The launch of OMB's USASpending.gov, based on the Sunlight funded FedSpending.org, is a huge accomplishment worth celebrating. The Washington Post's story talks about the strange bedfellows that made it happen:
Robert Shea is a Republican insider with a head for business and a yen for federal program performance standards. Gary Bass is a government watchdog with a mean bite who wants openness and knows how to get it.
Official antagonists, political opposites, brought together by a wild, crazy idea: federal budget transparency. Online and searchable. Free for the asking....
Official antagonists, political opposites, brought together by a wild, crazy idea: federal budget transparency. Online and searchable. Free for the asking.
We're pleased to have been ahead of this curve -- and one of the prime catalysts for it. At the recent celebration of the one year successes of FedSpending.org (hosted by its creator OMB Watch), it was noted that over 5 million searches of the data occured in the last 12 months. That's not visits or hits, that's actual searches for the data! Now that's some success. At that event, Robert Shea of OMB also promised that the government data would be made available with programming interfaces to make it easy for developers and technologically sophisticated citizens to use the data in ways yet to be imagined. How nice that this government agency really gets what transparency is all about.
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You’ve Got to Tell a Story
Even though Congress passed "ethics reform" holiday time in Washington -- that nefarious mixing of parties and politics -- continues pretty much as usual. No one tells the story better than ABC News' Brian Ross.
View a clip from the show
Congressional Transparency on a Map
"We can never understand [a House member’s] Washington activity without also understating his perception of his various constituencies and the home style he uses to cultivate their support…" states Richard Fenno in Home Style: House Members in Their Districts. Fenno understands that the work of members of Congress is more than committee meetings and votes but is also people they meet with from the district. The work in the district builds trust constituents need to send them to Washington and to accept the decisions they make there. Fenno’s makes the point that the work of lawmakers done in the district is not an exhibition but the yang to Washington’s Ying.
This trust that lawmakers create in the district extends to who they meet with in Washington. The Punch Clock motto has always been “Members of Congress work for us, and we should know what they do every day.” Fenno made this point a different way, “Trust is, however, a fragile relationship. It is not an overnight or one-time thing. It is hard to win; and it must be constantly renewed and rewon. "
In this spirit, Sunlight has decided to help out by creating a trust-building tool. This tool, the Punch Clock Map, is a Google map mashup with corresponding RSS feeds that lets citizens see for themselves just how elected officials spend their time and how they serve their district’s needs.
Senate E-Gov Hearing
I'm about to head to a hearing from the Senate Homeland Security and Government Affairs Committee, which, as we learned yesterday amidst a flurry of activity on the Open House Project Google Group, will be viewable, both live and archived, from the Senate committee's website.
This is exciting also because of the content of the hearing, where we'll be hearing from a panel of e-government and technology experts, including CDT's Ari Schwartz, Jimmy Wales of Wikia, JL Needham of Google, and Karen Evans of the Office of Management and Budget.
We expect the hearing to deal with both executive branch e-government implementation, and to also touch on some degree of legislative branch transparency issues, as a committee staffer stopped by yesterday to explain. We'll likely be hearing more about CRS reports, and an initiative regarding THOMAS upgrades, both priorities from the Open House Project report.
Continue readingHoliday Lobby Parties Say No Cameras Allowed
If you're an industry group or a lobby shop each and every season is worthy of a themed fundraiser. Holiday season is, of course, the best time to get lawmakers and lobbyists together to schmooze and allow a legal forum for the exchange of campaign cash for direct access. ABC News' Brian Ross and his film crew came down from New York to try and film the natives in their annual tradition only to be removed from the festivities:
At the National Beer Wholesalers Association and Brewers Association’s “Taste of the Holidays” party Wednesday night in the Rayburn cafeteria, Members of Congress, staffers and lobbyists noshed on House ethics committee-approved delicacies like Guinness draught mini meatballs and beer-glazed ribs and libations that included more than 20 brews.
Ross entered the party with cameras rolling. His goal: to show perks lawmakers and staffers receive during the holidays as trade groups and lobby shops throw swanky parties on Capitol Hill. Unsurprisingly, the newsman was treated like an interloper by the party’s sponsors.
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Different Earmark Strokes for Different Folks
Freshman Sen. Claire McCaskill (D-Mo.) brought financial oversight experience with her to Washington as a former prosecutor and Missouri state auditor. And she has said that fighting for greater transparency and openness in how the federal government operates would be the focus of her time as a senator, "as it relates to cost savings and being very stingy with the taxpayer dime," as quoted by the Columbia (Mo.) Daily Tribune, her hometown newspaper. Along with John McCain (R-Ariz.), she sponsored earmark disclosure language that would require committee and conference reports on the bill to list the name(s) of the sponsor and intended recipient(s) of any earmarks. Plus, her proposal would have required information on the earmark be made electronically and easily accessible to the public at least 48 hours prior to the vote on the bill or the final conference report, according to SourceWatch. McCaskill has also been working with Sen. Jim Webb (D-Va.) to set up an independent, bipartisan commission to oversee wartime contracts modeled after the commission then-Sen. Harry Truman chaired during World War II.
Continue readingSuper Donors
Public Campaign's blog highlighted a National Journal cover story about super donors -- lobbyists who max out on personal contributions to political campaigns each year. In this election cycle the aggregate contribution limit is $108,200.
Most of these K Street "royals" have spouses giving them the opportunity to double that amount (as long as the spouse goes along). Now that adds up to some real money as you will see. National Journal includes a list of the top 20 individual K Street donors provided by the Center for Responsive Politics, as well as a deeper profile of five of the. Even though the report finds that the top lobbyist donors cite various motivations for giving, "virtually all of them enjoy a level of influence and access that many others on K Street would envy."
And surprise surprise! K Street work has paid off spectacularly well for these folks.
Continue readingpolipoly – A tool for dealing with district boundary polygons
Finding out what congressional district an address falls within can be a difficult problem. One solution is to use the polipoly library that we have open sourced to check if a point falls within a polygon boundary of a congressional district.
Continue readingOpen Govt Data Geeks Unite, and the Rise of 3-D Journalism
Micah Sifry (Sunlight senior strategic consultant) writes:
I've just finished spending two days at a mini-retreat on open government data organized by Carl Malamud of Public.Resource.Org, hosted by Tim O'Reilly of O'Reilly Media and funded by the Sunlight Foundation, Google and Yahoo!. The purpose of the meeting was to gather a bunch of folks from both the public and private sectors who are working on everything from pro-democracy websites to hyper-local news startups to see if we could draft some common principles for data and open government, and also to deepen connections and collaboration among a powerfully creative group of individuals and projects. (Full disclosure: I was there in my consulting role as a senior technology adviser to Sunlight, but this was another of those fortuitous events where I get to where all my hats as PdF editor, open government activist, and Sunlight consultant at once.)
In attendance were Adrian Holovaty and Daniel O'Neil of the soon-to-be-unveiled EveryBlock; Michal Mugurski and Eric Rodenbeck of Stamen Design, which does amazing work with data visualization; Josh Tauberer of GovTrack.us, which makes Thomas useful and amazes the rest of us with his efficiency; Lawrence Lessig of Stanford, who's focusing his prodigious energies on the problem of corruption; Dan Newman of MAPLight.org, which is doing path-breaking work connecting money, legislators, votes and power; John Geraci of outside.in, which is localizing the blogosphere down the neighborhood level; Ed Bender of the Institute for Money in State Politics, which has state-of-the-art APIs for mashing up state-level campaign finance data; Tom Steinberg of mySociety.org, probably the world's leader in pro-democracy web services (see TheyWorkForYou.com); David Moore and Donny Shaw of OpenCongress, which brings social wisdom to unveil what's really going inside Congress now; JL Needham of Google, you've probably heard of them; Ethan Zuckerman of the Berkman Center, who has more accomplishments in the geek-to-social-good sector than anyone I know (and he's only 34!!); Greg Palmer, whose stepping down as Congressman Henry Waxman's tech director soon to venture into some exciting projects in the private sector; Jamie Taylor of Metaweb, which is building a powerful platform called Freebase for public information sharing; Bradley Horowitz of Yahoo!, you've probably heard of them too; Zack Exley of the New Organizing Institute, whose one of my favorite progressive agitators; Michael Dale of Metavid, which is bringing transparency and interactivity to Congressional video; Joseph Lorenzo Hall of UC Berkeley, one of the world's experts on e-voting; Marcia Hoffman, a staff attorney for the Electronic Frontier Foundation, which I am a proud member of; David Orban of Metasocial Web, who is exploring the frontier of networked politics; Will Fitzpatrick of Omidyar Network, which is moving toward embracing transparency as a top priority; Aaron Swartz of Open Library, which is working on creating a wiki page for every book in the world; and myself and Greg Elin of the Sunlight Labs.
Continue readingGolden Duke Awards
Our good friends over at Talking Points Memo have announced the first annual Golden Duke Awards, an end of the year, reader-nominated, scandal contest. We want to urge you to send in your nominations,!
TPM named the contest for former congressman and now federal inmate Randy "Duke" Cunningham, the center of what Josh Marshall called the "iconic modern political scandal: you've got bribery, sex, national security, and just cartoonish ridiculousness writ large." His team is inviting readers to nominate their favorite political crook or bamboozler in six categories: best testimonial train wreck, outstanding achievement for improbable forgetfulness, outstanding achievement in corruption-based chutzpa, best local scandal, best scandal - sex or carnality related, and best scandal, general interest. Send in your nominations by December 14.
TPM has compiled an impressive panel of judges, including Susie Bright, John Dean, Hendrik Hertzberg, Dahlia Lithwick and Matthew Yglesias. On December 18, TPM will announce the nominees and the winners on December 31.
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