The following video is a TED talk by Nokia researcher Jan Chipchase, whose blog I read regularly. He discusses mobile phone research and design in a broader context of international culture. While he doesn't explicitly discuss politics, the ideas he introduces about the rapid evolution in the ways in which we experience technology have big implications for the ways in which we'll experience information and government.
Continue readingAnd the Beat Goes On
Despite repeated denials by some reform groups, the recently passed ethics reforms are full of loopholes. USA Today and The Washington Post are now beginning to report on how "the more things change, the more they stay the same."
None of this is a great surprise, I suppose. That's why it seems to us that transparency -- 21st century style -- may do more to stop bad things from happening than all the new laws that Congress passes.
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There is Another Way
Sen. Chuck Schumer (D-N.Y.) and a bipartisan bloc of other senators have proposed a constitutional amendment that would overturn Buckley v. Valeo, the 1976 Supreme Court decision that is the superstructure of our current election law. Specifically, the court ruled that giving and spending money to influence elections is a form of constitutionally protected free speech. I find it interesting that Schumer and company would go down this route since the likelihood for success is very small. In order to become law, the measure would have to go through a gauntlet of debates and votes, including winning two-thirds of the votes of Congress, and winning ratification of three-quarters of the states within seven years. Not very realistic.
Let me be clear. I understand the motivation to overturn Buckley. It's long been the big maple tree in the middle on the campaign finance ball field. But most reformers have accepted that it's not going away anytime soon and they've learned to play around it. One way of doing that is to create a campaign finance system that offers a voluntary system of full public financing. When the process is nearly impossible to pass a constitutional amendment, why not consider that route, which is appearing more and more achievable.
Continue readingA New Take On Disclosure?
I know this is a cynical take, but if Congress won’t provide accessible databases of information, maybe we should move in this direction.
Cartoon from the Politico.
Continue readingDebatepedia
Members of high school and college debate teams and ordinary citizens alike have a remarkable new tool for research and honing their rhetorical skills. Debatepedia, a brand new project of the International Debate and Education Association, is a wiki for civil debate and reason.
The idea is that users are able to present the pros and cons of arguments made by scholars, experts, politicians, think tanks and interest and activist groups and other opinion leaders. The views of opinion leaders are usually documentable facts, and Debatepedia allows its users to arrive at a consensus in how those facts are framed. In the process, the site lets its users to present all the info necessary for a debate team member or an average citizen to craft their own position in a rational way with footnotes.
Continue readingSocial Media, Web 2.0 and the California Fires
I know this is off topic for the Sunlight Foundation -- except for how the Web is changing everything -- but our Creative Director passed along these links for how the social media is following, reporting, compiling and sharing information about the California wild fires. We're sure this is just a partial list.
Continue readingNew Michael Wesch Video
Via the always great info aesthetics, Michael Wesch, a Kansas State professor, has created a new video. He waxes inspirational about such familiar topics as reference structure, ontology, freeform categorization, tagging, crowd sourcing, Digg, and netvibes. This video introduces the concepts behind the new ways in which the Internet is becoming useful, using the forms in which information is presented in order to present information (making for a productive combination of form and content, much like the phenomena he describes).
Continue readingOversight Committee Seeks for More Blackwater Documents
Rep. Henry Waxman's oversight committee sent out letters today to the Department of Defense, the Department of State and to Blackwater CEO Erik Prince asking for various sets of documents regarding contracts going back to 2003.
Among other issues, the seven-page letter to Erik Prince raises questions about all the no-bid contracts Blackwater has been given and asks the company to hand in documents detailing the hourly billing information that Blackwater charges the State department.
In the letter to DoD the Chairman of the House Committee on Oversight and Government reform touched upon an earlier letter from Mar. 31 ...
Continue readingSunlight API Development Kit
When working on a prototype, it is often necessary to get a REST web service up and running quickly. It's easy enough to do, but the amount of code that is duplicated for each service can really increase the time to completion. To make the development of REST web services quicker and easier, we have developed the Sunlight API Development Kit or, as we affectionately call it, the Sunlight ADK. The ADK is a PHP framework that assists in the rapid development of REST web services. We've released the code under the LGPL license.
Continue readingLocal Sunlight
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