Boing Boing highlights CommitteeCaller.com, a new app that allows people to easily call an entire congressional committee to express their views. Consider it speed dial for congressional committee members. The site was built by Fred Benenson, a master's degree student at NYU's Tisch School of the Arts, as a final project for a class he was taking this fall. "The web application utilizes the open source Asterisk PBX system to connect you to every senator or house member on a particular committee," Benenson writes in the Boing Boing post. "No more digging around the 'net entering zip-codes to retrieve phone numbers of representatives," he writes. He is working on a state legislature version as well.
Benenson says he created the site out of frustration after spending hours dialing every member of a particular congressional committee. He realized that calling individual committee members should not have to be so laborious, and the process ought to be able to be automated. "I was able to aggregate a database for myself containing all 540 110 th Congress representatives and their committee affiliations," Benenson writes. He created a secondary database containing all 5,000 specific affiliations. And he states he'd be happy to share both databases with anyone who is interested in developing a similar application.
Continue readingMajor Victory for Transparency
This afternoon, our friends at Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington (CREW) got a major victory for all who care for openness and transparency.
A federal judge ruled that the logs kept by the Secret Service of visitors to the White House and the Vice President's residence are public records and subject to Freedom of Information Act requests. The Bush White House had been fighting the release of the documents in an effort to hide evidence and details of visits from disgraced lobbyist Jack Abramoff and prominent religious conservative leaders. The White House insists that the logs are presidential records and should not be public, and wants the Secret Service to destroy its copies of the logs once they are turned over to the White House. They were wrong.
In sum, according to CREW: "As a result of today's ruling, records of visits to both the White House complex and the residency of the vice president are now publicly available through the FOIA."
Continue readingHidden in Plain Sight
Last week, the Center for Democracy and Technology (CDT) and OMB Watch, both Sunlight Foundation grantees, released a report highlighting how many federal agencies' databases and websites contain flaws making them hard to search with commonly used search engines. The report, "Hiding in Plain Sight: Why Important Government Information Cannot Be Found through Commercial Search Engines," shows how vital government information appears "invisible" to ordinary Americans using the Internet. Congress passed the E-Government Act of 2002 to promote the public's access to government information and services. Based on this report, there a whole lot of work that still needs to be done.
The report not only points out the flaws in current government databases that make it hard, if not impossible, for ordinary citizens to find the data they are looking for, but it also provides fixes that would encourage greater accessibility of information by making it more searchable.
Continue readingThe Washington Independent
The Center for Independent Media (CIM) is poised to launch its new Washington outpost -- The Washington Independent. Allison Silver, a former editor for The New York Times and The Los Angeles Times, will be news editor. Laura McGann, formerly with TPMmuckraker, is on board as managing editor. They are attracting some significant talent.
The Center was launched in 2006 to support talented bloggers with journalism and internet training, as well as to provide logistical support. The brains behind it are David Bennahum, founding writer for Wired magazine, and Ali Savino, a former Microsoft programmer. Thus far the group has fostered four state-based news sites, Colorado Confidential, Iowa Independent, Michigan Messenger, and Minnesota Monitor. Each site operates independently, and as CIM's website states, "the sites' contributors do more reporting than most bloggers and are more opinionated on key local issues than most daily news reporters."
Continue readingUSASpending.gov Launches
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
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 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 readingLegal Defense Funds
Earlier this week, the U.S. Supreme Court refused to hear an appeal by Rep. Jim McDermott of a ruling that he acted improperly by passing on to reporters a recording of a 1996 telephone call where Republican leaders talked strategy in regard to the ethics case pending against former House Speaker Newt Gingrich (R-Ga.). This week's decision also leaves standing a previous court ruling saying that McDermott would have to pay $60,000 in damages and $800,000 in legal bills to now House Minority Leader John Boehner (R-Ohio), who had sued the Washington Democrat in 1998.
The question is, how is McDermott going to pay? CQ looked into whether he can use a legal-defense fund to help pay Boehner and it seems possible. It turns out that McDermott is one of six House members who maintain active legal defense funds, reporting contributions this year. CQ says that the rise in these separate accounts funds is a result of an increase in Justice Department and Federal Election Commission investigations.
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