Disclaimer: The opinions expressed by the guest blogger and those providing comments are theirs alone and do not reflect the opinions of the Sunlight Foundation or any employee thereof. Sunlight Foundation is not responsible for the accuracy of any of the information within the guest blog.
This OpenGov Voices guest post was written by Alan H. Jones and Roger Zhu. Alan and Roger worked on a financial data visualization project for the town of Arlington, MA. Alan is a Vice-Chairman of Arlington’s Finance Committee in Arlington, MA and has spent the last 12 years helping organizations and individuals make effective use of information technology. You can read more of his work here. Roger is an improvisational engineer, industrial designer and interaction designer. He is a designer with Involution Studios.
See (and interact with) your town's budget: exploring the next generation of accessibility in financial information.
Government budgets can be tough to understand, but now the town of Arlington, Massachusetts is providing the next generation of accessibility in financial information that allows citizens to see, engage and discuss.
See:
The Arlington Visual Budget is an interactive web-based application that holds all the town’s financial budget information from 2008 to 2018. The data was broken down into three sections: revenues, expense and funds. In each section, you can drill down to see each government department’s total spending including percentage of totals compared to last year and what that data means.
On the right side of the data is a treemap (below) with interactive color populated by data in real time. The map below illustrates the impact of a particular revenue or expenditure compared to the whole budget and how that budget has changed over time.
All the data comes directly from Arlington town’s financial office where we used current technology to build a pipeline that converts files created in Microsoft Excel to JSON -- a lightweight data-interchange format used for computation within the site.
Continue readingToday in #OpenGov 10/18/2013
National News Senator Ted Cruz (R-TX) is blocking President Obama’s nominee to lead the FCC over political disclosure issues. Cruz... View Article
Continue readingStockman campaign amends filings, questions remain on contributions’ legality
"I did not make the contribution," Thomas Dodd told Sunlight on Oct. 10 when asked about why his mother had disavowed knowledge of a $7,500 contribution made to the campaign of his boss, Rep. Steve Stockman, R-Texas. Though now, the campaign says, he did. Five days after a Sunlight report cited Jane Dodd saying she didn't make the contributions, Stockman's campaign filed an amendment, listing Thomas Dodd, his special assistant, as the donor.
Continue readingWe Have a Winner!
Last week we celebrated our billionth API call by announcing a giveaway, and Tuesday we went ahead and pulled the name of a random API user who had made at least one successful query. I've been emailing with him since, and am please so say that Matt Gabrenya is our winner! You can find his Github profile here, and his business site, Boston TechCollective, here.
Matt used our APIs to power his BillTrack project, which aims to make it easier to run advocacy campaigns on issues like SOPA and the Keystone XL pipeline.
We're delighted that Matt found our APIs useful, and thrilled that thousands of you have as well. We're going to keep making them better, deeper and more powerful; we're counting on all of you to put them to good use.
It’s not just Republican House incumbents who face primary opposition
If the media coverage of shutdown politics is to be believed, House Republicans' fear of 'getting primaried' bya more conservative opponent was the major impediment to moderate GOP-ers reaching a bargain with Democrats on healthcare and federal spending. However, a survey of competitive House primaries -- compiled using Sunlight's Realtime FEC tracker -- shows that incumbent Democrats are also subject to serious challenges from partisan opponents.
Continue readingQuién Manda: Who’s the Boss? – Spain Edition (Now with less Tony Danza)
Launched last week by Madrid based nonprofit, Civio, Quién Manda (Who Rules?) takes on the task of monitoring the goings on of Spanish public officials and influential corporate leaders. The platform has been designed to keep an eye on the unmonitored, and rarely recorded interactions that Spanish politicians are having behind closed doors, tinted car windows and somehow frequently right in front of the lens of a camera.
The team at Civio has tasked themselves with tagging photos a la Facebook with as many high profile names as they can. Each individual and corporation that gets tagged receives a profile that collects all tagged photos and displays the power connections that have been identified, along with links to social media accounts and any available biographical information. The system currently has over 100 tagged photographs, identifying over 2500 relationships.
Today in #OpenGov 10/17/2013
National News
- Uber, the 21st century taxi competitor, has focused considerable effort on influencing elected officials and regulators in the various cities where it operates. But, now it's turning its lobbying efforts to the federal government for the first time by signing up with the tech lobbying firm Franklin Square Group. (The Hill)
- When political candidates find themselves with extra cash at the end of a race they have some options. Many candidates who failed to reach their goal refund donations, give money to charity, or shift the funds to other candidates. (Roll Call)
- The DSCC outraised the RSCC in September and appears to have significantly more cash on hand. But, once the Democratic committee's debt is taken into account the two are running neck and neck. (Roll Call)
- Representatives of the Romanian prime minister spent last month meeting with various agencies and other public bodies to identify datasets that are eligible to be published as part of their OGP plan. (EPSIplatform)
- Armenia is also working through its OGP commitment. Civil Society groups in the country have been monitoring implementation of the Armenian National Action Plan and have decided that, while most of the commitments were "formally" met, their implementation has been shaky. (Armenia Now)
- Open corporate data for all! The OpenCorporates corporate network platform allows for visualization of corporate networks around the world, aiming to eventually be the best place to go for this information. (Tech President)
- A FOI battle is brewing between the legislature and executive in Cleveland, Ohio where the mayor is suing a member of the city council for emails and documents. (NFOIC)
- Hawaii's public records act appears to open up a wide range of government information, but the law's fee provisions often result in charges that are too high for citizens and public interest media organizations to afford. (Huffington Post)
Government Shutdown + Arcane Senate Rules = Less Transparency in New Jersey Senate Race
“We told you so,” is so petty, but, well, we told you so. We predicted that disclosure of Senate campaign... View Article
Continue readingBooker camp refused to share campaign filings with press
Cory Booker, the tech-savvy Newark Mayor, claims to support governmental transparency and legislation that would mandate electronic campaign filing in the Senate. Yet, just days before the Oct. 16 general election his campaign withheld important filings from the press.
Continue readingToday in #OpenGov 10/16/2013
National News
- Big fundraising news out of Kentucky. Democratic Challenger Alison Lundergan Grimes outraised Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell during the third quarter. McConnell still has a vast advantage when it comes to cash on hand, but also has a combative primary with a self funded opponent to worry about. (POLITICO)
- The government shutdown has caused the cancellation of many political fundraisers, but it hasn't plugged the flow of hysterical fundraising emails flooding email inboxes everywhere. Both sides of the aisle are using the shutdown in their digital pitches. (Public Integrity)
- Looking for an introduction to data journalism? The European Journalism Centre has a free class for you! Registration is now open for "Doing Journalism with Data: First steps, skills, and tools." (Open Knowledge Blog)
- Recent revelations that a major British drug company avoided more than $1 billion in tax payments are leading to calls for greater transparency around company ownership. (Open Knowledge Blog)
- California's court system operates under its own Rules of Court and some of that document's public records provisions have been interpreted in ways that have citizens, and even some judges, up in arms. (Voice of San Diego)
- Looking for news about government IT issues at a state level? Look no further than this new weekly roundup, launched by statescoop, fedscoop's state level equivalent. (fedscoop)
- Chicago launched a "comprehensive" data dictionary, including information on "every data set held by city agencies and departments, how and if it may be accessed, and in which formats" data is available. The city is hailing it as the first of its kind. (govfresh)
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