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.
Luke Rosiak is a former Sunlight Foundation reporter and database analyst who now writes for the Washington Examiner. This post addresses the tooling around Extensible Business Reporting Language and provides recommendations on what needs to be done. You can reach Luke on Twitter at @lukerosiak.
In the early 1990s, long before most federal agencies had embraced the digital era, the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) undertook a truly “big data” initiative that showcased some of the best that open data had to offer: Its quarterly reports were uploaded in real time, in text, rather than PDF, format, to a public FTP server called EDGAR. (File Transfer Protocol or FTP is a standard network protocol used to copy a file from one host to another over a network.)
Like with the Federal Election Commission, the companies submitted their own reports, but they immediately entered the public record, and it was the government who required the submissions, dictated the forms and made them available.
EDGAR, which was implemented in part by Sunlight Foundation supporter Carl Malamud, revolutionized a massive industry of financial watchers who used the reports to decide what companies to invest in--and which to dump. Firms like Bloomberg and Reuters processed the text files into structured data, and analysts pored over them.
And before long, the SEC was pushing the ball even further, with talk of XBRL or Extensible Business Reporting Language. After all, financial information was almost entirely numbers-based, lending itself to computer analysis, and was fairly structured, with accountants all using a core of the same carefully-defined terms--though Wall Street accounting is too complex to fit in simple columns and rows, necessitating nested structures and the ability to dynamically define new terms.
The X in XBRL was a double-edged sword there. XBRL’s power, advocates said, was derived from its flexibility. It was a unified language that could express financial ideas whether the company was trading goats in Ethiopia or derivatives in Manhattan. To provide that kind of flexibility, it allowed accountants to define their own terms in financial documents, extending from a base of agreed-upon terms, in America called the US-GAAP.
But the US-GAAP itself had thousands of terms, and accountants who were accustomed to filing paper reports never bothered to learn its structure. Lazy filers created their own custom terms when buried somewhere in the GAAP, there was already a universal term that meant the same thing. That defeated the purpose of structured reporting, because it made comparing across companies impossible.
Continue readingOpenGov Voices: Open Data in Latin America: Here to stay
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.
Fabrizio Scrollini is currently working on a PhD on transparency and accountability in Latin America at the London School of Economics and Political Science. He co-founded DATAuy which supports Quesabes -- the first website in Uruguay that helps citizens request for public information from their government. DATAuy has also championed open government, open parliament, and transparency in Uruguay by collaborating with other NGOs in the region and organizing hackathons.
Two weeks ago Uruguay, a small Latin American country, had the pleasure of hosting open data and transparency activists from different corners of Latin America and the world for the first Latin American open data unconference. ABRELATAM (named after a plan on the Spanish word “abrelatas,” which means can opener), was organized by DATA Uruguay and Ciudadano Inteligente from Chile in a pioneer partnership to advance transparency and open data in the region. In this post I would like to share with you a snapshot of the awesome discussions that took place at the ABRELATAM.
Community matters.
This is hardly a surprise but community can mean different things. Indeed people are interested in open data for all sorts of reasons, but when it comes to a particular area or group of datasets, and the aim is social change, the need for different skills and common goals becomes crucial. Some of the greatest sessions were about how to link the different worlds of technology, communication, policy and social problem solving. Open data (or the lack of it) is sometimes a great excuse to put minds together working to achieve better outcomes. People working together (not just data) will deliver change, and this is done online, but offline engagement is crucial as well. Communities need to be expanded to involve more people and organizations who can also help to promote open data and use it for their own ends.
OpenGov Voices: Bringing Senate Campaigns into the 21st Century
Disclaimer: The opinions expressed by the guest blogger and those providing comments are theirs alone. Sunlight Foundation is not responsible for the accuracy 
of any of the information within the guest blog.
Jon Tester is the junior Senator from Montana. He and his wife, Sharla, still farm the 1,800 acres his grandparents homesteaded in 1912.
With the NSA’s secrets spilling into the news, folks around the country – including U.S. Senators – are demanding more transparency and accountability from the federal government. I fully support these calls for reform.
Transparency matters in the legislative branch, too. My fellow Senators must not neglect their own backyards. My colleagues need to hold themselves accountable to the American people and join me in lifting the veil that hides how Senators and Senate candidates report the money that funds their campaigns.
The Senate’s reporting system is stuck in the Dark Ages, and it’s hurting our democracy.
Continue readingOpenGov Voices: Open Government is About Raising People’s Opinions
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.
Lucas Dailey is a UX designer and Chief Innovation Officer at political social network MyMaryland.net. You can follow him on Twitter @lucasdailey.
The mechanism for citizen interaction with government doesn’t start and end at the ballot box. An essential goal of our fight for greater government openness and transparency is to give citizens’ opinions greater power. For government to be responsive it must have a fast, easy means to understand how constituents feel about any given issues. Ultimately, government itself is a relationship between the institutions that constitute a polity and its citizens.
MyMaryland.net wants to bridge the gap between voters and their representatives because we believe people’s voices matter. MyMaryland.net connects verified Maryland voters with their elected officials in democracy’s first 24/7 online Town Hall.
Participation: a two-sided problem
One of the keys to a vibrant representative democracy is an informed and engaged citizenry. Yet only 10% of Americans contact their elected officials between elections. We can do better by lowering the hurdles to participate and raising the political value of opinions.
Members of Congress get hundreds or thousands of emails every day. It takes a considerable amount of staff resources to separate constituents from non-constituents, and when they’re finally separated only a very small percentage of messages are from actual voters in their districts.
With MyMaryland.net we prescreen all users through the Maryland voter registration file then connect them with their actual elected officials. Since elected officials know all messages and votes in their MyMaryland.net Town Hall are from their registered voters then they don’t need to spend the time to verify them.
Voters can show their support or opposition to a post simply by voting it up or down instead of writing their own message, thus saving time for citizens and legislative staff. Legislative staff also save time by writing a single response to each post instead of multiple responses to numerous similar messages.
With MyMaryland.net voters and elected officials are able to convey more opinions in less time.
Continue readingOpenGov Voices: Local Government Financial Transparency: Scaling It Up
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.
Groups like OpenOakland and Open City have done some great work in making local government financial data more accessible. Machine readable data sets and visualizations help citizens better understand how their tax money is being used.
Because these efforts typically require volunteers and/or visionary political leaders, they tend to focus on individual governmental units. Since the U.S. has some 80,000 local governments, it is unlikely that these standalone projects will give us anything like nationwide transparency of local government fiscal data. Building a nationwide open data set would be very beneficial because it would allow users to compare their city or county to comparable units across the country. It could answer such questions as “how does our public safety spending stack up against other cities with similar population and crime rate?” It could also allow us to compare the fiscal condition of cities in order to see which are headed in the direction of Detroit, Harrisburg, San Bernardino and Stockton – toward bankruptcy.
A Mountain View California based company, OpenGov.com, is working with several local governments to place their fiscal data online, in graphical form. If successful, this firm could greatly increase the amount of open government financial data – for those governments that are willing to subscribe to their transparency service.
But what about situations in which a local government is unwilling to cooperate and volunteers are unavailable? This universe is likely to include some of the more fiscally irresponsible governments in places that lack tech-savvy, engaged citizens.
In these cases, we can collect and report data on behalf of those governments. Recently, my group, Public Sector Credit Solutions, collected legally mandated financial reports from 260 city governments in California. We extracted standardized data from these reports and placed the information online for free here. We’d love to work with other groups to roll out this type of fiscal transparency to other types of local governments (like counties and regional transportation districts) and to the rest of the country.
Continue readingOpenGov Voices: Hack the Budget! (or try to)
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 is a guest post from Anthony Holley, a member of the intrepid Hack for Western Mass team that spent the weekend of June 1 trying to track money reported in USASpending.gov back to the federal budget. Anthony is a writer living and working in Amherst, MA. He is interested in helping good non-profits grow so that they can do their best work.
Advocacy groups like the Sunlight Foundation and National Priorities Project have long lamented the state of data gathered on USAspending.gov, which remains the key, searchable data repository for those interested in learning about and educating others on our federal spending. Individual federal agencies are responsible for reporting their expenditures to USAspending.gov in the interest of contributing to an open, transparent government. A working group at the Western Massachusetts Civic Day of Hacking sought to reconcile the information on USAspending.gov with the information in the budget appendix, published by the Office of Management and Budget (OMB), keeping in mind that true transparency means being able to track expenditures from the budget to USAspending.gov. A group of computer programmers, data managers, and political activists got together to work on this problem over the weekend of June 1 and 2. What we found was that this goal was at least very difficult, and perhaps impossible, to achieve.
We started by looking at the data on the OMB website to see if we could parse it for useful identifiers that we could then match up with the data on USAspending.gov. The data on the OMB website turns out to be particularly user unfriendly for these purposes, presented in XML and PDF formats that are not easy to search by category. Each section of the budget has a Treasury ID, so we took that as our starting point for trying to match expenditures listed on the budget with USASpending.gov.
Hack for Western Mass team. Photo credit: Molly McLeod
Continue readingOpenGov Voices: Keeping Tabs on Your Local City Council with Councilmatic
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.
Derek Eder is a co-founder of Open City, a group of volunteers in Chicago that create apps with open data to improve citizen understanding of our government through transparency, and owner of DataMade, a civic technology and open data consultancy.
City councils shape nearly every aspect of city life, from what kind of canopy you can have on a storefront, to how much we pay in taxes, to the number of cops on the street.
Unfortunately, it is hard for citizens to keep tabs on what their city council is doing. A few years ago, if you wanted to be informed about a city council’s actions, you had to go to the clerk’s office and page through the hundreds or thousands of bills that were added or updated every month.
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.
OpenGov Voices: On the eve of a disappointing FOI law, Spanish civic organizations meet the challenge
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 guest post is co-authored by David Cabo, Victoria Anderica and Jacobo Elosua. David and Jacobo co-founded Fundación Ciudadana Civio, which promotes an engaged citizenry through transparency and data openness in Spain. Together, they empower citizens with information technologies and data journalism to demand for transparency and accountability from government. David also created dondevanmisimpuestos.es, a website that visualizes annual budgets from Spanish public administrations. Victoria Anderica works with Access Info Europe -- a group that provides access to legislation information under the Right to Information Rating projects. She is involved in the “Legal Leaks” -- a project that trains journalists on how to use access to information laws.
Corruption is the second biggest concern for Spaniards, right after unemployment, according to quarterly polls.
From news about fraud accusations about the King of Spain’s son-in-law to judicial investigations into the ruling People’s Party to a scandal involving the Socialist Party and major trade unions over unemployment benefits fraud, citizens are losing patience and much of the media’s attention is focused on the country’s institutions.
In response to these scandals, the word “transparency” is suddenly heard in every corner, in every demonstration, in every TV debate. Many more Spaniards are now aware of what some civic organizations have been denouncing for years: Spain is the only country in Europe with more than one million inhabitants who do not have access to information legislation.
The Spanish Congress is currently debating a draft law that fails the test when subjected to most basic international standards. Access to information is still not a fundamental right in line with the ruling of international courts of human rights. Currently, the law only applies to administrative information – not to the judicial and legislative branches of the state. The definition of “administrative information” excludes drafts, notes, internal reports or communications between administrative bodies. And the monitoring and appeals body is not independent because it is part of the Ministry of Public Administrations.
Continue readingOpenGov Voices: How TurboVote is Shaping the Future of Voting
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.
Kathryn Peters is the co-founder of TurboVote -- a nonpartisan nonprofit based in New York, which makes the voting process easier through a sign up system that helps users track rules and deadlines about voting -- to ensure that all citizens are included in the democratic process. You can reach her at @kathrynepeters.
Voting is one of the most fundamental interactions between citizens and our government. And it's a system whose 19th-century pedigree is showing badly. If for previous generations, gathering on Tuesday at central locations offered convenience and community, our busy schedules and long commutes have made getting to the polls one more obstacle to democratic participation.
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.
Sunlight offered us a seed grant to run a pilot at Boston University, which helped us catch the attention of Google, earn funding from the Knight Foundation, and build partnerships at schools from the University of Florida to Hobart and William Smith Colleges, until by the end of 2012, we'd reached nearly 200,000 voters. Going forward, we want to offer every voter an easier, streamlined voting experience. In order to do this, we'll need to work directly with the 8,000+ local election administrators who handle the voting process across the U.S. So we set out to learn more about our new favorite people. Service designers from Reboot shadowed elections offices from Brattleboro, VT, to Austin, TX, with stops in Denver, CO, Columbia, MO, Louisville, KY and Stuart, FL along the way. The research team got to know the people behind the scenes of American democracy, their processes and technologies, and got hands-on with e-poll books and barcode scanners as we learned the tools of the trade.
OpenGov Voices: Beyond the Big City: Think Federally, Hack Locally
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.
Becky Sweger is the Director of Data and Technology at National Priorities Project. NPP is a non-partisan, non-profit organization dedicated to making the U.S. transparent and accessible so people can prioritize and influence how their tax dollars are spent. You can reach her at bsweger@nationalpriorities.org
Hack for Western Mass is happening at UMass Amherst on June 1-2—one of over 80 Hack for Change events happening across the country. We hope you’ll join us at UMass Amherst as we bring the first-ever civic hackathon to Western Massachusetts.
Isn’t Western Mass in the middle of nowhere? Can’t you just hack in Boston?
National Priorities Project (NPP), a national federal budget research organization, has long thought about how our local community can benefit from the open data and civic hacking movements that are quickly gaining worldwide momentum. We attend events all over the country, and as transparency champions, we applaud when DC hacks its municipal code, Philly gets a Chief Data Officer, and Chicago starts posting data on Github.
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