In his spare time (no doubt while watching nonstop basketball this ?weekend), our Creative Director came up with a way to visualize the estimated net worth of the top 16 wealthiest members of Congress. |
Super Insider Lobbyists
I'm doing some catch up blogging now that I've had a chance to recuperate from Sunshine Week.
Last Thursday, Congressional Quarterly reported that 18 members of Congress had registered lobbyists serving as treasurer of their re-election campaign or their leadership PACs during 2007. Despite the passage of S.1 Honest Leadership and Open Government Act of 2007 (HLOGA), last year’s overhaul of lobbying regulations, “those in the business of seeking favors and those in a position to grant favors can be intertwined in such ways without running afoul of lobbying or ethics laws or congressional rules,” CQ write. And if that isn’t enough to raise your eyebrows, CQ says that lawmakers also asked for earmarks for the clients of their lobbyist-treasurers. (We’re trying to dig up a list of those.)
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Video of Lessig’s Change Congress Launch
As promised, here's video of Lessig's Sunshine Week lecture, sponsored by Sunlight and Omidyar Network:
Official Footage from National Press Club:
Sunlight Footage:
Audio from the Change Congress lecture (mp3, 34mb)
Mr. Lessig Comes to Washington
Lawrence Lessig, Stanford University law professor and world-renowned expert in intellectual property, is announcing that he's going to invest a significant amount of his time and energy confronting the pervasive and corruptive influence of money in our democracy. You may have heard of the recent Draft Lessig movement that almost convinced him to run for Congress. He ultimately decided not to make the run, but he's not retreating from the fight.
Today, at a lecture here in Washington, sponsored by Sunlight and Omidyar Network, he's launching the ChangeCongress project where he'll focus his academic interests on the issue of the systemic corruption of American democracy. Lessig will outline his hopes for ChangeCongress and how it will help citizens reclaim their democracy from the culture of corruption.
Lessig will give his lecture at 1:30 p.m. (Eastern Time) today at the National Press Club. We are very proud that Lessig recently joined Sunlight's advisory board, where he's helping us stay on the vanguard of using technology to promote a transparent and open government. If you can't make it to the lecture you can watch the Web cast.
Continue readingTwo Events for Open Government Fans
We're continuing the Sunshine Week festivities with two events dedicated to promoting a more open government. We invite you to join us, and for those of you who can't make it to Washington, DC, we encourage you to watch the webcasts of the events.
Today at 1pm EDT, in conjunction with Open the Government, Greg Elin of Sunlight Labs will moderate a panel to demonstrate new ways nonprofits have made government data open and useful to the public.
NetSquared.org’s Mashup Challenge
Our friends at NetSquared.org understand as well as anyone the tremendous potential the Web holds for non-profits and NGO's working for social change. They help these groups build strategic capacity, knowledge and skills through online tools, greatly enhancing their effectiveness and impact.
And voting has begun for NetSquared.org's Mashup Challenge to decide which projects will go on to the 3rd Annual NetSquared Conference (N2Y3), which is to take place May 27 - 28 in San Jose, Calif. You may remember that our grantee MapLight.org was a winner last year.
The community will select the 20 mashups that will go to the conference on March 24. At the conference, NetSquared will ask the 20 selected project teams to present their mashups and attendees will vote to select the top three. They will receive a share of $100,000 in prize money.Here's the link to this year's candidate projects.
Continue readingMaybe We Need Some New Ideas for Earmark Reform?
Here's something that hasn't gotten much attention that should. Late last week, OMB Watch released a valuable background brief on earmarks that gives a good overview of the earmarking process.
Dana Chasin says that the real issue for earmarks is the lack of transparency in the process that has led to corruption. The most effective earmark reforms, Dana writes, would be timely disclosure, revealing to the public what earmarks are being proposed by what lawmakers. He makes a strong case that an outright ban on earmarks won't reduce federal spending...and that really shouldn't be the real focus since earmarked funds are a tiny fraction of the federal budget.
We at the Sunlight Foundation agree that transparency is the needed reform. The Honest Leadership and Government Act of 2007 made some important reforms by providing some of the needed transparency, particularly for the House, but there is so much more that needs to be done.
This document from OMB Watch provides some very useful guidance a set of reforms that could be achievable first steps and that might actually provide some transparency and accountability. Those are good initial goals and they might just prove sufficient.
Continue readingThis Explains It!
From the Wall Street Journal:
What is it about a Web site that might make it literally irresistible? Clues are offered by research conducted by Irving Biederman, a neuroscientist at the University of Southern California, who is interested in the evolutionary and biological basis of the human need for information.......coming across what Dr. Biederman calls new and richly interpretable information triggers a chemical reaction that makes us feel good, which in turn causes us to seek out even more of it. The reverse is true as well: We want to avoid not getting those hits because, for one, we are so averse to boredom.
It is something we seem hard-wired to do, says Dr. Biederman. When you find new information, you get an opioid hit, and we are junkies for those. You might call us 'infovores.' "
Now we know!
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Citizen Scrutiny is the Bugfix
That's what Micah Sifry, Sunlight's senior strategic consultant and executive editor of the Personal Democracy Forum says today, about an E-Tech on a panel on "civic hacking" -- online activists taking government data in its raw and user-unfriendly state, and making it accessible and helpful to citizens.
The panel discussed a number of British sites launched by our colleagues at mySociety.org as well as the hacking of the UN at UNDemocracy.com, where you can now get easy access to the transcripts of the U.N. General Assembly and the Security Council in structured formats, information that was previously very hard to get your hands on. Neat stuff.
"When an institution is broken," Micah writes, "more scrutiny can only help fix it."
Yup.
Continue readingSunshine Week
It's Sunshine Week here in DC and, well, the sun is shining which is an auspicious beginning. This is a hugely important national initiative launched six years ago about the importance of open government and freedom of information. How important? According to a Scripps Howard News Service and Ohio University survey released today just 4% of the surveyed Americans believe the federal government is very open -- and 44% believe it is very secretive.
Participants in Sunshine Week activities which are held throughout the country include print, broadcast and online news media, civic groups, libraries, non-profits, schools and others interested in the public's right to know. Here in D.C. there are two panels on Wednesday at the National Press Club plus a lecture by Professor Lawrence Lessig that Sunlight and Omidyar Network are sponsoring on Thursday. More details tomorrow on both of these.
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