USA.gov, the site that conveys official information and services about the U.S. government, just launched the new design of their website. Since we took a stab at redesigning it ourselves back in January of '09, we thought we'd see if they took any of our advice.
Continue readingCitizens United: Michigan’s response
The Supreme Court’s decision in the Citizens United v. FEC case has rendered 24 states' election laws unconstitutional. The 5-4 ruling in favor of Citizens United reversed a provision of the McCain-Feingold act that prohibited any electioneering communication—defined as advertising via broadcast, cable or satellite that is paid for by corporations or labor unions. Many states have acted fast to counter corporations’ ability to spend unlimited amounts of money to influence elections by passing laws that force disclosure of all independent expenditures in near real time. The Sunlight Foundation Reporting Group has decided to report what each of ...
Continue readingEarmark transparency still makes more sense than a ban
The Sunlight Foundation recently sent a letter seeking cosponsors for H.R. 5258 and S. 3335, both known as the Earmark... View Article
Continue readingStates of Transparency: New Jersey
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: New Jersey
Website: www.nj.gov/transparency
Six months after a corruption scandal that was lurid even by local standards, New Jersey's new governor boosted state transparency efforts in January with a new website. The site, www.nj.gov/transparency, publishes state spending and revenues, and although it received one of the lowest scores in the US Public Interest Research Group (USPIRG)'s recent survey of such sites, it has promise. What's more, the state also boasts an excellent campaign finance portal -- www.elec.state.nj.us.
Continue readingStories to start the day
1) Companies are finding ways to avoid Congress’ ban on for-profit earmarks. 2) Democrats are losing Wall Street donors as... View Article
Continue reading2010 Top Washington Lobbying Firms Mapped
Ever wondered where the top lobbying firms are located in Washington, DC? Wonder no more. Here’s a map of the... View Article
Continue readingU.S. Energy, Mining Companies Must Disclose Government Payments
U.S. energy companies will soon have to reveal how much they pay foreign governments for rights to produce crude oil, natural gas and minerals around the world.
Tucked near the end of the more than 2,000-page final version of the financial reform bill is language requiring energy companies to submit the payment information annually to the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission. The provision was added by Democratic Sen. Patrick Leahy of Vermont, a long-time supporter of the voluntary Extractive Industries Transparency Initiative, and by Sen. Ben Cardin of Maryland, also a Democrat. That global initiative is backed ...
Key net neutrality supporters hire former government officials to lobby
Two of the biggest proponents of net neutrality rules for broadband providers involved in closed door congressional committee negotiations have... View Article
Continue readingWhite House releases 2010 financial disclosures for staffers
Last week we requested personal financial disclosures for a few senior White House staffers. These documents list the assets officials own--property, stocks and mutual funds. The documents can be requested on the White House website by clicking here..
In addition to assets, these disclosures also tell you who gave these high profile staffers gifts or paid for their travel. For instance, on page 16 of Rahm Emanuel’s disclosure, we can see that he received tickets to the Bruce Springsteen concert last summer. We previously reported that 18 members of Congress benefited from fundraisers held at the concert (for details ...
Guest Post: Calling All Phoenix Area Civic Hackers
Marc Chung is one of the organizers who helped make the Great American Hackathon a success, and is a friend of Sunlight. He's asked for a little space on the Labs blog to announce his new Phoenix-area open data group, and we're only too happy to oblige. Read on for the details.
I'm Marc Chung, a computer scientist who is passionate about bringing technologists together to improve our world.
Last year, I organized the Phoenix edition of the Great American Hackathon. That weekend a local gathering of developers decided to contribute time towards building a (parser)[http://sunlightlabs.com/blog/2009/hotness-arizona/] for the Arizona State Legislature. The work was done as part of the Fifty States project which supports organizations like MapLight and OpenCongress.
After the hackathon, I was contacted by several journalists and developers who were very excited by the work we did and just as eager to offer their assistance on future civic hacking initiatives. In the short time since GAH '09, we've been working with to extract useful information from public data in an effort to shed more light on how state governments work.
Combining the interests of these two groups was inevitable and so today, along with Mark Ng and Brian Shaler, I'd like to announce PhxData, a group to unite technologists in the Phoenix area who are engaged in data mining, parsing, visualization, etc. It also serves as a platform for journalists and government officials to connect with civic hackers who want to take public data and make it useful.
Check out our website: http://phxdata.org
If you're a data scientist, journalist, government official, statistician, developer or designer who would like to work on exploring data in the interest of pursuing greater government transparency for the state of Arizona, you should join this group.
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