At a May 3, 2000, press conference, Rep. Patrick Kennedy, D-R.I., announced that the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee (DCCC) had filed a lawsuit, prepared by its counsel, Robert F. Bauer, alleging that Rep. Tom DeLay, R-Texas, was using a series of nonprofits and political committees (called section 527s, after the section of the tax code under which they're created) to circumvent campaign finance laws, extort money from donors, and evade disclosure. Kennedy and Bauer presented the charges, based for the most part on media reports about DeLay's fundraising tactics, as an unprecedented assault on campaign finance law ...
Continue readingThe National Data Catalog Is Hungry
So you've found some government data on the web. Naturally, you are eager to share your findings with the world. Perfect! Sunlight Labs can help. Our National Data Catalog (NatDatCat) is hungry for government data, and we have to feed it regularly. Otherwise, it gets grumpy.
The first step is to assess what you've found. If it is just a few bits of scattered files, just fill out a quick form and tell us about it. On the other hand, if it is a collection of data sets, you might consider writing an importer...
Continue readingOMB struggles to track $800 billion IT spending by government
IT Dashboard attempts to tracks billions of dollars spent by the federal government on information technology, but the website itself has out of date information and inaccurate ratings on the investment risks of some agency projects.
Federal investments for IT improvements have a tendency to run over budget, or in the worst of scenarios, fail to meet any projected goals. While the private sector has seen blinding technological advancement in a relatively short time, federal agencies have struggled to keep up, even with a government-wide IT budget of $79.5 billion for fiscal 2011.
With so much need for technology ...
LIVE: Rep. Maxine Waters Defends Against Ethics Charges
1 hour 20 mins
Continue readingTools for Transparency: The Vote-to-Promote Model
News aggregation services that use the vote-to-promote model like Reddit and Digg, and Delicious and StumbleUpon to a degree, are... View Article
Continue readingI’m Kind of a Sucker for Transit Data
This may admittedly be of limited interest to those outside the DC area, but it's extremely interesting to me, so I'm afraid you'll just have to humor me for a paragraph or two. WMATA, our regional transit agency, has just launched a developer portal and API, and they've done a really nice job of it. People seem to love transit data -- after crime data it seems to be the municipal information people get most excited about (and I'd argue that it's much, much more useful than crime data) -- and I'm no exception. Playing with this stuff is a bit of a hobby of mine, and I've been following WMATA's gradual move toward openness for years. This is a big step forward for both the agency and its customers.
Bus data is still forthcoming, and I suspect that's where the real possibilities lie: the rail system is pretty easy to use; tech can pay bigger dividends when applied to the relative mysteries of the bus. Still, it's already clear that WMATA has made some smart decisions about implementation, defined reasonable terms of service, and generally seems to be moving in the right direction. When the API is considered alongside the already-released GTFS dataset, Metro's offerings match up fairly well (though not perfectly) with the ten open data principles that Sunlight has just published.
Now to see if I can't get a Graphserver instance running...
Continue readingCitizens Not Increasing Scrutiny
The Washington Independent has a great write-up of political spending after the Citizens decision, with one exception: the headline. Citizens... View Article
Continue readingSunlight Labs Community Survey
We've put together a short survey that we'd greatly appreciate your responses on. It shouldn't take more than ten minutes. By answering you'll be a part of this re-evaluation of where we focus our efforts so that we can help ensure that this community stays focused and energized. Tell us what you like about the community and where we're slacking, but most importantly tell us what you need.
Continue readingGoogle requests AdWords service be exempted from FEC rule
NIH urged to create a single website showing grantees’ funding
Dr. Charles Nemeroff’s name is synonymous with what can go wrong when scientists who receive funding from the National Institutes of Health (NIH), the U.S. government’s $31 billion a year medical research arm, fail to disclose business relationships that pose a conflict of interest.
In 2008 came the embarrassing revelation that the prominent psychiatrist accepted nearly $1 million in consulting fees from Glaxo Smith Kline over six years while also leading NIH research on that same company’s antidepressant treatments. Nemeroff was also the chair of the psychiatry department at Emory University.
The NIH is trying to ...
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