Earlier today, the House unveiled the final version of their health care reform bill. You can view the full bill... View Article
Continue readingFDA hearing to highlight secret clinical trial data
Next week the Food and Drug Administration's (FDA) transparency taskforce will be holding a hearing asking for people to comment on the issue at the core of the multi-media investigation we released today, "Heart of the Matter: How Congress and Special Interests Kept Clinical Trial Data Secret":
The topics to be covered are: (1) early communication about emerging safety issues concerning FDA-regulated products, (2) disclosure of information about product applications that are abandoned (which means that no work is being done or will be undertaken to have the application approved) or withdrawn by the applicant before approval, and (emph. added) (3) communication of agency decisions about pending product applications.
Continue readingRead The Bill Goes To The Hill
This week Sunlight marched up to Capitol Hill to deliver the petition signatures of more than 20,000 people who are... View Article
Continue readingAdobe is Bad for Open Government
So next week, Adobe's having a conference here to tell Federal employees why they ought to be using "Adobe PDF, and Adobe® Flash® technology" to make government more open. They've spent what seems to be millions of dollars wrapping buses in DC with Adobe marketing materials all designed to tell us how necessary Adobe products are to Obama's Open Government Initiative. They've even got a beautiful website set up to tout the government's use of Flash and PDF, and are holding a conference here next week to talk about how Government should use ubiquitous and secure technologies to make government more open and interactive.
Here at the Sunlight Foundation, we spend a lot of time with Adobe's products-- mainly trying to reverse the damage that these technologies create when government discloses information. The PDF file format, for instance, isn't particularly easily parsed. As ubiquitous as a PDF file is, often times they're non-parsable by software, unfindable by search engines, and unreliable if text is extracted.
Continue readingHow Congress and Special Interests Kept Clinical Trial Data Secret
Meet Bray Patrick-Lake, a 39-year-old mother of two and director of a Colorado nonprofit serving the homeless. In 2008, she... View Article
Continue readingLocal Sunlight
Every week I climb into the depths of the local political blogosphere to find the Sunlight. I use this series... View Article
Continue readingRecovery.gov Augmented Reality Mashup
As of today Android and iPhone users can see recovery.gov contract data on their phones via the Layar augmented reality application. Layar is an application that overlays your view of the real world with waypoints representing your favorite coffee place, the movie theatre you're trying to find, or in this case, where some of that $787 billion from the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act is going.
How data-dependent is health care reform?
Reinventing the Wheel
A couple of days ago I was pointed to a slideshare presentation that was done as a Webmanager University New Media Talk on user centered design. Yes, there is actually a University for the people who manage federal, state and local government websites. While making my way through the slides I discovered that the Government has two separate resources dedicated to how their employees should implement user centered websites; usability.gov and usa.gov/webcontent. These sites are filled with content written by knowledgeable phd's, which is great, but when government websites seem to be falling further behind in web design and usability, it begs the question of why they're creating their own resources and not just using the myriad ones that exist in the private sector.
Continue readingCAR Training – visualizations
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