When we launched TransparencyCorps at the end of June, we ran a few small earmark campaigns, to digitize little batches of earmark request letters that legislators had posted on their websites. These campaigns wrapped up very quickly, and at the same time, the House decided to release earmark request letters en masse, and we didn't have to do our campaigns per-legislator anymore.
Given the demonstrated interest in earmarks, we decided to run a much larger campaign, for all the earmarks released by the House Appropriations Committee, starting with those for the Commerce, Justice, and Science Subcommittee. These were released in a single massive PDF, which I split up into individual 1- or 2-page request letters.
This campaign involved 1,183 letters, and we had the campaign run for 5,537 completed tasks. Total volunteer time, as measured on TransparencyCorps: over 472 hours. That's nearly 20 man-days. Here are the results.
Continue readingIs Government a Data Wholesaler or Retailer?
Imagine if Costco announced that they were going to take the Costco experience to Manhattan, and open up convenience stores across the the island. Further, imagine shopping at these new CostCo bodegas, all of 500 square feet, with your giant cart, selecting from what the CostCo bodega has to offer in this limited amount of space! At your local CostCo bodega you have to choose from either 400 rolls of toilet paper, 70 lbs of dehydrated mashed potatoes, or a 6 pack of giant boxes of cereal. That's pretty much all they could store in inventory at the CostCo bodega because they wouldn't have room in 500 square feet for anything else. And good luck carrying all that home!
Sounds absurd, doesn't it?
Continue readingJournalism’s “Raw Data” Future
ReadWriteWeb published an interesting article written by Zach Beauvais with Talis and editor of Nodalities Magazine on how data is... View Article
Continue readingA Little Help for Open Data Policy? A Call to Data Wonks
If you check out phase III of the Open Government Dialog going on now, there’s currently a pretty glaring omission:... View Article
Continue readingPrison Incarceration Rates and the National Criminal Justice Commission Act
This post exists in the service of taking government data and showing what you can do with it. Yesterday, the... View Article
Continue readingWhat do people want from Recovery.gov?
We scraped all the ideas off of the latest National Dialogue on Recovery.gov to see of we could condense what most of the ideas were about. Here's what we got:
Looks like most of the ideas were about data. People sure do want to set that data free, don't they?
Transparency for Bird Strikes
Recently, the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) released a call for public comments on a proposed ruling barring the release of... View Article
Continue readingWhat Are You Breathing Today?
Yesterday I wrote about how more and better downloadable data on toxics in our neighborhoods will be coming our way... View Article
Continue readingSo Now Let’s Get Boring
Recovery.gov is off to a good start. Good design. Nice visuals. Early opportunity for citizen engagement. (Others think so too.)... View Article
Continue readingTech Liberation Front on Transparency
Yesterday, I participated in my first skype conversation, a podcast interview hosted by Berin Szoka, of the Tech Liberation Front.... View Article
Continue reading