As stated in the note from the Sunlight Foundation′s Board Chair, as of September 2020 the Sunlight Foundation is no longer active. This site is maintained as a static archive only.

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Genealogy of the Stimulus Bill

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The current economic crisis does seem to present a combination of circumstances (the housing crisis, a credit crisis, declining international trade, rising unemployment), some of which are causes, some of which are symptoms, none of which--of course--are particularly pleasant for those going through them. So how does Congress, legislatively, address new circumstances? Do members and their staffs (and the lobbyists whispering in their ears) craft bills to solve the problems at hand? Or do they go through their archives and relabel old bills as solutions to new problems?

Using the indispensable Govtrack.us, I'm going to look for antecedents ...

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I heart Bit.ly

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We've been using Bit.ly a lot here at Sunlight Labs-- I've become somewhat of an evangelist of using it over many similar shortcut services. What gets me excited about bit.ly is the advanced tracking capabilities it has. Did you know....

  1. Bit.ly tracks friendfeed and twitter conversations?
  2. It tracks each individual click and tells you where they're coming from?
  3. It actually scrapes the page you link to with it and provides you with semantic data on the page?!
  4. All of this is completely "transparent?" You can view the stats of any bit.ly link

All you have to do is put /info/ in between bit.ly and the random characters it assigns to your link. So for instance, the bit.ly link to our recent "Redesigning the Government" post was http://bit.ly/LONF But if you just put that magic /info/ in it, you can see the stats: http://bit.ly/info/LONF

We've been using it to track Twitter's effectiveness at driving traffic to the Sunlight Labs website we're quite excited to see it using OpenCalais to scrape semantic data off the page as well. It is quite a unique blend of interesting information about something as simple as a link.

Also: I highly recommend the Firefox extension. It allows you to see some basic information about a bit.ly or other shortcutted link when you mouse-over it like how many clicks it has received and more importantly, what the full URL is.

Thanks Bit.ly!

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Weekly Lab Report 2009.04

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More evidence of The Sunlight Foundation's pursuing its catalyst mission—using the power of the Internet to catalyze greater government openness and transparency—at the Sunlight Labs. Catalysts initiate reactions that precipitate the desired solution. Here's what happened this past week at Sunlight Labs...


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