Blog : Sunlight Foundation

Read the Bill: The (Long) Short Story

by Paul Blumenthal Jul 9, 2009 3:08 pm

In case you needed the short version of the full history of Congress and Read the Bill, please read below.... View Article

18 Million for Recovery.gov 2.0

by Clay Johnson

technology

Jul 9, 2009 1:20 pm

According to the GSA, Recovery.gov will be rebuilt over the course of five months for a total of $9,516,324. The Recovery Accountability and Transparency Board then has the option to exercise options that can take the contract through 4 more years for a total of $17,948,518. The award winner is a company called Smartronix which will likely subcontract out to several companies over the next few weeks to deliver the site.

There's a lively discussion happening on the Sunlight Labs Email List, and we're trying to gather information about what the contract details are. While Twitter is on fire with shock at the price tag, I don't think that's the real problem here.

The real problem is transparency. The real problem is that while many are outraged at the cost, you can't presume that the government isn't spending its money wisely unless you know both what Government is paying and what they're paying for. We don't know what they're paying for, yet.

I hope that this gets rectified soon and that the Recovery Accountability and Transparency Board, along with Smartronix works with our community to make sure of three things:

That people know what every dime of that $18MM is being spent on,
That Smartronix works with the community to make the process of building Recovery.gov open and transparent, and
That Smartronix works with the Sunlight Labs community to make the data published on Recovery.gov accessible and machine readable to develops.

Here at Sunlight we're trying to make that happen. So we begin Chapter 2. As new stuff developers, we'll keep you informed.

Introducing Transparency Corps

by Clay Johnson

technology

Jul 9, 2009 12:26 pm

A week ago at the Personal Democracy Forum, we unveiled TransparencyCorps, a new distributed volunteer-force application. It is a lightweight open source platform along the lines of "Mechanical Turk." Like all of our newer projects, it is open source software and you can check it out over on github. The app was written by Eric with tasks being written by several members of the Sunlight Labs team. It is written in Rails.

It is necessary and always will be: while we bring in a lot of data from Government, human eyes need to look at data and make associations that computers cannot. In the realm of transparency, there are solid links between documents on the web that are publicly available that machines simply cannot accurately make. So we built TransparencyCorps as a way for us to build a community to help out and complete these tasks.

TransparencyCorps isn't just for us though, but for all people in the transparency community. We're inviting our partners to create their own tasks and add them to the service along side our own in the hopes that in numbers we can do great things.

We're pretty excited about it as a platform and we'll continue to add more to it. If you have any thoughts or ideas, feel free to add your own or give us feedback. Make sure to tell Jeremy how great his leader-board drawings are.