UPDATE – 8/10/10: On Monday, August 9, 2010, Google and Verizon introduced a joint proposal for the future of Internet... View Article
Continue readingEarmark no-brainer
The Earmark Transparency Act has been introduced in both the House and Senate, but it needs co-sponsors to move forward. It's time that we tell Congress that we want to know how our money is being used, and thank those representatives that are working to build a more transparent government.
Continue readingKnight-Batten Winners
I was traveling earlier this week when the Knight-Batten Awards were announced and so I wanted to add my two... View Article
Continue readingSunlight Live Wins Knight-Batten Award!
I’m thrilled to announce that our real-time investigative reporting platform, Sunlight Live, has won the prestigious Knight-Batten Award for Innovation... View Article
Continue readingDisappearmarks: Billions set aside for earmarks remain unspent
Last week Rep. Betsy Markey, D-Colo., introduced a bill that would redirect some $700 million in funds that have been languishing in Transportation Department accounts, designated to fund projects earmarked by members of Congress more than a decade ago and long since forgotten.
Sunlight's Reporting Group has been tracking these "disappearmarks"--projects requested by members of Congress that are never completed--or, at times, even begun. In some cases, that's due to changes in federal programs, in others, due to local opposition, to projects being ineligible for the earmarked funds, or because state and local authorities simply couldn't ...
Who uses government data?
“Forty percent of internet users went online for government data or information in the preceding twelve months,” according to the... View Article
Continue readingDo you know where your lobbyist is? He’s on Sunlight Live!
Whether you’re a gun owner, a home builder, an environmentalist or all of the above, you probably have no idea... View Article
Continue readingA Few Git Tips
This weekend I had the opportunity to attend Scott Chacon's Advanced Git class at Jumpstart Lab. Scott works for Github and maintains the Git project's website. He's also written a book, ProGit, and the handy reference site Git Reference.
Scott spent a good bit of time going over the fundamentals of Git--the different types of objects stored in its database and how they point to one another. I had seen all this before when I first started using Git, but I wasn't ready to really understand it then. If you've ever felt that Git was a bit mysterious or scary I'd highly recommend going over the basics again. Try this article and these two sections of Scott's book.
Here are some other useful tips I picked up:
Continue readingRethinking Advocacy Email
Email is an incredible tool for many things, but it's also *not* a very good way to communicate for much of what we tend to use it for. And on top of that, we all just get so darned many! Reading email often seems more a nuisance than an opportunity to many (most?) people. And that's a shame. In fact, it's an outright "problem" if your job is to engage both current and potential supporters in your cause, because email is still considered the primary outreach channel for most organizations.
Continue readingStates of Transparency: South Dakota
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: South Dakota
Website: www.open.sd.gov
After an open records law passed last year, a South Dakota reporter was able to discover that a Canadian company was getting state tax incentives for building a crude oil pipeline. Democratic state representatives jumped on the issue as a lesson about secrecy in government. While the Freedom of Information Act-like law may be reaping rewards for state reporters, however, the state's transparency website will ...
59063
