Disclaimer: The opinions expressed by the guest blogger and those providing comments are theirs alone and do not reflect the opinions of the Sunlight Foundation or any employee thereof. Sunlight Foundation is not 
responsible for the accuracy of any of the information within the guest blog.
María Baron is the Executive Director of Directorio Legislativo -- a nonpartisan organization, which promotes the strengthening of legislative branches of government and the consolidation of the democratic system through dialogue, transparency and access to public information in Argentina. She can be reached on mbaron@directoriolegislativo.org.
"The struggle itself [...] is enough to fill a man's heart. One must imagine Sisyphus happy." Albert Camus
It seemed like the myth of Sisyphus, who repeatedly and meaninglessly pushed a boulder up the mountain just to see it roll down again and again for 12 years. That is how long it took Directorio Legislativo to access nearly 2,000 financial statements of national legislators in Argentina.
At the beginning it was chaos. Obscurity. No one in Congress would release the documents so we had to individually ask each of the 329 members of both Chambers. There were other times when together with other organizations, we litigated against the Argentine Chamber of Deputies and the case was in the Supreme Court for four years. In 2003, we organized 100 volunteers to ask the Argentine Senate to release financial statements of all Senators. We trained them with these recommendations on how to contact Senators (page 33 Annex A). The campaign, which lasted 4 months, ended with a presidential Senatorial Decree (419/02) signed by Dr. Juan Carlos Maqueda, Acting President of the Senate -- who declared that the documents must be made available “to the citizens who have made this demand and to any person who should request them in the future”.
In 2003, among other organizations across the world who recognized the case, was the World Bank. Additionally, during the next five or six years, the asset declarations were also released -- nearly 15 months after they were formally required by law.
After years of collecting the information a new question arose. What should we do with the 2000 documents we had?
Other international organizations had not been interested in the documents in the beginning and we figured they would not be interested in the future either. Looking for ways to make use of the information, our Colombian friends of Congreso Visible showed us how their alliance with local leading newspaper El Espectador in 2012 had increased their web users enormously.
A little bit more than a year ago, the leading newspaper La Nación of Argentina got interested in using all the data we had. We signed an agreement and reached out to sister organizations Poder Ciudadano and ACIJ -- who had also been collecting the same data on public officials within the Executive and Federal Judges respectively.
Continue readingOpenGov Voices: You are invited to TransparencyCamp Alabama 2013!
Disclaimer: The opinions expressed by the guest blogger and those providing comments are theirs alone and do not reflect the opinions of the Sunlight Foundation or any employee thereof. Sunlight Foundation 
is not responsible for the accuracy of any of the information within the guest blog.
Jackson Stephen is the founder of OpenBama -- a nonpartisan website that compiles data from various sources pertaining to Alabama State government into an easy to use tool. OpenBama desires to inspire the citizens of Alabama to demand more transparency within state and local government. Jackson is also organizing the first TransparencyCamp in Alabama. He can be reached at jackson.stephen.r@gmail.com.
Around 2008 I began the work on what would become OpenBama.org. At the time I started the project, I had never heard of the Sunlight Foundation, open government, or any of the wonderful transparency projects across the country. I was one guy with a computer and an idea to make Alabama legislative data meaningful to the citizens of my state. Little did I know that there was an entire community of individuals working on similar transparency projects across the country, individuals like myself that desired to take government information to the people.
Continue readingOpenGov Voices: Transparency with Arlington Visual Budget
Disclaimer: The opinions expressed by the guest blogger and those providing comments are theirs alone and do not reflect the opinions of the Sunlight Foundation or any employee thereof. Sunlight Foundation is not responsible for the accuracy of any of the information within the guest blog.
This OpenGov Voices guest post was written by Alan H. Jones and Roger Zhu. Alan and Roger worked on a financial data visualization project for the town of Arlington, MA. Alan is a Vice-Chairman of Arlington’s Finance Committee in Arlington, MA and has spent the last 12 years helping organizations and individuals make effective use of information technology. You can read more of his work here. Roger is an improvisational engineer, industrial designer and interaction designer. He is a designer with Involution Studios.
See (and interact with) your town's budget: exploring the next generation of accessibility in financial information.
Government budgets can be tough to understand, but now the town of Arlington, Massachusetts is providing the next generation of accessibility in financial information that allows citizens to see, engage and discuss.
See:
The Arlington Visual Budget is an interactive web-based application that holds all the town’s financial budget information from 2008 to 2018. The data was broken down into three sections: revenues, expense and funds. In each section, you can drill down to see each government department’s total spending including percentage of totals compared to last year and what that data means.
On the right side of the data is a treemap (below) with interactive color populated by data in real time. The map below illustrates the impact of a particular revenue or expenditure compared to the whole budget and how that budget has changed over time.
All the data comes directly from Arlington town’s financial office where we used current technology to build a pipeline that converts files created in Microsoft Excel to JSON -- a lightweight data-interchange format used for computation within the site.
Continue readingOpenGov Voices: Chasing the 8-hour app
Disclaimer: The opinions expressed by the guest blogger and those providing comments are theirs alone and do not reflect the opinions of the Sunlight Foundation or any employee thereof. Sunlight 
Foundation is not responsible for the accuracy of any of the information within the guest blog.
Tom Meagher is the co-founder of Hack Jersey and the data editor at Digital First Media's Project Thunderdome in New York City. Follow Hack Jersey at @hackjersey or www.hackjersey.com. Reach Tom at @ultracasual.
A few weeks ago, Hack Jersey brought a group of journalists and developers together to wrestle with campaign finance data. We thought it would be a good opportunity for many to get their hands dirty and to start thinking about new ways of reporting and building with the data.
In one room of our event at the New Jersey Institute of Technology, a group of journalists went on a data expedition, learning how to explore reports from the state's Election Law Enforcement Commission. In another, we gathered developers to try to build a campaign finance app for New Jersey using the Sunlight Foundation's APIs in a single work session.
Continue readingOpenGov Voices: How VT Diggers is tackling state campaign finance
Disclaimer: The opinions expressed by the guest blogger and those providing comments are theirs alone and do not reflect the opinions of the Sunlight Foundation or any employee thereof. Sunlight Foundation is not responsible for the accuracy of any of the information within the 
guest blog.
In 2010, I began reporting on campaign contributions in Vermont. That year, we had an open seat in the governor’s office and there were five candidates in the Democratic gubernatorial primary. I was shocked to discover that the only information available from the Vermont Secretary of State’s office came in the form of unsearchable PDF scans of spreadsheet forms. The secretary requires that candidates use a form available in Excel on the state website. Candidates fill out the form and submit it in paper format to the secretary. It is then scanned and posted on the website.
In spite of the fact that there was no easy way to search the information, I began scouring the web for information about people, advocacy groups and businesses. I soon discovered that many businesses, political action committees and unions had direct financial connections to the candidates. I wrote a series of investigative stories about contributions from out of state, from businesses and wealthy individuals to candidates of the two major parties in statewide races.
We revealed that paving and signage companies donated thousands of dollars to a candidate for lieutenant governor who had served as chair of Senate Transportation and who owned a road construction and engineering firm. We also tracked a donor who contributed four times to Peter Shumlin, using four different LLCs. The Associated Press picked up our story about David Blittersdorf’s contributions and the more than $4 million in state tax subsidies that he garnered for his company’s solar projects.
As a result of these stories, news organizations and others pressured the secretary of state to develop a searchable campaign finance database in 2011. Though the secretary has said he is willing to take on the project, he has been unable to obtain funding. This fall, the secretary put out an RFP for the project, which would be completed in 2015 (at the earliest).
Continue readingOpenGov Voices: Data provides constant revelations for central Illinois communities
Disclaimer: The opinions expressed by the guest blogger and those providing comments are theirs alone and do not reflect the opinions of the Sunlight Foundation
or any employee thereof. Sunlight Foundation is not responsible for the accuracy of any of the information within the guest blog.
Brant Houston is the Knight Chair in Investigative Reporting at the College of Media at the University of Illinois and Editor in Chief of CU-CitizenAccess -- a community online news and information project devoted to investigative and enterprise coverage of social, justice and economic issues in east central Illinois. He can be reached at brant.houston@gmail.com
CU-CitizenAccess.org, an award-winning online newsroom, was launched with public data and it continues to thrive and grow with data about the central Illinois region.
Conceived as a digital platform for university students, faculty and journalism professionals, the project began with a review of basic Census data for the communities of Champaign and Urbana, Illinois in 2008. (Thus, the “C” for Champaign and the “U” for Urbana.) The data revealed what seemed like a surprisingly high percentage of people living in poverty – about 20 percent – in a county that is home to the University of Illinois, a top public educational institution.
But as we scanned the data, we knew there were questions about whether college students, with low earned income, were distorting the numbers. So we looked at the percentage of subsidized school lunches and saw that more than half the school children were receiving lunches. We also read news stories and talked with the staff at the local newspaper and realized there was more than a story to pursue – that there was an ongoing project.
While collecting more data and information, we worked with colleagues to raise funds from a local community foundation, matching money from the Knight Foundation’s Community Information program, and from the University. By the spring 2009, work was underway by Illinois journalism alum Pam Dempsey and Shelley Smithson. In December 2009, the website was up and running and alum Acton Gorton, was helping administer the website while reporting too.
OpenGov Voices: CivOmega: Making Government Data Useful to Everyone
Disclaimer: The opinions expressed by the guest blogger and those providing comments are theirs alone and do not reflect the... View Article
Continue readingOpenGov Voices: 3 simple ways cities can improve access to online information
Disclaimer: The opinions expressed by the guest blogger and those providing comments are theirs alone and do not reflect the opinions of the Sunlight Foundation or any employee 
thereof. Sunlight Foundation is not responsible for the accuracy of any of the information within the guest blog.
Matt MacDonald is the co-founder and president at NearbyFYI. NearbyFYI collects city government data and documents, helping make local government information accessible and understood. He can be reached at matt@nearbyfyi.com. Matt is also one of the winners of Sunlight Foundation’s OpenGov Grants.
At NearbyFYI we review online information and documents from hundreds of city and town websites. Our CityCrawler service has found and extracted text from over 100,000 documents for the more than 170 Vermont cities and towns that we track. We're adding new documents and municipal websites all the time, and we wanted to share a few tips that make it easier for citizens to find meeting minutes, permit forms and documents online. The information below is written for a non-technical audience but some of the changes might require assistance from your webmaster, IT department or website vendor.
Create a unique web page for each document or formEach city or town meeting that occurs should have its own unique web page for agenda items, meeting minutes and other documents. We often see cities and towns creating a single, very large web page that contains an entire year of meeting minutes. This may be convenient for the person posting the meeting minutes online but presents a number of challenges for the citizen who is trying to find a specific meeting agenda or the minutes from that meeting.
Here is an example of meeting minutes that are in a single page that requires the citizen to scroll and scroll to find what they are looking for. This long archived page structure also presents challenges to web crawlers and tools that look to create structured information from the text. Proctor, VT provides a good example for what we look for in a unique meeting minutes document. We like that this document can answer the following questions:
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Which town created the document? (Proctor)
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What type of document is this? (Meeting Minutes)
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Which legislative body is responsible for the document (Selectboard)
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When was the meeting? (November 27, 2012 - it's better to use a full date format like this)
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Which board members attended the meeting? (Eric, Lloyd, Vincent, Bruce, William)
The only thing that could improve the access to this document is if it was saved as a plain text file rather than a PDF file. Creating a single web page or document for each meeting means that citizens don't have to scan very large documents to find what they are looking for.
Continue readingOpenGov Voices: A Transparent Approach to Understanding Local Government Debt
Disclaimer: The opinions expressed by the guest blogger and those providing comments are theirs alone and do not reflect the opinions of the Sunlight Foundation or any employee thereof. Sunlight 
Foundation is not responsible for the accuracy of any of the information within the guest blog.
Marc Joffe is the founder of Public Sector Credit Solutions (PSCS) which applies open data and analytics to rating government bonds. Before starting PSCS, Marc was a Senior Director at Moody’s Analytics. You can contact him at marc@publicsectorcredit.org. Marc is also one of the winners of Sunlight Foundation’s OpenGov Grants.
High profile bankruptcy filings by Detroit and other cities, along with concerns about public employee pensions, are increasing borrowing costs for state and local governments. Higher interest payments to bondholders mean higher taxes and fewer services. However, with transparent data and analytics, local government bonds can get reasonable interest rates -- as this post will illustrate.
Over the last 70 years, municipal bond defaults have been rare. In a typical year, no more than one in 1,000 municipalities fail to make timely payments on their tax supported debt. Also, interest on municipal bonds is exempt from federal income taxes and usually free of state income taxes as well.
Because of their low risk and favorable tax treatment, municipal bonds have typically yielded less than US Treasury bonds – making it easy for states, cities, counties and school districts to finance new infrastructure. Time series data available from the Federal Reserve (a portion of which is depicted in the accompanying graph) show that yields on “munis” were lower than Treasuries from 1953 until the 2008 financial crisis. This discount returned briefly in 2010, but since Meredith Whitney predicted a wave of municipal bond defaults on 60 Minutes in December 2010, muni yields have exceeded Treasury yields – often by substantial margins.
Municipal and Treasury data Continue readingOpenGov Voices: Roundup of voices you may have missed
We are switching up this week’s OpenGov Voices and giving you a chance to catch up with some of the major OpenGov Voices blog posts that you may have missed. It’s also a good opportunity for you to reconnect with the wonderful opengov initiatives happening around the world and perhaps inspire you to start the transparency conversation in your community. Without much further ado:
Derek Eder’s post on how you can keep tabs on your local city council using a tool called Councilmatic -- was one not to 
miss.
OpenGov Voices: Keeping Tabs on your Local City Council with Councilmatic:
In recent years, many city clerks have taken a big step forward by publishing this legislation online. However, the current generation of municipal legislative information systems are mainly built to help councilmembers and clerks’ offices manage legislation. They were not built to help the public to understand what their city council is doing. Well, like so many of our problems, now there’s an app for that: Councilmatic.
When we launched our OpenGov Grants program in June (you can apply for a grant here), it was only appropriate that we show you how these grants are already at work. What better way than to let you hear from our friends at TurboVote. Kathryn Peters’ post on how TurboVote (a previous Sunlight grantee) is shaping the future of voting that you don’t have to wait in line (and sometimes miss a chance to cast your vote) because their tool is changing all that.
OpenGov Voices: How TurboVote is Shaping the Future of Voting: 
In 2010, my friend Seth Flaxman and I set out to create an electoral system that would fit the way WE live: TurboVote, a new user interface for voting, as it were, complete with push notifications about election deadlines and a Netflix-worthy delivery system for all that paperwork, so we didn't have to buy envelopes or track down stamps just to stay engaged.Continue reading
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