OpenCongress.org is announcing a new widget today called: "Congress, I'm Watching." It's a new tool that lets bloggers, activists, organizations and citizens share a concise summary of any bills in Congress that they are following. We are really excited about this one:
All too often, political blogs and membership groups don't have a good online resource to connect the issues they're discussing to actual bills in Congress. With the new "Congress, I'm Watching" widget, organizations have a timely way of tracking the status of bills and issues that they care about in Congress on their own home pages and online communities of all kinds can encourage collective oversight for what Congress is doing. Political blogs that are tracking specific issues can also use the widget to follow legislation that's near and dear to their heart.
Like all our widgets, it's free to use, customizable, and only takes a minute to put on your website. For an example of how it looks, please see OpenCongress.org's sample.
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Suitably Flip Opens up Bundles of Hsu’s
Running names identified by the media as being part of Norman Hsu's network of donors through federal, state and even municipal campaign finance records, Suitably Flip offers the most comprehensive road map to following the money. Sadly, there's no way to be certain which of these contributions were truly bundled by Hsu, and which might have been independently. While the recently enacted Honest Leadership and Open Government Act of 2007 requires campaigns to identify bundled contributions totaling more than $15,000 from registered lobbyists, there's no provision requiring the same sort of disclosure about bundles from convicted felons, or anyone else for that matter.
Continue readingTechPresident Wins Knight-Batten Award
Congratulations to our good friends over at techPresident for winning the 2007 Knight-Batten Award for Innovations in Journalism Grand Prize. The University of Maryland-affiliated J-Lab organized the award. Andrew Rasiej and Micah Sifry, Sunlight's technology advisors, founded techPresident to focus on how the campaigns are using the web, and how the web is using them. They are encouraging ordinary citizens to be their own Woodsteins, covering the candidates using all the new tools of the new web. The site covers campaign websites, online advertising, and postings on YouTube and has a must-read group blog and daily digest. Their tracking of which candidate has the fastest growing group of friends on MySpace and Facebook supporters has become a political bellweather.
Andrew and Micah have collected a couple dozen veterans of the 2004 and 2006 elections, both Republicans and Democrats, to blog on the site. This powerhouse stable includes the likes of Patrick Ruffini, former eCampaign Director for the Republican National Committee and webmaster for Bush-Cheney '04; Zack Exley , director of online organizing and communications for Kerry/Edwards '04; Morra Aarons, former director of Internet marketing for the DNC, and Chuck DeFeo, general manager of Townhall.com.
Micah and Andrew and the rest of the (very small) techPresident team are the innovators of the ongoing mashup of politics and Web 2.0. As the campaign heats up, techPresident will increasingly be an essential resource for journalists and average citizens alike. Congratulations guys!
Continue readingNetworked Journalism Summit
I'd like to give a shout-out to Jeff Jarvis, who announced the first Networked Journalism Summit to be held on October 10 in New York. The Summit will take place at the CUNY Graduate School of Journalism and is funded by the MacArthur Foundation. Networked Journalism is really one of the most exciting new developments in journalism, a way of professionals and amateurs working together to get the real story, all uniquely possible because of the Internet.
Continue readingFOIA Files Suggest the Truth is Out There…
...but lots of times just not available through FOIA. The Sunshine in Government Initiative, a coalition of media groups that promotes accessibility, accountability and openness in government policies, has launched the FOIA Files, a repository of descriptions of news and investigative articles that relied on the Freedom of Information Act to pry loose information from the government. It's searchable by agency, date, congressional district and state, and by whether or not the news organization that did the story had to go to court to get the records it sought. I couldn't help noticing a fair number of entries like this one:
The Macon (Ga.) Telegraph, in a report about the public's frequent unawareness of the presence of dangerous chemicals in their neighborhoods, found that the Environmental Protection Agency refused to provide even redacted copies of risk management plan summaries for five counties in and around Macon. The newspaper requested the summaries under FOIA and the EPA acknowledged they are public, but refused to release them because they contain information about worst-case scenarios.Following FOIA seems to be regarded as optional by a lot of government agencies. Continue reading
Congress Blogs More Than You Think
The IBM Business for Government report on blogging is a very useful introduction to Web 2.0 and blogs for wary lawmakers, as Ellen notes below. I'm not sure when they made this report - I know I first read it a month or two ago - but if they were to update their list of members of Congress blogging they would see that congressional blogs are not only more widespread than they report, but are also growing quickly. I've been collecting information related to member Web sites and the type of content they post for some time now. Below the fold you'll find a full-ish list of congressional blogs. It's a lot longer than IBM and others have reported.
These blogs vary in quality from rarely updated and only press releases to a real online communications hub.
Continue readingGovernmental Blogging
Here's an interesting new report -- The Blogging Revolution: Government in the Age of Web 2.0. Think of it as a kind of "Blogging for Dummies" without the humor. (No disrespect to the author or to the "...for Dummies" series.)
This report could be very helpful to any Member of Congress, mayor, state legislator, bureaucrat, corporate CEO who is looking to get an understanding of blogging and Web 2.0. In a straightforward and non-threatening manner, the report explains the Web; its history, its now, and its future. It also attempts to encourage decision makers to engage this brave new world. In common language, the author explains everything from how to start a blog, to social networking, to why blog in the first place. And he makes the case that Web 2.0 tools can increase civic engagement and strengthen our democracy.
Continue readingPresident Signs Lobbying and Ethics Reform
It's officially signed. See this post below about what goes into effect and when. You can read the President's statement and concerns below:
Continue readingExtreme Home Makeover Means Extreme Legal Trouble for Ted Stevens
One thing that the lobbying and ethics reform bill didn’t have to clarify was bribery; that one is already written pretty clearly into the law. Sen. Ted Stevens looks to be in serious trouble for accepting bribes in the form of an extreme home makeover. The Associated Press broke the story earlier today that VECO executive Bill Allen has testified to federal investigators, with whom he is cooperating, that he paid between one and four VECO employees to work on Stevens’ home for six months. This is in direct contradiction to Stevens’ earlier assertions that Allen did not pay for the remodeling. From the AP:
Ex-Veco Corp. CEO Bill Allen admitted in court Friday that he had company employees work several months on a remodeling project at the Girdwood home of U.S. Sen. Ted Stevens.
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Under cross-examination by defense attorney James Wendt, representing former state Rep. Pete Kott, Allen acknowledged that the more than $400,000 he admitted spending in the bribery charge was for other legislators - and including for work done at the Girdwood home of Stevens, the longest-serving Republican in the U.S. Senate.
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Lobbying and Ethics Bill to Go Into Effect Tomorrow
Barring a bizarre turn of events President Bush will sign S.1, the lobbying and ethics reform bill, today. That means that many of the changes will go into effect as of Saturday while other changes will come into effect later this year or by next year. By the beginning of next year there will be a much greater level of transparency in Congress as this bill requires online posting of congressional materials and the creation of numerous online databases. Let’s do a little run-down.
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