Tag Archive: OpenGov Voices

OpenGov Voices: Chasing the 8-hour app

by Tom Meagher Oct 11, 2013 11:00 am

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 Tom Meagher 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.

OpenGov Voices: How VT Diggers is tackling state campaign finance

by Anne Galloway Oct 4, 2013 11:11 am

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 headshotAnne guest blog.

Anne Galloway is the founder of VTDigger.org -- a statewide news website in Vermont that publishes watchdog reports on state government, politics, consumer affairs, business and public policy. She has worked as a reporter and editor in Vermont for 17 years covering the Vermont Legislature, the governor and state government. Anne can be reached at agalloway@vtdigger.org.

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.

shumlin913edt — *Peter Shumlin, governor of Vermont*

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).

OpenGov Voices: Data provides constant revelations for central Illinois communities

by Brant Houston Sep 27, 2013 11:10 am

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 Brant Houston - professor of journalism 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.

CU Citizen Access — *An illustrative representation of an interactive story about the efforts to clean toxic waste from a neighborhood community in Urbana, IL. Image by Acton H. Gorton for CU-CitizenAccess.org*

OpenGov Voices: CivOmega: Making Government Data Useful to Everyone

by Dan Schultz Sep 20, 2013 2:30 pm

Disclaimer: The opinions expressed by the guest blogger and those providing comments are theirs alone and do not reflect the... View Article

OpenGov Voices: 3 simple ways cities can improve access to online information

by Matt MacDonald Sep 13, 2013 11:20 am

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 Matt MacDonald 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 form

Each 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:

Which town created the document? (Proctor)
What type of document is this? (Meeting Minutes)
Which legislative body is responsible for the document (Selectboard)
When was the meeting? (November 27, 2012 - it's better to use a full date format like this)
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.

OpenGov Voices: A Transparent Approach to Understanding Local Government Debt

by Marc Joffe Sep 6, 2013 11:07 am

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 Joffe_Headshot_1 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

OpenGov Voices: Roundup of voices you may have missed

by Zubedah Nanfuka Aug 30, 2013 4:44 pm

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: Kathryn Peters

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.

OpenGov Voices: OPEN PR: A Catalyst for Civic Engagement

by Alvin Quiñones Aug 23, 2013 11:33 am

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 Alvin Quiñones responsible for the accuracy of any of the information within the guest blog.

Alvin Quiñones is the co-founder and director for the Center for Integrity and Public Policy (CIPP). CIPP promotes government transparency and civic engagement in Puerto Rico. He can be reached at alvin@cipp-pr.org

Late last summer, a graduate student friend of mine and I were discussing the need to bring a different dynamic to the discussion of policy and politics in Puerto Rico. Day after day, we would watch the news play out the same type of story lines, with representatives from each political party staking out opposite positions that seemed to be driven more by gang affiliation than actual analysis. The result? An audience distracted from any real discussion of the issues that affected their daily life. So we debated about how could we change this, and out of that summer conversation came a concern for the need to bring a different voice to the public.

As we attempted to gather some government data to be analyzed, we realized that information that should have been of easy access to the public was not readily available. That is how we came upon the idea of gathering the data ourselves and opening a data platform that could be used by journalists, academic institutions, government employees and the general public to further the access to valuable information. Open Puerto Rico was born.

Open PR Open Puerto Rico goes beyond being just a source of accurate and objective information: it is also a tool of empowerment. How do we achieve a responsive government if the people don’t know what’s going on? How can they decide which policies to support or how to vote if they have no access to relevant information? It is also an administrative tool for decision makers in government, nonprofits, and the private business in finding the information they need.

At Open PR, we aim to create easier access to government information. Our mission is not to tell people what to think about an issue or a political party, but rather to give them the tools to draw their own conclusions with objective and accurate evidence. We also want to promote a dialogue amongst the people, to be a catalyst for communication and, ultimately, civic engagement.

OpenGov Voices: Catastrophe of District Budgets in the Punjab Province of Pakistan

by Zahra Lodhi Aug 16, 2013 11:03 am

Disclaimer: The opinions expressed by the guest blogger and those providing comments are theirs alone and do not reflect the opinions of Zahra Lodhi the Sunlight Foundation or any employee thereof. Sunlight Foundation is not responsible for the accuracy of any of the information within the guest blog.

Zahra Lodhi is the Project Manager - Strengthening Civil Society for Improved Accountability at the Center for Peace and Development Initiatives. Zahra started her career as a Research Associate at Pakistan Agricultural Research Council, Government of Pakistan. She can be reached at zahra.lodi@gmail.com

The key to practical democracy is the active involvement of citizens in every aspect of governance; and budget as an imperative instrument of governance is no exception. However, the budget-making process in Pakistan has been closed and largely opaque and people in general have little opportunity to participate in the process that affects the quality of their lives directly.

In recent decades budget transparency has become a pillar of good governance around the world, but in Pakistan a lot of work still needs to be done. The budget making process in Pakistan is wrapped in curtains of secrecy, as both the government and political parties are taking no major steps to make this process participatory or peoples oriented.

CPDI 1 The Centre for Peace and Development Initiatives (CPDI), an Islamabad-based think tank, conducted a study to monitor the process of budget making at the district level. The main aim of this study was to collect research based evidence and find out whether the district governments of Punjab are following the timelines and required procedures for the budget making process. The District Government Budget Rules 2003 lay a clear outline for different timelines and procedures to follow, including a clear requirement for people’s participation in the budget making process.

The survey results revealed very disturbing trends in budget formulation.

OpenGov Voices: FreedomHack: A Hackathon for Good

by Barrett Holmes Aug 9, 2013 10:16 am

Disclaimer: The opinions expressed by the guest blogger and those providing comments are Barrett_Holmes_Pitner_headshot 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.

Barrett Holmes Pitner is the Senior Global Editor, Cont3nt.com (one of the organizers of the FreedomHack. You can reach him at barrett@cont3nt.com @barrettpitner

This weekend, August 10-11, coders, hackers, policy experts and journalists will spend 24 hours at a hackathon feverishly working together to develop tools and products that will help those living in the most dangerous parts of the world tell their stories. This is FreedomHack.

FreedomHack 1 We have all been to hackathons and witnessed how the combination of energy, enthusiasm, intelligence, creativity and technical expertise consistently results in products that could take months to conceive in a traditional corporate structure. We understand how removing the monotony of “work” from the equation and replacing it with “fun and passion” can create brilliant results, and this is what we aim to achieve this weekend.

When the organizers of FreedomHack conceived the idea, it was just a handful of us in a room trying to figure out the best way to help these communities. A hackathon clearly rose to the top because of its inventive, spontaneous and fun structure.

From the onset, we have always referred to FreedomHack as “a hack for good.” FreedomHack will allow every participant the opportunity to have fun and work hard over one weekend for the benefit of people who live in embattled communities who desperately need your expertise.

This hackathon will focus on developing secure tools and products for those who live in parts of Mexico that have been overrun by cartel violence and human rights related issues. Citizen reporters and journalists regularly face threats on their lives and at the very least, censorship on the vital topics they are reporting.

Register for the FreedomHack hackathon.

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