Recovery.gov is supposed to be a transparency clearing house for information on the federal stimulus spending appropriated in the $787... View Article
Continue readingOpen Notebook: Flaws in Lobbying Disclosure
Yesterday, Hot Air's Ed Morrissey wrote that two conservative groups are charging that Andrew Stern, president of the Service Employees International Union, should have registered (or re-registered) as a lobbyist. They're citing White House visitor logs (Stern was the most frequent visitor in the fist batch of records released) and his own tweets as evidence.
The same day, Washington Post reported that the U.S. Chamber of Commerce is trying to raise $50,000 to commission an economist to find fault with current health care reform proposals working their way through the Senate.
Continue readingFederalReporting.gov: Recovery.gov’s Dirty Little Secret
The press would have you believe that Recovery.gov is an $18MM website that collects loan, contract, and grant data from recipients and shows it to end users. But that's only half true in a lot of ways. That price isn't exactly correct, and that's not all Recovery.gov's function.
Read more to find out what we mean.
Continue readingLobbyists Put On Ventriloquist Act
More than a dozen lawmakers inserted statements supporting a biotechnology provision added to the House health care bill that was... View Article
Continue readingCongress: There’s An (Android) App For That
Our Android app, "Congress", is now published in the Android Market, for free. As I said in the beta release post, Congress is a pocket Congressional directory that takes full advantage of the Sunlight Labs Congress API and the Drumbone API. You can install it by visiting the Market, or scan the QR code in this post to take you right there.
The features:
Continue readingGet your act together, Data.gov
On May 21st, we launched Apps for America 2: the Data.gov Challenge-- the very same day that Federal CIO Vivek Kundra & Company launched data.gov. On May 26th, Kundra announced that there were hundreds of thousands of data sources just around the corner.
It is now November 13th, 2009. Right now the Raw Data Catalog in data.gov stands at an even 600 feeds. What's worse, the data is chunked up into small little bits, making 600 not a particularly exciting number. For instance, nearly half the datasets (293/600) in the raw data catalog are toxics release inventory datasets, broken up into individual states and outlying territories further broken up into individual years, from 2005 through 2008. This isn't living up to expectations, or even keeping in line with public statements.
Continue readingLocal Sunlight
Every week I climb into the depths of the local political blogosphere to find the Sunlight. This week I have... View Article
Continue readingCokie Roberts Reviews ‘Read The Bill’
NPR Senior News Analyst and ABC political commentator Cokie Roberts reviewed the political landscape facing advocates of reasonable public access... View Article
Continue readingMorning Links
1) A new report shows that transportation earmarks are going towards campaign contributors rather than needed road and infrastructure improvements.... View Article
Continue readingNew York Senate’s Big Google Adventure
The New York Senate’s strides toward greater transparency hasn’t stalled since we last visited them. A huge step forward was... View Article
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