government and two from nonprofits, today and figured I'd pass them along. The first is the Government Printing Office's online guide to members of Congress. The GPO's online guide allows users to search members of Congress by a number of categories, including name, hometown, terms served, and more. The database is fairly rudimentary but it does allow someone to do quick searches for members from a particular state or see how many members have served for 5 terms. This is good step for GPO as it shows that they looking towards using the Web to project information; all they need is to add more search categories and more information for the member profiles. More links to more information makes the data more useful.
FedSpending.org’s Offspring
Earlier this month,
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