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 readingVotersDaily: What it’s all about
About a week ago, Christopher Groskopf posted a question to the Sunlight Labs Google group. After completing a parser for North Dakota in the Fifty State Project he asked the question: "Has anyone addressed the parsing of federal schedules?"
Continue readingYou Gotta Speak the Language
A long time ago, my grandmother-- born and raised in Albany, Georgia-- went to Germany for my brother's wedding. She'd never been outside the country before and was excited about the trip, and of course, her grandson's wedding. While she was there though, she had a bit of a problem communicating-- see, she didn't speak German. Her solution to the problem was instinctive but not logical-- just speak English loudly and slowly. Increase volume until there's understanding. One person she encountered over there responded to her by speaking German loudly and slowly.
Her response:
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 readingOpenSecrets launches earmark mashup
Our friends at the Center for Responsive Politics today unveiled a new feature, long in the works, mashing up campaign contribution and lobbying data with fiscal year 2008 and 2009 earmark data compiled by Taxpayers for Common Sense.
Choose your representative or senators and view all earmarks sponsored. Where CRP or TCS has identified a beneficiary of the earmark, such as a municipality, university or defense contractor (indicated in bold, where identified), you can easily see contributions from that entity's political action committee and employees to the sponsoring lawmaker, as well as the amount of money the entity spent lobbying the federal government.
Continue readingApps for America 2 Technology Showdown
While the judging for Apps for America 2 rolls on, let's do a little technology breakdown of the submissions.
Continue readingThe Entries are In
As the submission deadline has passed, we've been taking a look at the entries. You should too. They're really great. In total, we edged out our first Apps for America by just a few entries, ending up with 47 entries.
Continue readingApp for America Deadline a few hours away
We're having an exciting time watching great apps come in -- some great stuff! Remember, get your apps in before midnight pacific time today if you want to qualify! As they come in, we're going to vet them and make sure they qualify for the basic rules of the contest, then open it up for judging by our judges over the weekend.
The entries look great so far!
Continue readinguscode.house.gov RFP deadline extended
This is awesome: the folks over at uscode.house.gov agreed to extend their RFP deadline by one week to August 18th. If you were thinking about getting a team together to create a bid, now you've got a bit of breathing room.
Continue readingHow to Search FedBizOpps.gov for Web Related Federal Contracts
Since I realized we dropped the ball and only heard about the uscode.house.gov opportunity with six days left, I've spent a good portion of the day figuring out how to find government contracts that relate to the web. It starts with FedBizOpps. That's where government releases publicly available contracts. In a later post I'll talk to you about how to tell if you're qualified and how to qualify (as soon as I figure it all out) but for right now, I thought I'd give you this little ScreenCast.
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