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Continue readingTools for Transparency: Analyzing Engagement with PostRank
We often take blogs for granted, but they remain a wonderful resource for users and an essential, easy-to-use tool for... View Article
Continue readingTools 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.
Continue readingTools for Transparency: Note Taking with Twitter and Google Docs
Not too long ago I attended a Crisis Camp unconference hosted at George Washington University in Washington, DC. For my... View Article
Continue readingTools for Transparency: Live Streaming to the Web
For many, the “live web” was a meaningless concept until the aftermath of the 2009 Iranian presidential election when protesters... View Article
Continue readingTools for Transparency: The Vote-to-Promote Model
News aggregation services that use the vote-to-promote model like Reddit and Digg, and Delicious and StumbleUpon to a degree, are... View Article
Continue readingRethinking Advocacy Email
Email is an incredible tool for many things, but it's also *not* a very good way to communicate for much of what we tend to use it for. And on top of that, we all just get so darned many! Reading email often seems more a nuisance than an opportunity to many (most?) people. And that's a shame. In fact, it's an outright "problem" if your job is to engage both current and potential supporters in your cause, because email is still considered the primary outreach channel for most organizations.
Continue readingLobbyists On Twitter
Saturday’s Washington Post features a story about lobbyists on twitter. The story points out the growth of telecom lobbyists on... View Article
Continue readingSunlight Live Recap: How We Did It
During the Health Care Summit on Thursday, Feb 25, Sunlight tried something new by connecting a live political event to the government data and information we work to make more accessible every day. Dubbed "Sunlight Live," our coverage of the joint Republican and Democratic heath care summit as a pilot was a smashing success, thanks to all of you.
Continue readingThe Little Things We Take For Granted
So, Nancy Pelosi and Steny Hoyer announced that they were going to place the final health care bill online for... View Article
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