As the second anniversary of the Supreme Court’s disastrous Citizens United decision approaches, the Sunlight Foundation has drafted the Stop... View Article
Continue readingSunlight Weekly Round-up: New State Open Government Guide
An awakening call to self educate ourselves on open records and open public meetings came when in June this year,... View Article
Continue readingSenate Approps Shortchange E-Gov
After the huge fight over the House’s support for Electronic Government Fund, which pays for many important transparency programs like... View Article
Continue readingImpatience Spurs Innovation and the iPad is the New Fold
Drupal or Solr may not be my forte, but when Rob Winikates, Deputy Director, Office of Digital Strategy, Online Engagement... View Article
Continue readingTools for Transparency: Broadcastr – What’s your OpenGov story?
Broadcastr “is a social media platform for location-based stories. It enables the recording, indexing, listening, and sharing of audio content.... View Article
Continue readingBig lobbyists battle for big and small clients over Dodd Frank fee cap
As the House Committee on Financial Services readies for next week's hearings to discuss new regulations for the banking industry, lobbyists lined up to battle over the changes, extending a battle between small banks, big banks and big retailers.
In a letter submitted to Congress on Tuesday, Feb. 8, the American Bankers Association said the potential changes, "will cause severe harm to the entire banking industry and, in particular, to community-based banks and the communities they serve."
The ABA's dire warning is a response to proposed regulations by the Federal Reserve on debit card and credit card fees ...
Continue readingOpenGovernment Is A Finalist For SXSW Accelerator
We've been really pleased with the enthusiastic response that OpenGov has received since its launch. Today's brought one more bit of good news: the site's been named a finalist in the Accelerator competition of this year's SXSWi. You can find the full details over at the OG blog. Congratulations to David, Carl and the rest of the PPF team!
And while I've got you thinking about state legislative data, check out what Gabriel Florit's done to visualize data from Open States. It's very neat stuff, and a great early example of the kinds of things that we think the project will make possible.
Continue readingHouse Rules Transparency Victory
While we’re still waiting to see the draft copy of the House Rules from the incoming majority today, we’re now... View Article
Continue readingNation’s biggest banks benefit most from Fed program
Data recently disclosed by the Federal Reserve shows that one of its emergency lending programs, the Term Asset-Backed loan Facility or TALF, led to the purchasing of assets from 56 organizations--among them seven were also aided by the biggest bailout program, the Troubled Asset Relief Program, or TARP. Those seven financial firms benefited from $25 billion--or 35 percent--of the $71 billion in loans issued through through TALF.
More than two years after the financial crisis was touched off by the collapse of Lehman Brothers, when Congress, the Bush administration and independent agencies like the Federal Reserve took unprecedented actions to prop up bankers, brokers and other financial firms, the public is only now beginning to see detailed information on actions the government took that were considered secret before. While the Federal Reserve has released transaction level detail for TALF purchases, something that was ordered by Congress, it has withheld much of the underlying data for other emergency programs; Bloomberg.com reported that the Fed did not release information on the underlying securities purchased through the Term Securities Lending Facility program (TSLF) or the Term Auction Facility (TAF).
Tools for Transparency: GovSM
For the next month, we’ll be hosting special guest bloggers for our Tools for Transparency series. Today we introduce Josh Shpayher, founder of GovSM.com, a wiki website that keeps track of all the social media accounts of government, from congressional representatives to the Massachusetts Department of Transportation. GovSM believes that having a comprehensive catalogue of all the governmental use of social media will help government and the open gov community learn more about and improve their own social media practices to benefit their constituencies. By now, we’ve all heard about the social media wave and most of us have heard about Gov2.0 and governmental use (or their feeble attempts to use) social media. Though there have been many discussions amongst “good gov” people about government officials’ best practices for using social media, what has been lacking is a clearly defined method of determining how a government office or official can use social media to benefit their constituents. If a system of rating social media use can be widely circulated (similar to Golden Mouse rankings of congressional websites), I believe that the quality of government use of social media will rise dramatically.
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