Today marks the one-year anniversary of the Open Government Directive, and Sunlight issued the following statement. Please also join us... View Article
Continue readingStream Congress: An HTML5 App in the Google Chrome Web Store
Earlier today, Google announced their Chrome Web Store. For its launch, Sunlight is thrilled to announce a new HTML5 app called Stream Congress. Stream Congress gives you a quick look into what exactly your members of Congress are up to. Resembling a lifestream (but for Congress), the app takes in data points from various sources and combines them into a clean, real-time interface. Consider the app to be in a Developer Preview for now: we're going to launch it in earnest when the new Congress begins in January. Your feedback is appreciated.
Today, I wanted to share with the Sunlight developer community the process behind building this HTML5 app. It really does feel like we're entering a new era of the Web, and it's important for the civic hacking community to lead the way.
Continue readingFirms severing ties with Wikileaks have multiple interests before feds
Make Lobbying for Foreign Interests More Transparent
Sunlight will be making a big push in the 112th Congress for improvements to lobbying disclosure. As part of that effort, we will also call for amendments to the Foreign Agents Registration Act, the law that requires anyone who lobbies the U.S. government on behalf of a foreign interest to register and report his or her activities with the Justice Department. FARA requires fairly detailed information from lobbyists, including the names of the government employees or Members of Congress contacted and the dates of each contact. (This fundamental information is not required by the Lobbyist Disclosure Act and is a reporting loophole Sunlight aims to close.) Unfortunately, many details regarding the work of foreign agents is hidden from public view because it is buried in unsearchable PDF documents. Sunlight and ProPublica have teamed up to put some of the FARA data in electronic form, but full transparency demands that FARA forms be electronically filed and all data reported made publicly available in searchable, sortable, downloadable databases.
Continue readingIndependent ethics office likely to survive
The Washington Post reports that the Office of Congressional Ethics (OCE), the only independent ethics body in Congress, is likely... View Article
Continue readingHow accurate are lobbying figures?
As part of our Statelight project, we’re reaching out to open government and open data activists around the country to contribute to (and expand!) the #opengov dialogue. Today, we welcome Diana Lopez to give some insight into the complications of lobbying reform. Lopez is the Senior Editor of Government Lobbying at Sunshine Review. She focuses on government lobbying disclosure and moderates #FOIAchat, a weekly Freedom of Information Act Twitter chat held every Friday at 2PM EST.
- make more than one contact,
- spend more than 20 percent of their time lobbying
- have more than $11,500 in expenses, or
- have $3,000 in income from lobbying per quarter.
Better Draw a District – Doodle Your Own Gerrymander
One day, there will be a brilliant, easy-to-use tool that enlightens our citizenry on the intricacies of gerrymandering and the political machinations therein. But that day is not today.
Continue readingBetter Draw a District
High school civics classes teach that democracy is in the hands of voters. This view, though empowering, only tells part of the story. To really understand a democracy, you need to understand how votes are counted. One must shed light on the very machinery that powers our representative democracy: the sometimes bizarrely-shaped geographic boundaries called congressional districts.
One day, there will be a brilliant, easy-to-use tool that enlightens our citizenry on the intricacies of gerrymandering and the political machinations therein. But that day is not today. Today we launch the crude, far-from-serious, yet very fun Better Draw a District, the last and longest-awaited in the series of projects we created as part of our Labs Olympics teambuilding event.
Continue readingA Mashup. The Real Story of Lobbying
Last week, when the American League of Lobbyists announced a new PR offensive to help change the public perception of the profession, including this video, we just couldn’t contain ourselves. Their Lobbying-as-American-as-Mom-and-Apple-Pie PR effort deserved a classic Internet video mashup – one, that in Sunlight-style involves “data jamming” – telling the real story of how lobbyists work to control the Washington agenda:
Rangel may have more bad days to come
The title of his autobiography is And I Haven’t Had A Bad Day Since, but Rep. Charlie Rangel may still... View Article
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