2Day in #OpenGov 11/29/2011

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Policy Fellow Matt Rumsey wrote this post.

Here is Tuesday’s take on transparency-related news items, congressional committee hearings, transparency-related bills introduced in Congress, and transparency-related events.

News Roundup:

Campaign Finance

  • This week, the House is set to vote on a bill that would end the option of public financing for Presidential campaigns. Public financing began in 1976, but has seen its popularity and participation sag in the past decade. (Washington Post)
  • Politicians are gearing up for the holidays by throwing a variety of seasonally appropriate fundraisers. (National Journal)

Government

  • Apache Hadoop, a piece of open source software, makes large and diverse data-sets easily available for analysis. The software is being utilized by government agencies to make sense of their data. (Federal Computer Week)
International
  • Croatia’s leading transparency advocate, Marko Rakar, made news last weekend by releasing all public procurement data for government spending since July 2009 in an easily searchable format. The data had been available on government websites, but in unusable formats. (techPresident)
  • PdF France, a conference focused on the role of the internet in political campaigns and the disruptive power of open data for local and national governments, is scheduled for next week. (techPresident)
State and Local
  • The Colorado Secretary of State has proposed a major set of changes to state campaign finance rules. Notably, the rules would limit fines for late or incomplete campaign finance reports. (Lobby Comply)
  • 32 PACs and political party groups owe $40,000 worth in fines to the state of Rhode Island. (Lobby Comply)

Relevant committee hearings scheduled for 11/29:

  • None.

Relevant bills introduced:

  • None.
Transparency events scheduled for 11/28-12/2:
  • None.

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