Recently, the EPA eRulemaking team released a new version of Regulations.gov, a website that tracks the various stages of the rulemaking processes of hundreds of federal agencies, and collects and publishes comments from the public about this rulemaking. We’ve written about Regulations.gov before, and continue to be impressed with the site’s progress in making the sometimes-daunting intricacies of federal regulations more approachable to members of the general public.
This release brings several new features that further this goal. Styling on many document pages has been significantly improved, making it much easier to read both rule and comment text. The presentation of metadata has also been made cleaner, so researchers can more easily find identifiers that help them connect a particular rule to related documents on other websites, such as FederalRegister.gov or RegInfo.gov. New panes have also been added to help users understand the public participation that has occurred so far in a given rulemaking, and to more easily recognize opportunities for further participation.
Of course, since last year’s release of the Regulations.gov API, Regulations.gov is more than just an informational website; it has also become a data provider that now facilitates a variety of third-party participation and analysis tools, as their Developers page now highlights. One such tool is Sunlight’s recently-released Docket Wrench, which uses Regulations.gov data to explore questions of corporate and public influence in the federal regulatory process. Docket Wrench evolved from two years’ worth of effort exploring the possibilities of analysis on federal regulatory comment data, and we believe the time we’ve spent building it has given us a unique perspective on the avenues of research this data makes available, as well as the opportunities for further growth and improvement in regulatory comment data going forward.
The team behind Regulations.gov deserves enormous credit for the progress they’ve made, but there remains much work to be done to give the public a complete, accessible and useful path into the federal regulatory process.
Continue readingLodging, travel and dining options for TransparencyCamp 2013
Washington, D.C. is a hub for political, nonprofit organization and business activity; it’s also well-loved destination for tourists, not to mention the visitors who come to see friends and family. As a D.C. resident, I know the experience of visiting Washington can be expensive, confusing and exhausting. So, to out-of-town TransparencyCamp 2013 visitors next month, let me give you some of the tips I share with friends and family to make your visit as enjoyable and productive as possible. But double-check the decisions you make; we offer these suggestions without warranty and with the understanding that there are many good ways to visit Washington.
Lodging
Assuming you don’t already have a place to crash, your first decision – after registering for TransparencyCamp and making transportation plans – is finding a place to stay. TCamp will take place at the Marvin Center on the campus of the George Washington University at 21st and H streets NW. View Larger Map There are quite a number of nearby hotels, including the Best Western Georgetown and the Melrose Georgetown. Check out Washington.org for more hotel recommendations, often with special rates, from the District's convention and visitors bureau. Continue readingFilming OpenGov Champions: Sandra Moscoso, Washington, DC
I met Sandra Moscoso at TransparencyCamp last year and was immediately impressed by her work opening up D.C. public school... View Article
Continue reading2Day in #OpenGov 4/9/2013
NEWS ROUNDUP:
- The Indian government sponsored its first hackathon over the weekend. more than 1,900 participants located at 10 education institutions across the country hacked on apps and infographics related to India's latest 5 year-plan. (Tech President)
- Meanwhile, the White House is hosting its second hackathon on Jun 1. They've set the lofty goal of creating "full, production-ready applications and visual tools," that can be used on the We The People petition system. (Federal Computer Week)
- Companies are likely to pursue a variety of strategies as they fight to save their favorite credits during the looming fight over tax reform. A number of them have hit on the same idea: find a path to the power. To this end, a diverse set of firms has signed up lobbyists with strong ties to Senate Finance Chair Max Baucus. (New York Times)
- Yvette Fontenot, one of the Obama administration's top health care officials, is joining Democratic lobbying shop Avenue Solutions. She previously served stints at HHS and in the White House Office of Health Reform, where she helped to implement Obamacare. (The Hill)
- On the other side of the aisle, former GOP staff director and general counsel for the House Administration Committee Phil Kiko is joining the Smith-Free group. The firm represents companies like Bank of America, MasterCard, and Sony Pictures. (The Hill)
- By the end of April all five remaining FEC commissioners will be serving expired terms. The FEC has an increasingly large workload and has often failed to enforce the most basic rules or agree to pursue the most obvious violations. (Roll Call)
- Ready for Hillary PAC is gaining some momentum in its quest to support Hillary Clinton's not yet existent 2016 White House bid. Last week James Carville wrote an email supporting the group's efforts and now Harold Ickes, a major Clinton fundraiser and strategist, as signed on to advise the PAC and help them raise money. (Washington Post)
See you at the BarCamp NewsInnovation!
On April 27, all roads will lead to Philly for the fifth annual BarCamp NewsInnovation (BCNI) and its third annual News hackathon. BCNI (which is part of Philly Tech Week) is a one-day national unconference on journalism innovation and the future of news as explored by practitioners and others in the same field. Sunlight is one of the sponsors for the event.
BCNI is organized by the good folks over at Technically Media (the company behind Technically philly) and Temple University Department of Journalism. It will bring together designers, developers like myself and an interesting mix of programmers and students.
What: BarCamp NewsInnovation
When: Saturday April 27
Where: Temple University Philadelphia, 2020 N 13th St, Philadelphia, PA 19122
Continue reading2Day in #OpenGov 4/8/2013
NEWS ROUNDUP:
- Ron Paul, who recently retired from Congress after mounting an unsuccessful bid for the GOP nomination last year, still has some Congressional campaign cash floating around. He's spending some of that money on other projects that he's started. Last month his campaign donated $150,000 to the Foundation for Rational Economics and Education. The group that he founded in 1976 is currently run by his wife. (Public Integrity)
- A new GAO report doesn't shed much light on the political intelligence industry. The report found that political intelligence is hard to define and complicated to regulate. The GAO might be hesitant to take a stand on the industry, but Sen. Chuck Grassley (R-IA) and Rep. Louise Slaughter (D-NY) are planning to introduce legislation that would institute disclosure requirements. (Federal Computer Week)
- According to a new report by the Housing and Urban Development department's IG, almost $700 million in federal aid for those hit by Hurricanes Katrina and Rita is unaccounted for. Most of the discrepancies stem from failure by more than 24,000 recipients to comply with the aid terms or provide sufficient documentation. (Government Executive)
- The Federal Reserve emerged from the primordial soup of federal law the same year that Justice Louis Brandeis argued for the cleansing properties of Sunlight. A century later, the central bank is taking small, but important, steps towards transparency. (Harvard Ethics Blog)
- Outside money is starting to heat up the New York Mayor's race. A group of labor unions and Democratic activists dropped $250,000 for a three week run of ads attacking city council Speaker Christine Quinn, the races presumed front runner. (New York Times)
- Last week President Obama unveiled a $100 million initiative to map the human brain, an initiative inspired in part by the Human Genome Project. It is yet to be known if the project will provide for open access. (Open Knowledge Blog)
Research Tool Kit: Gun Laws, Lobbying and Influence in the United States
With the U.S. Senate expected to take up gun legislation next week and recent passing of gun laws in Connecticut, Colorado and Maryland, we put together a tool kit on the issues around gun rights and gun control. For more information, you can follow the money, influence and news on the issue of gun control and gun rights in the U.S. at our resource page. Keep reading for information about state legislation, swing votes in the Senate, political spending by gun rights and gun control groups, details on how they lobby Congress and where they are airing TV issue ads.
Continue readingPeople’s splurge: Outside spending in Bay State Senate race tops $1 million
Despite candidates' signatures on the so-called "People's Pledge" to keep outside big money groups out of a special Massachusetts Senate election, the Democratic primary has attracted nearly $1.3 million in outside spending so far.
Continue readingOpenGov Voices: The Open Data Ecosystem Thrives in Philadelphia
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.
Pam Selle is a News Apps Developer and Community Evangelist for AxisPhilly, a nonprofit investigative news organization that prioritizes work in the public interest. She is a resident of Philadelphia, speaks at national and regional technical events, and blogs at thewebivore.com. Follow her at @pamasaur.
Philadelphia is known as a leader in the open government movement – the city lays claim to the second Chief Data Officer in the country (Sunlight OpenGov Champion Mark Headd), is a two-time Code for America host city, is home to an active Code for America Brigade and has social good hackathons at least every month, sometimes every week. There’s a strong interest in creating applications to inform and empower citizens with apps such as Lobbying.ph, PhillySNAP and Baldwin using public data for their respective purposes.
In February, the city released the AVI calculator, an online app that helps residents determine real estate taxes under a new policy that went into effect. The city also made the data powering the calculator available as an API. This allowed AxisPhilly, an independent, nonprofit news organization, use the AVI calculator API and transform it from just informational to a discussion tool.
The website appsforphilly.org, which lists open source projects in Philadelphia, lists these two projects side by side. So how did a city government and a news organization end up next to each other on this list of open source projects? What’s the story behind Philadelphia making a web app and releasing the data to enable tools like AxisPhilly’s? For one, both projects are open source and allow for code-sharing. You can access the code for both the City of Philadelphia’s AVI project and AxisPhilly’s map project template on GitHub. AxisPhilly’s project also leverages the property parcels open data set.
2Day in #OpenGov 4/5/2013
NEWS ROUNDUP:
- Outfits like Ushahidi spent years building and sharing tools to help track election issues in advance of recent presidential elections in Kenya, hoping that they could help stem the violence that came along with the country's last election in 2007. While they can't take all the credit for relatively peaceful polls this year, their efforts were part of broader initiatives that seem to have worked. (Tech President)
- The FBI has taken advantage of rules in the PATRIOT act that allow them to send out "national security letters" that come along with gag orders, preventing their recipients from even talking about the existence of the letters. Recently, several tech companies have successfully pushed back about this closed process. First, the Electronic Frontier Foundation successfully sued, representing an unnamed telecom company, and now Google is taking on the practice. (Ars Technica)
- The IRS mistakenly revealed the names of a number of donors to the Republican Governors Association Public Policy Committee, a "nonprofit" that is supposed to be able to hide its donor list from public view. (Public Integrity)
- The House Judiciary Committee is sending Richard Hertling, its former chief counsel and staff director, through the revolving door. Hertling, who has also worked in the Senate and at the Justice department during the Bush administration, is joining Covington & Burling government affairs team. (The Hill)
- While the National Rifle Association gets most of the press and popular attention another group, Gun Owners of America, is emerging as a major force in opposition to new gun control legislation that is winding its way through the Senate. (New York Times)
- When the U.S Chamber of Commerce and Labor Unions came to agreement on visas for low-skilled workers the lane seemed open for a slam dunk for this immigration reform legislation. But, some business groups are unhappy with the deal and, led by the construction industry, appear poised to launch a lobbying press to block the deal.(POLITICO)
- Beards are booming among groups as diverse as urban hipsters and mountain men, but facial hair has been on a long decline in America's halls of power. Now there's a PAC aiming to reverse that trend. The Bearded Entrepreneurs for the Advancement of Responsible Democracy (BEARD) PAC recently registered with the FEC. Happy Friday and enjoy the accompanying slideshow! (National Journal)
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