Tom Donilon, a White House national security advisor, is being touted as a potential replacement for Rahm Emanuel as chief... View Article
Continue readingNYT: Disclose lawmaker charity donations
The New York Times calls for the full and proper disclosure of donations to charities set up by lawmakers: Congressional... View Article
Continue readingAnnouncing Clearspending — and Why It’s Important
Today we're launching Clearspending -- a site devoted to our analysis of the data behind USASpending.gov. Ellen's already written about this project over on the main foundation blog, and you should certainly check out her post. But I wanted to talk about it a little bit here, too, because this project is near & dear to my heart, having grown out of work that Kaitlin, Kevin and I did together before I stepped into the role of Labs Director.
The three of us had been working with the USASpending database for a while, and in the course of that work we began to realize some discouraging things. The data clearly had some problems. We did some research and wrote some tests to quantify those problems -- that effort turned into Clearspending. The results were unequivocal: the data was bad -- really bad. Unusably bad, in fact. As things currently stand, USASpending.gov really can't be relied upon.
You can read all about it over at the Clearspending site, and I hope you will -- in addition to an analysis that looked at millions of rows of data and found over a trillion dollars' worth of messed-up spending reports, we spent a lot of time talking to officials at all levels of the reporting chain. I don't think you're likely to find a better discussion of these systems and their problems.
And make no mistake, these systems are important.
Continue readingClearspending. That’s What We Need.
As I noted in my speech yesterday at the Gov2.0 Summit, Gov2.0 has become a popular catchphrase in Washington today... View Article
Continue readingTop donors to lawmakers fund their official portraits
For 24 years, Rep. Bart Gordon, D-Tenn., has represented the sixth district of Tennessee, rising to become the chairman of the House Science Committee. Now he is retiring, but he is planning to leave his likeness behind in the committee room, in the form of an official portrait paid for by corporate donors such as Lockheed Martin, Microsoft, and Northrop Grumman, which are also top contributors to his campaign fund. These companies have contributed a total of $34,000 to the portrait fund.
Another lawmaker, House Agriculture Chairman Collin Peterson, D-Minn., who is slated for an easy win in the ...
Continue readingGov2.0 Presentation: An Open Government Scorecard
I was absolutely delighted to present at the Gov2.0 Summit here in Washington this morning. Thanks to Tim OReilly and... View Article
Continue readingMore political organizations declare they’ll take unlimited funds
In the 6 weeks following an advisory opinion issued by the Federal Elections Commission allowing some political organizations—called independent expenditure-only PACs—to receive unlimited contributions from corporations and labor unions, 23 groups have registered as such. The FEC is anticipating 67 more to do so as well. To see both FEC lists click here.
Sunlight first reported on these organizations when a group called the League of Conservation Voters Fund intervened in the Colorado primary, running a phone bank to support Sen. Michael Bennet.
These groups are created for the sole pupose of making independent expenditures to influence elections ...
Continue readingAsk the question about transparency that you’ve always wanted
Ever get tired of hearing pundits ask softball questions to politicians? Or finally hear a really great question, only to have it answered in a few TV friendly, pre-packaged bullet points that don’t tell you anything you didn’t already know? Thanks to the work of our friends at Personal Democracy Forum, we don’t have to accept this one way channel of communication. With 10Questions.com, every American can be a part of the conversation with those running for office this election season.
Continue readingStates of Transparency: Tennessee
The Open Government Directive encouraged states to put valuable government data online. In this series we're reviewing each state's efforts in this direction.
This week: Tennessee
Website: www.tn.gov/opengov/
The open government site for the state of Tennessee offers checkbook-level spending data, but would be extremely frustrating to serious researchers looking to do their own analysis. It's just not laid out in a computer-friendly way.
Currently, spending information is available in PDF format. It isn't searchable by vendor name or spending type, and isn't downloadable in any machine-readable format. And it's updated ...
Continue readingWhat’s Going on in the Labs
If you're like us, you're busy creating and don't take the necessary time to document and communicate what you're up to. Here in the labs, we've been great about announcing when we're finished with a product but we haven't really kept the community informed on what we're working on before we're done with it. We're going to improve this. Starting with this post, we're going to give you a monthly rundown of what we're working on here in our D.C. offices. With this and other proposed initiatives like improved documentation of our projects and making labs staff available for IRC "office hours," we hope to do a better job of keeping you in the loop and making ourselves available for questions or comments. Please let us know what you think about these proposals. With that, here's what we're up to at Sunlight Labs:
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