Today, I humbly accepted the Knight Batten Award for Innovations in Journalism for our interactive reporting platform, Sunlight Live. I’ve... View Article
Continue readingRangel: Election Day and November trial
Rep. Charlie Rangel is awaiting an ethics trial in Congress, but today he faces the voters of his Harlem district... View Article
Continue readingDon’t Kill the Office of Congressional Ethics
How would you feel about an investigation into steroid use among baseball players led by the Major League Baseball Player’s... View Article
Continue readingMost House Republican members contributing to campaign committee
With expectations running high that they will take the majority in the House of Representatives, Republican House members are putting... View Article
Continue readingCatalog of Government Publications Bulk Data
At Sunlight, we advocate for complete access to government data. That's why we built a crawler for the Catalog of Government Publications (CGP) to extract the data and share the resulting CGP bulk data publicly.
Continue readingGOP lawmaker overseeing Rangel trial has also failed to disclose assets
According to Roll Call, Rep. Michael McCaul did not properly report dozens of stock transactions on both his 2008 and... View Article
Continue readingCarrots and Sticks
The response to Clearspending has been overwhelmingly positive. People seem to care about government spending data quality to an extent I never would have anticipated. It's encouraging, and it makes me think we have a real shot at getting these problems fixed.
But there are some people with a different perspective. One of them is Gunnar Hellekson, who wrote a thoughtful blog post about why he disagrees with our approach. Naturally I don't plan to write responses to everyone who disagrees with us. But we really like and respect Gunnar, and he raised some important points in his post. To wit:
Continue readingBig bailout recipients contribute to New York pols, Republican Senate aspirants
They received billions in help from the federal government to stay afloat during the worst days of the financial crisis... View Article
Continue readingTools for Transparency: GitHub
With 97 Sunlight software projects hosted on GitHub, we’re clearly fans of the service. GitHub, launched in July of 2008,... View Article
Continue readingCan we rate heart surgeries like blenders?
The Consumers Union, publisher of Consumer Reports, released a set of ratings yesterday for something rather more important than appliances: heart bypass surgery. Using data submitted to the Society of Thoracic Surgeons (STS), the Consumers Union has graded various heart surgery groups using a three-star scale, similar to the way it rates radios, cameras and washing machines. It's a set of valuable public data that could serve as a model for expanding the Department of Health and Human Services' open government sites like Data.medicare.gov and the Community Health Data Initiative.
The heart surgery ratings are based on ...
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