Last week, several groups wrote to President Obama, requesting that new restrictions on stimulus lobbying be revised. The new policies... View Article
Continue readingLinks to House earmark disclosures in one database
House members had to post their earmark requests for fiscal year 2010 online this weekend; the original deadline was Friday, but that was extended to Saturday at 5 p.m., according to CNN.
So how many members made the deadline? I can't be sure, but I tried to find out over the weekend. I went through 430-some Web sites (there are a few vacancies right now -- Rahm Emanuel's seat, Hilda Solis' seat, and Kirsten Gillibrand's seat) looking for those disclosures (sometimes it was really interesting, sometimes it was thankless drudgery). On 116 Web pages, I couldn't ...
Continue readingHow Charitable Are Lawmaker Charities (Another Example)
The Washington Times has been running a pretty decent series on the connections between congressmen and charitable foundations that carry... View Article
Continue readingWhite House Adds Web Access to Personal Financial Disclosures
Sunlight has long advocated for online disclosure of Personal Financial Disclosure Forms (PFDs) of political appointees subject to Senate confirmation.... View Article
Continue readingTop 10 Measurements for Transparency
Weekend before this most recent one, Government 2.0 Camp took place here in Washington and by all accounts it was... View Article
Continue readingKundra’s Mission
It’s an understatement to say that us open government advocates have placed great hope on Vivek Kundra. We take President... View Article
Continue readingOur first three months as a community
Apps for America's entry period has closed, and we're now busy at work judging the applications. I dropped a note to the list, but want to share here too: because of the sheer quantity of the applications submitted, I'm extending the judging period by one week. There's just no way the judges can spend enough time judging each application (45 of them!) in one week. So we're giving ourselves a bit more time, the judging period will end two weeks from yesterday (Friday).
This has been an exciting period for our community. Over the past three months:
- We received 45 incredible applications based on the APIs and data sources we provide
- We helped organize TransparencyCamp and made what's being called "The Best Unconference Software ever written" (soon to be released as open source)
- Launched a 50 state project
- Organized two hackathons, one at (PyCon)[http://us.pycon.org] and the other at Web2.0 Expo
- Grew, as a community, from 0 to 460.
So the question is, what's next?
That's what we're starting to figure out here at the Sunlight Foundation-- we're asking ourselves how we can better serve this fledgling community of volunteer developers and designers and also looking ahead to what we think are new, big opportunities for furthering the goals of Open Government. Soon, I think we'll see lots of data being released directly from the Government in better, more developer-friendly formats. And it will largely up to this community to figure out what to do with all that.
Inside the Sunlight Foundation, we're asking ourselves the following questions:
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How do we use the sunlightlabs.com site to allow developers to organize and more effectively tackle projects and coordinate with one another?
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How do we create ways for non-technical people to help the technical people do things like help clean up data, classify information or other things that need a quick human eye?
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How do we keep track of the things inside Government that need to be fixed for us and communicate that effectively.
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How do we figure out how not only to parse all of this data, but begin to make sense of it for others?
We'd love your input too.
Continue readingFormer PMA Group Clients Get Defense Earmarks from Murtha for 2010
Rep. John Murtha, D-Pa., has requested defense related funding for five companies that hired the PMA Group last year, according to a review of the earmark requests released on the Congressman's website. Murtha has requested a total of $23.8 million to be directed to these companies.
You can search for the clients here (links to the search pages don't work).
And here's a breakdown for each of the five companies.
Advanced Acoustic Concepts - $5,000,000
Argon ST - $8,000,000
MTS Technologies - $5,000,000
Planning Systems Inc. - $2,300,000
QTL Bio Defense Systems ...
Continue readingDicks requests earmark for Concurrent Technologies
Rep. Norm Dicks requested one Defense earmark for one former client of PMA Group:
Enhanced Navy Shore Readiness Integration - $5,000,000Enhanced Navy Shore Readiness Integration targets Commander, Navy Installations Command (CNIC) prioritized opportunities for enhanced mission performance and execution to better enable Navy Fleet, Fighter, and Family readiness. Through this program, prioritized CNIC mission functions are streamlined and standardized on an enterprise scale. During this process, enabling technologies with potential for leap-ahead improvement are identified and demonstrated in real-world environments before being considered for implementation. Additionally, CNICs total force strategy is developed to ensure the right workforce capabilities ...
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Moran requests funds for Samueli Institute
The press release is here. The Washington Post profiled the research facility a while back:
Ask Wayne B. Jonas why the scientific foundation he directs is funding research into the effects of prayer, the use of homeopathy to fight bioterrorism and whether magnetic devices can heal orthopedic injuries, and he offers a straightforward answer: Science is the way to determine whether they work."We're trying to stimulate good-quality research," said Jonas, a former chief of the Office of Alternative Medicine at the National Institutes of Health (NIH) who directs the nonprofit Samueli Institute for Information Biology (SIIB) in Alexandria ...
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