Powerlessness in the face of disaster is dispiriting. Powerlessness in the face of regulatory failure is fixable. Despite our widespread... View Article
Continue readingForms: We have a winner
After discovering the conflict of interest in the forms contest, we scrambled to find a judge. Ultimately, Adobe came through and brought us Stephen Buckley host of OpenGovRadio and blogger at http://www.ustransparency.com. Here's what Stephen had to say about the winner, and why he picked who he picked:
Continue readingNet neutrality: Do campaign contributions tell the whole story?
After 74 Democratic members of the House of Representatives sent a letter to Federal Communications Commission Chairman Julius Genachowski warning that the FCC should not advance net neutrality rules without explicit direction from Congress, Free Press put together a page showing career campaign contributors from PACs, employees and lobbyists of interests that oppose the measure, intended to keep the Internet a level playing field.
The biggest recipient of telecom campaign cash was Rep. Bobby Rush, D-Ill., who took in more than $128,000--over the course of an 18-year career, that averages out to about $14,400 an election cycle. Four ...
Critics say federal student privacy law misused by colleges
Reports of NCAA football violations, lists of who gets free tickets to big games, and disciplinary records of students found responsible for sexual assault are among the records that U.S. colleges and universities have refused to release, citing a federal student privacy law. Last month, a Wyoming community college even went to court to stop a local newspaper from publishing a leaked internal report about a trip the college president took to Costa Rica.
In these examples and many others, the colleges said their hands were tied because of the need to abide by the Family Educational Rights and ...
Disappearmarks: Buffalo’s Switcheroo saves earmark
Time was running out for an $11.8 million federal earmark to redevelop the Inner Harbor of the Buffalo River where it empties into Lake Erie. Like most earmarks, the recipient – the Erie Canal Harbor Development Corporation – had only three years to spend the funds before the money lapsed. In Buffalo, that meant the corporation had until October 2007, or else lose it for good.
There were once grand plans for the ... Continue reading
Design for America: Mistake 1
Our Design for America contest was great-- we had a lot of great entrants in all the categories. One of the categories I was more excited about was the "Redesign of a Government Form" category. While it was a bit esoteric-- if you think about it, the primary way people interface with government is through forms. Perhaps people think government is mundane, soulless and complicated because government forms are that way.
They don't have to be-- and that's what got us excited about seeing what the design community could do with government forms. To top it off, we selected someone who really helped revolutionize the way web forms got made: Kevin Hale to be a judge.
Unfortunately, what happened was that the winning entrant used Wufoo, Hale's company to build their form. It's a clear conflict of interest between judge and contestant. I made the mistake of not checking out the form's URL when I took the screenshot and catching it (I was in a rush to make the announcement at Gov2Expo), and now we're at a situation where somebody won with a conflict of interest looming.
Sunlight's an organization about transparency and ethics. So first thing's first: there's the confession. We messed up. In order to fix it-- initially we thought about just allowing the community to vote on which one won. But I feel like that doesn't ensure the best result, that ensures the most popular one. And those can be different. So, today we're going to try and find a new judge and give them the opportunity to judge the forms independently of the original results.
Continue readingStudy: Earmarks, federal spending follow political power, inhibit economic growth
Year after year, the late John Murtha used his influence on the House Defense Appropriations Subcommittee to bring tens of millions of dollars in earmarks to his district--hard hit by the declining fortunes of the steel and coal industries--to in effect create a new economic base fueled on federal spending. Sen. Robert Byrd did the same for West Virginia. But do such efforts actually work? Does spending taxpayer money spur private sector development?
A new study from researchers at the Harvard Business School suggests that the answer is no; that public spending doesn't ... Continue reading
CPI’s Jim Morris talks about BP’s OSHA violations
Our colleague Jim Morris, who runs Data Mine, our joint project with the Center for Public Integrity, talked about his story on BP's pattern of OSHA violations at its refineries on ABC yesterday. Jim appears at 10:10 in the clip; if the player below doesn't work it's available here.
Probably worth noting that Jim had to request the data under the Freedom of Information Act.
How We Use MongoDB at Sunlight
Last week, David and I attended MongoNYC, a one-day conference focused on MongoDB. We like Mongo here at Sunlight. We like it a lot.
Working with Mongo, it's become clear that it's a more natural way to store data. We primarily use Python and Ruby, and because Mongo allows us to think in JSON, everything tends to just click. JSON documents are close enough to objects in Python and Ruby that mapping between application and database becomes almost effortless. Mongo has really shined in two specific use cases: as a datastore for a resource oriented web service, and as a datastore for results from scraping a web site.
Continue readingBP had no plan for Deepwater Horizon disaster
British Petroleum did not have an emergency response plan for its Deepwater Horizon drill rig; such plans direct personnel to the proper procedures for responding to incidents like the current spill in the Gulf of Mexico.
In testimony before the House Transportation and Infrastructure Committee on May 19, Liz Birnbaum, the former Director of the Minerals Management Service (MMS) who resigned yesterday morning, said the reason that BP did not complete an Oil Spill Response Plan was a reported decrease in the rig’s “worst-case scenario discharge” from 250,000 barrels a day to 160,000.
BP calculated the volume ...
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