For anyone paying attention to the hypocrisy surrounding the so-called “people’s pledge” in the Massachusetts Senate race, a new paper offers some good evidence of why you should be skeptical of these kinds of pledges in general. The paper, “Campaign Contributions from Corporate Executives in Lieu of Political Action Committees” is by Brian Keller Richter and Timothy Werner, both assistant professors of Business, Government, and Society at the University of Texas at Austin, finds that when candidates pledge to stop accepting money from political action committees (PACs), corporate CEOs step up their personal contributions.
Continue readingAnnouncing the Global Open Data Initiative
Sunlight is excited today to announce, with a few of our friends and allies, the Global Open Data Initiative, dedicated... View Article
Continue readingSenators who write farm bill fine print reap agribusiness campaign cash
As senators cast their votes today on the 1,139-page, $955 billion farm bill, the unseen backdrop is the more than $26 million in campaign cash that agribusiness has pumped into their political campaigns. All but two members of the current Senate have received money from these donors who represent every possible agriculture concern, from sugar growers to dairy farmers to chemical manufacturers and more.
It’s an axiom of agriculture politics that agribusiness interests concentrate their generosity on members of key committees who write and fund the farm bill. As the graphic below shows, the current Senate is no ...
Continue readingAnti-Keystone group spends big on DC TV ads
A coalition of environmental groups hit the Washington airwaves during the Sunday morning talk shows with ads pressuring Secretary of State John Kerry to oppose the Keystone XL pipeline, which is under review at his agency.
The All Risk, No Reward Coalition spent a total of $28,000 to run a 30-second ad on Fox News Sunday and CBS's "Face The Nation" on Washington TV stations, documents in Political Ad Sleuth show. It follows two other TV ads the group ran in April in Nebraska and D.C. TV markets. The latest ad urges the Kerry to heed the ...
Continue readingThe future of civic software reuse?
On Thursday June 6th at the Personal Democracy Forum (an annual conference exploring technology’s influence on politics and government), New York City’s Comptroller John Liu announced that the code behind Checkbook NYC 2.0, the city's transparency spending web portal, had been open-sourced and made available for forking on Checkbook NYC 2.0's github page. This is significant because (1) Checkbook 2.0 is enormous: it makes over $70 billion dollars in New York City spending available online in a timely, structured, and human-readable form, demonstrating that best practices in data disclosure can be followed even at scale; (2) it marks a shift to proactive civic application-sharing, by the way of the municipality’s desire to share the resources they’ve developed with other local (and even state) governments and NYC’s partnership with common municipal software vendors in this endeavor; and (3) it raises questions about what’s next for government transparency tools, civic software partnerships, and reuse.
Continue reading2Day in #OpenGov 6/10/2013
- Edward Snowden's decision to out himself as the NSA leaker caused scrutiny of the sprawling network of government contractors. (POLITICO)
- Government and industry officials clarified the scope of PRISM over the weekend: the government cannot access data directly from companies' servers but can send classified queries and receive the requested data remotely. (Washington Post)
- When the stocks of private health insurers soared weeks in advance of the official Medicare decision, it turned a light on the practice of sharing 'political intelligence' between government and industry.Email records indicate that hundreds of HHS employees knew of the decision two weeks before it was publicly announced. (Washington Post)
- Elijah Cummings, the ranking Democrat on the committee investigating the IRS, released the interview transcript of the self-described conservative IRS manager who ordered increased scrutiny of conservative groups. Cummings blasted Chairman Issa's handling of the investigation and asserted that the case was effectively concluded. (Yahoo)
- A newly released Pew report shows that while confidence in nonprofit journalism is strong, the majority of nonprofit news organizations have tenuous financial stability. (Knight Foundation)
Get Funded with Sunlight’s New OpenGov Grants
We’re happy to announce our new OpenGov Grants program to help you fulfill your vision of making government more transparent and accountable.
We know how challenging fundraising can be. You start an innovative project using technology to make government more open and accessible and halfway through -- you run out of money. At Sunlight, we’ve been there, and that's why we want to help you out. (Don't be misled by our name -- we’re not a foundation with an endowment, but rather a nonprofit that competes for grants just like any other 501 c3 charitable organization.) Indeed, we know how challenging fundraising can be.
With the financial support of Google.org, our new OpenGov Grants program will offer one-time grants in the range of $5,000 to $10,000 to help you achieve your vision of opening up government through creative innovations. OpenGov Grants can support anything from making a cool app to help residents understand how local government works, to creating an open source site to navigate state or local spending data to extending the capabilities of one of Sunlight’s own websites or apps. We’ll give priority to projects that develop open source software or data. (For details on what we will and won’t fund, please visit our FAQ.) Get inspired to apply by watching our video. Continue readingOpenGov Voices: How TurboVote is Shaping the Future of Voting
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.
Kathryn Peters is the co-founder of TurboVote -- a nonpartisan nonprofit based in New York, which makes the voting process easier through a sign up system that helps users track rules and deadlines about voting -- to ensure that all citizens are included in the democratic process. You can reach her at @kathrynepeters.
Voting is one of the most fundamental interactions between citizens and our government. And it's a system whose 19th-century pedigree is showing badly. If for previous generations, gathering on Tuesday at central locations offered convenience and community, our busy schedules and long commutes have made getting to the polls one more obstacle to democratic participation.
In 2010, my friend Seth Flaxman and I set out to create an electoral system that would fit the way WE live: TurboVote, a new user interface for voting, as it were, complete with push notifications about election deadlines and a Netflix-worthy delivery system for all that paperwork, so we didn't have to buy envelopes or track down stamps just to stay engaged.
Sunlight offered us a seed grant to run a pilot at Boston University, which helped us catch the attention of Google, earn funding from the Knight Foundation, and build partnerships at schools from the University of Florida to Hobart and William Smith Colleges, until by the end of 2012, we'd reached nearly 200,000 voters. Going forward, we want to offer every voter an easier, streamlined voting experience. In order to do this, we'll need to work directly with the 8,000+ local election administrators who handle the voting process across the U.S. So we set out to learn more about our new favorite people. Service designers from Reboot shadowed elections offices from Brattleboro, VT, to Austin, TX, with stops in Denver, CO, Columbia, MO, Louisville, KY and Stuart, FL along the way. The research team got to know the people behind the scenes of American democracy, their processes and technologies, and got hands-on with e-poll books and barcode scanners as we learned the tools of the trade.
2Day in #OpenGov 6/7/2013
by Carrie Tian, policy intern NEWS: Though our roundups generally reflect the diversity of topics in open government, today’s roundup... View Article
Continue readingRecommendations for Stronger Zoning Data
Releasing zoning data is an important first step to developing a better public understanding about this local government process that impacts the most physical elements of neighborhoods. Having better standards for releasing this information could lead to even better understanding of zoning and its impacts, encouraging more reuse and analysis of the data in apps, news stories and beyond.
While zoning is an especially complex dataset because of its its many variables from city to city, among other reasons, there are a few steps cities could take to improve the quality of this data and its ability to be reused and analyzed. Many of these ideas can be found in our Open Data Policy Guidelines.
1. Mandate timeliness -- Releasing zoning data in a timely manner, and updating it when changes are made, gives people a chance to be aware of and react to changes that might impact them.
2. Use open formats -- Open, structured data helps encourage reuse and analysis, and for zoning data releasing several different kinds of open structured data might be helpful for different levels of users. CSV or XML files are formats that can be used for spreadsheets with zoning information. File formats specific to geospatial software, from shapefiles to GeoJSON, can help encourage the development of more advanced apps and mapping of zoning data.
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