Making Government Transparent and Accountable
The Sunlight Foundation uses cutting-edge technology and ideas to make government transparent and accountable. Underlying all of our efforts is a fundamental belief that increased transparency will improve the public's confidence in government
The Sunlight Foundation Blog
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Potential White House Chief of Staff Replacement?
Tom Donilon, a White House national security advisor, is being touted as a potential replacement for Rahm Emanuel as chief of staff if Emanuel decides to leave to run for mayor of Chicago. The Washington Examiner’s Tim Carney has a good catch on Donilon today:
He was a top lobbyist at Fannie Mae during the housing bubble, when Fannie fought — with Democratic help — to avoid any restrictions or curbs on its work to inflate home values and get more people under mortgage. Before that, Donilon was a lobbyist at O’Melveny and Myers, where Fannie was a client.
In 2008, according to his financial disclosure forms, Donilon was a paid consultant for Citigroup, Goldman Sachs, and Apollo Investments.
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NYT: Disclose lawmaker charity donations
The New York Times calls for the full and proper disclosure of donations to charities set up by lawmakers:
Congressional rules require corporate lobbyists to disclose donations to lawmakers’ charities, but many fail to do so with no consequence. The charities themselves are not required to disclose their donors, and there are no limits to the amount a donor can give. The Office of Congressional Ethics looked into a few of these foundations last year, but was stymied when the House granted several congressmen the right to solicit donations even when the donors had business before their committees.
The art of currying favor in Washington is an ancient one, and both lawmakers and corporations have become exceptionally creative at finding ways around every legal obstacle reducing the influence of big money. But these “donations” need to be fully disclosed and strictly limited like the campaign contributions they resemble. Members of Congress should pay heed to the rising tide of anti-incumbent disgust this year and stop acting like greedy chiselers of corporate largess.
I’m not sure that these donations need to be “strictly limited,” but they certainly ought to be fully disclosed. The disclosure should not be limited to lobbyists or corporate money, but should include the executives and other non-lobbyists who choose to funnel money to these charities.
This editorial is in response to a New York Times article, published on Monday, that highlighted the ways in which lawmakers use charities to court corporate donors and build mini-fiefdoms in their districts and states by displaying their beneficence.
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Clearspending. That’s What We Need.
As I noted in my speech yesterday at the Gov2.0 Summit, Gov2.0 has become a popular catchphrase in Washington today and no organization has been more excited about its potential when it comes to data transparency than the Sunlight Foundation. But now, some 20 months since President Obama made his initial commitment to technology and transparency, we have numerous concerns. One of the core examples that I used was USASpending.gov, which President Obama championed into law when he was in the Senate, along with Sen. Tom Coburn, in 2007.
USASpending was created to provide the public with information about how the federal government spends our tax dollars. It was launched nearly three years ago and has already gone through three redesigns, each one flashier than the next. The site is pretty impressive graphics-wise, but unfortunately the data provided is full of inaccuracies, according to Clearspending, a new Sunlight site that tracks and illustrates just how broken the data is. We were deliberate in our approach when conducting this analysis, and we hope that by giving these problems the light of day, it might actually help get them fixed.
Think of Clearspending.com as a kind of scorecard that analyzes how well U.S. government agencies are reporting their spending data on USASpending.gov.
What Sunlight has found, and Clearspending shows in great detail, is that more than $1.3 trillion in federal reporting data from 2009 is unreliable. The data inaccuracies we uncovered account for 70 percent of the total $1.9 trillion in government spending data reported in that year. Some of the numbers are too big, some are too small and some are missing completely, while other spending data entries don’t have the detail that’s required or were reported months later than the law demands.
When it comes to making data available, it has to be accurate. Federal agencies need to focus first on the quality of data they collect. If the data is unreliable, then the quality of websites they release — or the tools built upon it — is irrelevant.
The government has known about the problems we’ve illustrated on Clearspending, and they say they’re working to fix it. But instead we have only gotten a series of redesigned websites, each one with data just as unreliable as the one before it.
There’s a tremendous amount of work left to do before Gov2.0 becomes a reality. These are not easy tasks, and certainly not glamorous ones. But these are the types of challenges that we must undertake if the promise of Gov2.0 is going to be realized.
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Gov2.0 Presentation: An Open Government Scorecard
I was absolutely delighted to present at the Gov2.0 Summit here in Washington this morning. Thanks to Tim OReilly and his whole crew for the invitation and all the hard work they put into the event.
I have to admit it was a real challenge to present an “Open Government Scorecard” in the 10 minutes I had allotted to me but as I prepared my remarks I found that the time constraint really made me focus. There were a number of disappointments that I have in the President’s record that I didn’t mention, such as his calling for — but not acting upon – a centralized database for earmarks, or his promises to push for lobbying reform that has never materialized — but I hit some of the major concerns that I and my colleagues at Sunlight have with the Open Government Directive, Recovery.gov, Data.gov, and USA Spending.gov. (Tomorrow I’ll talk more about our ongoing analysis of the data on that site.)
And rather that summarize my remarks, I’m presenting them in full below. Let me know what you think in the comment section below.
From the Executive Memorandum on transparency issued by President Obama on the first full day in office, to the full-blown Open Government Directive, to establishing new policies regulating lobbying of the Executive Branch, no organization has been more excited, enthusiastic or optimistic about the advent of Gov 2.0 for data transparency than Sunlight. In many respects, this Administration has gone further and faster toward creating a transparent government than any that’s preceded it.
But now, 20 months later, the drive for transparency appears stalled.
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The Open Government Directive — the Administration’s 10-month-old manifesto on government transparency — can either become a dated relic destined for the ashbin of history, or a transformative commitment to a new era of openness. Right now it’s teetering someplace in between.As you may recall, the central thrust of the directive is its insistence that all government departments create and implement their own open data plans, aimed at releasing “high-value” data to the public. The plans that resulted, however, were little more than aspirational. In the first of those plans, 12 out of 30 agencies didn’t identify any data for future publication and altogether only 75 new data sets were promised. 75 data sets? That was hugely disappointing.
Enforcement of these plans has always been ‘soft.’ And now even faces greater uncertainty with the departure of OMB Director Peter Orszag and WH Ethics Counsel Norm Eisen. The Directive is only as strong as its enforcement.
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To be sure, there have been some meaningful first steps from agencies and the White House. HHS and NASA both immediately spring to mind as aggressively pursuing new projects that are on the cutting edge. The White House itself has taken some meaningful steps in posting its staffers’ ethics filings online, requiring extensive stimulus lobbying disclosure, and posting the Visitor Logs online for the first time. But these aren’t well-established policies, and exemptions to publishing this data are unclear and unstated. All of these initiatives need a steady hand and a clear commitment to mature into permanent, reliable, effective policies.And one central Obama campaign promise, to “create a centralized Internet database of lobbying reports, ethics records, and campaign finance filings” isn’t even on the drawing boards.
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Data.gov started with enormous promise. A single catalog for all government data is very exciting in concept. As it has evolved, we have gotten a progressively better website: a more attractive design, and somewhat improved organization of the data sets. But it’s still a pretty mediocre data repository and the types of data available remains an enormous concern.It turns out that the government has some interesting ideas about what counts as “high value” information. The Department of the Interior seems to feel that population counts of wild horses and burros are “high value” but records of safety violations like the ones that seem to have led to the Upper Branch Mine disaster are not.
We want to see data that can be used to hold government – and the entities that report to it – accountable: records and data that would allow the public to assess the effectiveness and efficiency of federal programs, policies and initiatives; the competence and integrity of its employees and contractors; its management of public resources.
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Recovery.gov, the government’s signature project to demonstrate transparency around economic stimulus spending is hard consider it more than a qualified success. And the idea of collecting job creation data at the most local level was overly optimistic from the start – and ended with Vice President Biden making excuses for the data’s poor quality on the Daily Show.
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Now, let’s take a look at USASpending.gov, the project that then-Senator Obama and Senator Tom Coburn championed into law back in 2007.USASpending was created to provide the public with information about how the federal government spends our tax dollars. It was launched in late 2007, but it’s already gone through three redesigns, each one flashier than the next, with gradients and maps and now a sort of GapMinder-style visualization tool. It’s pretty impressive…. looking. Unfortunately, its data is almost completely useless….
To demonstrate just how flawed, Sunlight is announcing today a new project today called Clear Spending.
This project – the result of the hard work of Sunlight’s Kaitlin Lee and Kevin Webb — is an ongoing analysis of the grants data in USASpending. We started with a methodology for evaluating data quality that has been used by the GAO.
It’s really pretty simple.
Federal spending gets reported in two places. Individual transactions are sent to USASpending. There’s also a separate, somewhat redundant process where total spending for each program is reported to the Catalog of Federal Domestic Assistance, or CFDA. It’s possible to tally up the USASpending records by program, and compare those totals to the ones in the CFDA. When the two don’t match, we know there’s a problem.
That’s the heart of the method. We also looked at whether the reporting occurred on time, and whether all of the reports’ mandatory fields were filled out. Then we automated those three tests, so that we could run them against all ten million rows of the USASpending database.
The results aren’t pretty. We found over 1.3 trillion dollars of broken reporting in 2009 alone. That’s fully half of the spending for that year. Some of the numbers are too big, some are too small, some are missing completely. Others don’t have the detail that’s required, or were reported months later than the law demands.
The data powering USASpending is broken. You can’t trust any aggregate numbers you get from the site — answers to questions about federal spending that rise above the micro level. When we say things just don’t add up, we mean it.
The government has known about this problem, and they say they’re working to fix it. But what we’ve actually gotten is a series of redesigned websites, each one with data just as unreliable as the one before it.
We are beginning to worry that the Administration is more interested in style than substance.
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If we settle for a superficial kind of approach, Gov 2.0 will be remembered as a failure. Government has learned to say the right things — now we need government to actually get serious about technology and transparency.
*There’s a lot of work left to do. These are not easy tasks, or certainly not glamorous ones. But these are the types of challenges that we must undertake if the promise of Gov 2.0 is going to be realized.
For starters, we have to take on some of the responsibility for making this happen ourselves – I mean ‘us’ as in the community of Americans who are concerned about accountability. And that’s a lot of us. And we wear all kinds of political labels from conservative to liberal, to libertarian to the labels of Tea and Coffee Party activists.
Our job is to hold the Administration’s feet to the fire – bureaucrats aren’t going to act just because someone asks nicely. Government isn’t going to change how and when it makes data available – even when a few good people on the inside want it to – because of a directive.
It’s not going to happen until laws are changed, or Executive Orders are issued, or until enforcers are given real power and the President himself makes it a priority.
And finally, we need to admit that Gov2.0 isn’t happening until citizens are truly actively engaged in helping to demand and co-create it.
We can still have a government that is truly open, participatory and collaborative. But it won’t happen until we push for it.
Thank you.
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Ask the question about transparency that you’ve always wanted
Ever get tired of hearing pundits ask softball questions to politicians? Or finally hear a really great question, only to have it answered in a few TV friendly, pre-packaged bullet points that don’t tell you anything you didn’t already know?Thanks to the work of our friends at Personal Democracy Forum, we don’t have to accept this one way channel of communication. With 10Questions, every American can be a part of the conversation with those running for office this election season. First launched in 2007, 10Questions is “the first truly people-powered online candidate forum that seeks to involve millions of voters in prioritizing the questions they want answered, and moving politicians away from sound-bites to in-depth discussion of issues.”
For the 2010 midterms, 10Questions is being rolled out again for many of the most competitive races across the country. It’s a simple process, open to anyone across the country. To participate, just submit a question (deadline: September 14th). Then, vote the questions submitted up or down (voting ends September 21st). The top 10 questions are submitted to candidates, and by October 14th, candidates will post video responses to those questions on 10questions.com. Afterward, there’s another open voting period in which you decide how well you think candidates actually answered the questions, so they have an incentive to be thorough and thoughtful in their answers.
This is a particularly great opportunity for those of us in the transparency and open government movement; while transparency is crucial to keeping our elected officials accountable, candidates rarely field questions about open policies. If you haven’t yet, submit a question about transparency, or head over to vote to make sure that candidates have to explain how they’re going to make their administrations open.
Transparency is a pretty broad issue, so if you’re looking for ideas or resources to help formulate a more specific question, check out this collaborative guide to some of the work being done in this field: http://snlg.ht/9na1Wn.
Let us know your question in the comments, or highlight any that you think are particularly great.
Note: The co-founders of the Personal Democracy Forum, Andrew Rasiej and Micah Sifry serve as advisors to the Sunlight Foundation.
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Tools for Transparency: Google Fusion Tables
Just look at any one of Sunlight’s projects and you’ll realize that it takes a mountain of data to help keep government open and transparent. From district information to campaign expenditures to lobbying dollars, making sense of large data sets is an intensive, concerted effort.Many of your own projects use dozens of spreadsheets, take up thousands of rows of data and live somewhere on our laptop, accessible only to you. This works to a point, but in an era of sharing, collaborating and web-based storage, it isn’t an optimal solution.
Google Fusion Tables is an experimental project from Google Labs with the goal of making sharing and collaborating on large sets of data much simpler. Fusion Tables isn’t focused on the traditional database system that requires “complicated SQL queries and transaction processing,” but is rather focused on “fusing data management and collaboration: merging multiple data sources, discussion of the data, querying, visualization, and web publishing.”
Google Fusion Tables allows you handle large amounts of data: you can upload files of up to 100 MB in formats like Excel, CSV and KML. You can also programmatically update, delete, query and visualize data using their API. Plus, you can merge your own data with existing public sets, allowing you to add further value and context to your own information.
While Fusion Tables is an experimental Google project, it shows great potential in allowing the less technically savvy to easily leverage large data sets while communicating and collaborating much more effortlessly.
For more information, check out the video and related links below -
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Bill Would Place Agency Reports to Congress Online
Rep. Steve Driehaus (D-OH) recently introduced legislation that would make it a lot easier for the public to access thousands of congressionally mandated reports. These reports are created when Congress requires agencies to give an accounting of their actions or plans for addressing a particular issue. Once received by Congress, the reports become House or Senate documents, and often provide valuable insight into what the federal government is (or should be) doing.
House documents, according to the Clerk of the House, originate from congressional committees and including annual reports of executive departments, investigative reports made to congress, presidential messages, and other similar publications. (House or Senate documents should not to be confused with House or Senate reports, which are prepared by congressional committees on proposed legislation and issues under investigation.) Rep. Dreihaus’ bill applies to congressionally mandated reports only.
Not all congressionally mandated reports are available online. Electronic access would put more eyes on each document, thereby enhancing their usefulness as oversight documents. My colleague John Wonderlich earlier wrote about how these reports can inform committee oversight plans. Rep. Dreihaus’ spokesman Tim Mulvey explains that “The reason Congress passes laws mandating these reports is so the American people can understand how their government works, and where it may not be working so well.” Driehaus, who sits on the House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform, believes this bill could play a vital role in educating the public on what the government does.
At the beginning of each Congress, the Clerk of the House generates (pursuant to House Rule II) a report entitled “Reports to be Made to Congress,” which lists all congressionally mandated reports. It cites the law or resolution in which the requirement may be contained and placing under the name of each officer the list of reports required to be made by such officer.
While the report itself is available through GPO (here’s the 235-page report submitted in the 111th Congress: [PDF]) all of the reports it identifies are not. The GPO makes an effort to make these documents available online, but they don’t get everything. In addition, even when the documents are online, they are often difficult to find. For a closer look, check out the GPO’s index of congressional documents and search engine.
The Access to Congressional Mandated Reports Act, or H.R. 6026, would resolve several problems. The bill requires the director of the Office of Management and Budget to create a central website that will let the public access congressionally mandated reports. The legislation would mandate improved search functionality so that people can find the documents, allow people to be notified when a particular document becomes available, and require public access to the report within 30 days. In addition, OMB would be required to issue regulations to the agencies on how they should submit reports, which must be in electronic format.
Rep. Dreihaus has the right idea. Reps. Towns and Clay agree, as they’ve co-sponsored the legislation. Congressionally mandated reports (with few exceptions) should be available online, and I would add that congressionally documents should be published online as a general rule. Creating deadlines for the reports to be available, requiring electronic formats, and improving access to the public are all excellent ideas.
I do have a few minor quibbles. OMB has experience issuing regulations to make this kind of effort succeed, but it would be unconventional for their regulations to apply to independent agencies or the legislative or judicial branches. Similarly, it is more common for the Clerk or the Library of Congress or some other entity under congressional control to house congressional documents, instead of OMB, which is an arm of the President. Nevertheless, this legislation is a smart move in the right direction toward making government more open, transparent, and accountable.
Eric Naing contributed significantly to the writing and researching of this article.
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Tools for Transparency: Scribd – making documents accessible
We’re big fans of Scribd here at Sunlight. For a while now, we’ve been posting transparency related documents to the platform while leveraging their widgets to embed congressional fund raiser information on our Party Time website.
So, what is Scribd? Much like YouTube, Scribd relieves users of the burden of hosting large files in varying formats while adding a social layer on top. Users can also research existing documents, download them, add them to their own accounts and engage the community through commenting, ranking and sharing.
Many of us are sitting on files we’ve obtained through government offices, FOIA requests and other publicly available sources. Hosting these files ourselves can be cost prohibitive, difficult for others to find and may exist in formats unusable to some. Scribd takes the pain out of hosting and sharing these documents.
Making our documents accessible is important enough that, as Crunchbase notes, Barack Obama, the New York Times, Meg Whitman and others use this service to share their content.
While having the President posting files to Scribd is a great start, it’s not nearly enough. Every government office and agency, and every appointed and elected official needs to make public documents accessible to the public. Posting these docs in an archaic format on a government server doesn’t exactly fulfill this civic duty, but when these documents are posted in a format that everyone (with an Internet connection) can use, download, share and comment on, well, that’s a different story.
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Has Maxine Waters found a way around the Federal Election Campaign Act?
My colleague Lindsay Young reports on what appears to be a unique fundraising strategy employed by Rep. Maxine Waters, D-Calif. Rather than raise the bulk of her campaign funds from political action committees and individual donors, Waters sells space on mailers to candidates and political causes she’s endorsed*, sometimes for as much as $45,000.
The endorsements show up on “slate mailers,” essentially campaign literature sent out by Waters to her constituents listing approved candidates and appropriate votes on ballot initiatives. A Federal Election Commission spokesman told us that selling endorsements is “exempt from the definition of ‘contribution’ and ‘expenditure’ under the Federal Election Campaign Act.” In other words, the bedrock principles of campaign rules that apply to candidates–limitations on the amount of donations and the kinds of contributors–don’t apply.
So Dave Jones, who’s running for insurance commissioner in California, paid Waters $25,000 for her endorsement. Under California election law, he can raise money directly from labor unions and businesses, as well as individuals. So the labor union AFSCME, for example, gave Jones $12,900. Roxborough, Pomerance, Nye and Adreani LLP, a law firm “dedicated solely to providing businesses with a broad range of legal services in all facets of civil litigation with a primary focus on business, insurance, employment, and wage and hour litigation,” donated $6,500. As did Kershaw, Cutter & Ratinoff LLP, a law firm specializing in personal injury suits. Those three donations more than cover Jones’ purchase of Waters endorsement, but all three would be impermissible at the federal level–neither law firms nor labor unions can donate directly to federal candidates. This is not to say that those three donations, out of the thousands that Jones received, went directly to Waters, only that all money is fungible, and Waters benefits by selling an endorsement to a committee that takes contributions that her own campaign can’t take directly.
What would stop a politician from selling an endorsement for $1 million?
*–Updated to fix a misleading wording. The process that Waters’ campaign uses in putting together slate mailers is described here (scroll down).
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Statelight: Transparency in a Box, Pt. 3
As we set the stage for advocating on local and state transparency issues and highlight some policies issues of note, inevitably the question comes:
How exactly do you go about learning more about policies in your state?
Whether you’ve already picked a policy focus, want to learn more about what role open government policies could play in your state, or are just chasing curiosity, you need to answer this question. To make your search for answers clearer — more transparent if you will — we’ve laid out a series of questions for you to ask to help get you started with your research.
ONE: What issue area do I focus on?
In our last episode of Transparency in a Box, John laid out three issue areas that will be of interest to many state advocates: ethics and campaign finance, budget transparency, and legislative data. Depending upon which policy you choose there are different resources that outline the answers to a crucial question for your research:
What information does the government currently provide about this policy? Or, what’s knowable from your government?
The answer to this question will vary by state and issue. If you’re interested in learning about how to determine what the situation is in your state for ethics and campaign finance, jump down to TWO. If you’re looking to do research on budget transparency, jump to THREE. And for your legislative data needs, head to FOUR. For general open government resources, jump to FIVE.
TWO: How can I figure out what information is available for ethics and campaign finance?
Where to look: Your state likely has a department of government that oversees campaign finance laws, either as part of the office of its Secretary of State or Board of Elections. (For a good example, check out Michigan’s site for Lobbying Disclosure.) Personal Financial Disclosures can be harder to find and are sometimes available from a statewide ethics office. (See Florida’s example. ) For a beginning look at your state’s code of law, the Library of Congress provides some great links, though you may need to do an additional search to find out your state’s ethics regulations. And while not a perfect resource, you should also play with CREW’s Ethics in Your State tool. Although the corruption rankings are two years old, you’ll find helpful resources for groups working on ethics and campaign finance in your state along with media resources that might help give you a greater sense of your state’s situation.
What to look for: You can focus on one of the three policies below or search for information on all of them. In each instance, you’ll want to find out whether these things are actually available and if so, how much information is provided to the public and how much is online:
- Personal Financial Disclosures
- Campaign Contributions
- Lobbying Disclosure
How this policy is enacted: Campaign finance policies are determined by the passage of laws or by executive orders. Finding this sort of information will do a lot to tell you about why things are the way they are now, which is important to understand if you’re interested in working to make this policy more transparent.
THREE: How can I figure out the transparency of my state’s budget?
Where to look: Your state’s budget portal. If you’re unable to find what you’re looking for there, try looking for more information on your governor or comptroller general’s website. Although you should always go the source (i.e. your state’s official website) there are other sites that can help inform your search and understanding. For instance, check out this resource from the Center for Fiscal Accountability, which hosts useful links and news about budget transparency, listed by state. The Sunshine Review also posts a guide to budget transparency listed by state.
What to look for: Are budget proposals posted online in addition to actual expenditures? How timely or complete is the publishing? Does your state have an open website for its budget/spending?
How this policy is enacted: Many states (but not all) have an online budget portal that shows how money is spent. These portals could be enacted by law, but are more likely based on an initiative from your governor or your comptroller general who can build such a site when made a gubernatorial priority.
Related to this portal is the general process by which your state sets its spending priorities. This system can vary from one state to another, but generally involves your governor submitting a proposal for a budget and your legislature eventually approving it. The actual process, from submission to approval, is incredibly complex with a number of open and secret negotiations.
FOUR: How can I figure out what legislative data my state publishes?
Where to look: The official source of legislative information in your state, most likely your state legislature’s website, which you can find quickly on this comprehensive list. (Thanks, Wikipedia!) The Library of Congress also publishes a resource on state laws that should help your search. Each state page includes links for that state’s bills and legislative session laws. The Open States Project is also working on collecting a variety of legislative data for each state and may be a good source for research or collaboration.
What to look for: Keeping in mind that there are variety of ways to interpret “legislative data transparency” (which John goes into more detail with in his post), two to focus on:
1. Look to see if your state legislature posts its bills, amendments, and votes online. See whether the information is searchable and what the timeline is that your state uses for posting these documents online. Does your legislature note whether bills have to be online before a vote? If so, how long before?
2. You should also check to see how the state is making its legislative data available. This is the more technical side, but it’s crucial to creating innovative web platforms that can aggregate and share bills, votes, and amendments. Most states display bills and other legislation in HTML; others post actual data files in order to empower more advanced analysis and reuse. For a great example of open government work in this field, see the New York State Senate, a leader in making raw data available to developers.
If you’re having problems searching for information on this subject on your legislature’s website, you may have to turn to your search engine of choice. Use a combination of keywords including your state’s name and phrases like “legislative data,” “general assembly data,” “data system,” and “online.” Your search results may turn up a free resource (see Rhode Island’s example) or a proprietary one. Look for contact information from an associated government official to learn more.
How this policy is enacted: Legislative data is controlled by legislative procedure and changes to existing policy may require a change of your assembly or chamber’s rules, or may also be able to be changed by an initiative of the technical staff of the legislature.
FIVE: Where can I learn more about general states-related open government stuff?
There are number of resources scattered around out there, but a good place to start is to check out the work of organizations within your state. This directory of state and national organizations is a great place to find out about who’s already working on issues in your state and what issues they focus on. My colleague, Sarah, is also compiling a review of state transparency efforts. Check back to see how your state is doing.
While not an open government site, per say, this digest of state laws, hosted by the Library of Congress (mentioned above) is a great “one-stop” source for state-specific government sites. Head here when you’re looking for pages listing your state’s bills, legislative session laws, and other odds and ends.
OpenMuni Wiki is a collaborative platform where people share case studies and best practices for open government policy and advocacy. Although the site started with a more local focus, it has since expanded to include state-level concerns and should be turned especially when you’re looking into open standards for government data. If you’re looking for even more ideas or inspiration from the work others are doing around the country, OpenMuni offers a great list of like minded efforts. Poking around these groups will show you the lay of the open government land and again provides the opportunity to collaborate on ongoing transparency projects. Similarly, check out CityCamp to see how folks working on a municipal level are actively gathering public officials, citizens, and experts of every sort together to problem solve local transparency issues. Getting involved with a CityCamp can be a great way to connect with people already in the field.
This post only gives you an tiny view of all the work being done to get transparency for different levels of governance. There is still a great need to organize for change on a state level, and to be successful these transparency initiatives need to communicate with one another. If you do decide to join an open government group or to craft your own initiative, post your efforts where others can find and connect with you and your work. We host an open government projects page so that you can archive your work, ask questions of your peers in the field, and check out the work others are doing, though connecting with folks over Govloop or OpenMuni will be useful to you, too.
Have a favorite open government site that I missed? Please (!) share it with us below. (Extra points if it has a state focus.)
