Last week's Citizens United v. FEC Supreme Court decision was a game-changer in terms of corporate money in politics. In short, corporations will be allowed to freely spend unlimited amounts of money to support or oppose a candidate, just as long as there is no direct coordination with that candidate's campaign. Unprecedented amounts of corporate money will now flow into our political process. But here at Sunlight, we're focusing on the disclosure aspects of the decision. The majority opinion stated:
With the advent of the Internet, prompt disclosure of expenditures can provide shareholders and citizens with the information needed to hold corporations and elected officials accountable for their positions and supporters.
While the decision doesn't mandate "prompt disclosure", it does strongly recommend it. So what does disclosure at Internet speed look like?
Continue readingFCC’s Reboot
A couple of months ago, as part of our Redesigning the Government series, we took a stab at redesigning and rethinking the FCC website, which resulted in some good discussion between our organizations. Yesterday the FCC released their long awaited Reboot site, which by their definition is an attempt to be “your portal to take part in improving citizen interactions with the Federal Communications Commission”. The questions we've been asking ourselves while evaluating their new site are: what exactly does the above statement mean, what have they done well, and what are the things we think they still need to consider while moving forward.
Continue readingCitability Codeathon
Silona Bonewald from citability.org is holding a hackathon here in Washington, DC. You should consider attending. Citability is seeking to make it easy for government to publish documents online in a citable way.
Continue readingImagining /open
Last month President Obama unveiled his Open Government Directive to create further openness within the executive branch. This directive requires federal agencies to show how they are working toward transparency, public participation, and collaboration by requiring the addition of new web pages – "/open" pages – onto their existing sites. With the first deadline in the directive quickly approaching, we've put together our thoughts on what these pages should look like.
Continue readingHow to Manage Large Volunteer Hackathons
Here at Sunlight, we've handled lots of hackathons for the developer community-- especially around Open Government. Some have been productive, some have not. By now, I think we've gotten it down to a particularly good set of principles and ideas to share. Below is a collection of those ideas that will help you run your event more smoothly, and hopefully get the most out of your event.
Remember: hackathons are not social engagements or consensus driven activities. They're about doing work. Habitat for Humanity, for instance, doesn't get bunches of people together to talk about how they should build a house at the beginning of the day. They identify skillsets and put people to work as quickly as possible, often times before the volunteer event starts, and have a plan for what roles people can play before they get there.
Your attendees will show up eager to work, and more than likely they've sacrificed some of their time so that they could feel useful. It is your job to make them leave there feeling useful. That means being able to put them directly to work. That means:
Continue readingEvaluating /Open pages
Right now, we're focused on one thing: watching agencies put up their /Open page. We built a little tool that allows us to check in with each agency daily and notify us when it is up. When we put it up, agencies like the Department of Transportation, and the Department of Agriculture quickly put up placeholder pages to get a green check-box next to their name. Silly.
The point of the Open Tracker not to evaluate, it's to let us know when we can start evaluating and to encourage federal agencies to meet the deadline they're directed to meet.
Continue readingCrisisCamp DC Wrapup
While Haitian relief isn't core to Sunlight's mission, we decided it was OK to step out of bounds for a weekend to help out. This weekend, we saw around 150 people show up in our small office space and quickly get to work. To read about the projects that were worked on and where they're at, check out CrisisCommons.org.
The media picked up on it quite a bit-- getting across the point we've been driving at for over a year now: Developers have skills that can help all kinds of volunteer efforts, and they're willing to help out. Check out the story that American Public Media's Marketplace radio ran: Devising aid programs on their laptops.
We got a lot accomplished-- through a very driven and regimented development routine, 10 projects got strong starts, though the work isn't through yet. There's still so much to do and room for lots of your participation. So if you're free this weekend, consider contributing some of your time to one of the great projects at CrisisCommons.org.
Continue readingSunlight Labs + CrisisCamp DC: Haiti
It's hard to work on government transparency while this is going on. And here at Sunlight Labs, we like to use our skills for good. This weekend, we'll be supporting CrisisCamp Haiti Hackathon in any way that we can. We're encouraging our developers to go this CrisisCamp Hackathon on Saturday, and putting incentive to it offering them compensatory time off if they show up and contribute to the various projects that will go toward relief efforts. While the event's location is TBD, as long as it is in the DC area, we'll be there to help out. We're going to host the event here at Sunlight Labs and let the CrisisCamp Hackathon folks show us what to do.
The DC tech community and the community at large should find ways to give not only their money but their talent and skill toward saving lives and finding homes this weekend. We hope that if you're in the DC area and have some great tech skills, you'll join us in serving the folks leading CrisisCamp, and helping folks in Haiti.
Update:
We'll be providing space and bandwidth for the event as well. The event is hosted here in our offices at Sunlight. We hope you'll join us.
P.S. There's one in Silicon Valley too
Continue readingWatch Congress in Real Time on your iPhone
There are a lot of different iPhone apps out there about Congress. But it seems like they all do the same thing: allow you to look up legislators, find contact information for them and their staff members, call them, and get details about who they are and what they've done. In the Android Marketplace, there's only one app that does that-- our Congress app. But in iPhone land, there's at least a half-dozen.
Our project lead on our new iPhone [app], Josh Ruihley decided to take a different approach. We want to make data about what's happening inside Congress more available to the public. It isn't just who your member of Congress is that matters, but also what they do. It's also important to see what they're reading and who they're listening to, and what the process looks like.
Continue readingGovPulse wins Apps for innovation
GovPulse.us-- originally created as an entry for our Apps for America 2 contest, won the Apps for Innovation development contest. The app takes the arcane, hard to read Federal Register and makes it usable and beautiful. With it, you can easily monitor the regulations and notices that federal agencies release to get input from the public.
While they managed to get 2nd in our contest, we are so proud that they managed to take home the gold at CES this year. Congratulation to the GovPulse team on a job well done!
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