Building on the achievements of the Open House Project, today we are launching a parallel initiative, the Open Senate Project. This bipartisan, collaborative project will study the Senate’s current information-sharing practices to recommend how to improve public access to the Senate’s work on the Web.

We hope that you to join us in figuring out what technological reforms we should recommend to the Senate so it can make its work more accessible and user-friendly online. You can do that by subscribing to Google group listed on the top right-hand corner of the Open Senate Project’s homepage. Through that online group, we’ll have an ongoing conversation and collaborative preparation of our recommendations.

John Wonderlich, program director for the Sunlight Foundation, will lead the effort in collaboration with project coordinators Josh Tauberer, creator of the nonpartisan Web site GovTrack.us, and Jon Henke, a former Senate staffer who now blogs at TheNextRight.com.

As John blogged recently, with your help, the Open House Project was successful in jumpstarting a public discussion that prompted the House of Representatives to make its work available online in new ways, including releasing legislative data in more user-friendly formats and establishing new rules that allow lawmakers to use Web services like YouTube and Twitter to communicate with their constituents.

But, we can’t do it without you. Together, we can open the Senate.

0 Comments

YouTube is offering a $10,000 fellowship with the Pulitzer Center for “high-quality video pieces focused on stories that are not usually covered by the traditional media.”  The first round is asking people to make a 3 minute video highlighting a person in your community.  They are taking submissions til October 5th.

This is a great opportunity for citizens to go out into their communities and report on what is really important and how individuals are making a difference.  There is a lot of news to be found especially when it comes to corruption in politics.  The best place to hold elected officials accountable is in your own backyard.  So get to muckraking super sleuths.

Get your cameras ready and good luck!

h/t to PJnet.org

0 Comments

Porkbusters and Eyeblast.tv are teaming up on a new citizen journalism project. You can be the Edward R. Murrow of earmarks, and Eyeblast.tv will help you out with equipment and expertise. More details here.

0 Comments

Our friends at the Center for Responsive Politics are partnering with Helium to hold a contest for citizen journalists who can best write about the influence of money in US politics and elections. Here’s the run-down from CRP:

The Center for Responsive Politics (CRP) has partnered with Helium to bring you the OpenSecrets.org Citizen Journalism Awards. Compete by writing unique, compelling articles about money’s influence on US elections and public policy. You could be named the next OpenSecrets.org Citizen Journalist and win a cash prize.

The assignment: CRP will feature one new title each month. Follow CRP’s article guidelines, research the featured topic using OpenSecrets.org and other resources and write a compelling article for your chance to win.

The awards: CRP will pick one winning article each month. The winning writer will receive an OpenSecrets.org Citizen Journalism Award and a $100 cash prize from CRP.

CRP will also feature the winning articles on its website and in its email newsletters, which reach thousands of journalists, activists, academics and citizens.

Get started

Pick a title: See CRP’s current contest title below. You can also visit CRP’s partner page at Helium to write to more (noncontest) titles.

Research: OpenSecrets.org is an unparalleled resource for researching the influence of industries and interests in U.S. politics, and on issues that affect all our lives. The more you draw on OpenSecrets.org in your article, the better. Please attribute all data and statistics and provide URLs, whether you find the information on OpenSecrets.org or elsewhere. Expressing your opinion is fine, but please back it up with facts.

Write: Write a unique, well-researched article in 750 words or less. You can submit articles to this contest until noon on Friday, August 8. CRP’s staff will begin reviewing essays on August 5 from the top articles rated by the Helium community. Selection will be based on the most compelling essay and the winner will be the essay that brings the freshest insight on the issue presented.

Submit: File your article at Helium.com, where other Helium users will be able to read and rate it. CRP will pick the contest’s winner from among the top-rated articles.

Do not pass go. Proceed directly to OpenSecrets.org to enter the contest and collect your $100. The current contest topic is:

How have campaign contributions and lobbying efforts influenced policy on an issue you care about?

Submissions are due by August 8th.

0 Comments

Wondering who’s getting all the earmarks? Who’s giving them and why? Do earmarks meet pressing needs or pay off political favors? And which are pure pork? EarmarkWatch.org, an innovative new tool from the Sunlight Foundation and Taxpyers for Common Sense, lets you find out for yourself. Using EarmarkWatch.org, you can exercise citizen oversight of Congress. Dig into the 47 earmarks worth $166,500,000 that Rep. John Murtha inserted (and figure out which benefit campaign contributors). Or take a close look at the $100,000 earmark that Sen. David Vitter secured for an organization that promotes creationism in Louisiana schools. Or the $37 million in earmarks that include defense giant Northrop Grumman as a beneficiary. Right now, you can investigate earmarks from the House Defense Appropriations Bill and the House and Senate versions of the Labor, Health and Human Services Appropriations bills. Using a host of online resources, you can find out whether recipients of earmarks hired lobbyists, made campaign contributions to members of Congress, or won federal contracts and grants. You can also add information to eamarks others have researched, or comment on what others have found. EarmarkWatch.org provides you with powerful tools to scrutinize and evaluate thousands of earmarks. To get started, create an account and pick an earmark.

0 Comments

Citizens and journalists are taking to new mediums to report on Congress. These new mediums, however, are not recognized by the U.S. Senate Press Gallery. Today, ConsumerAffairs.com reports that it's Congressional reporter, Joe Enoch, an award-winning investigative journalist, was ejected from the Press Gallery after he was denied renewal of expired credentials because he wrote for an online venture. According to the Senate Press Gallery, ConsumerAffairs.com is not a "legitimate journalistic enterprise." This is a shining example of what Rob Bluey pointed to in his Hill op-ed and in his Open House Project recommendations to create a credentialing to bloggers and citizen journalists. The right to report is not limited to those employed by elite media institutions. ConsumerAffairs.com founder and editor in chief James R. Hood puts it best when he says, "The Constitution of the United States guarantees freedom of the press to everyone; it does not establish a legitimacy litmus test."

Not only does the Senate Press Gallery reject journalists because of the medium in which they write but they also operate in a completely non-transparent manner. We don't know exactly why Enoch was denied a renewal of his credentials. All that we know is that this institution has declared that ConsumerAffairs.com, and along with them every other journalist/blogger writing for a non-elite web site, not a "legitimate journalistic enterprise." We don't even know what standards the Press Gallery sets for defining a journalist's employer as a "legitimate journalistic enterprise." What constitutes legitimacy? Who decides what a journalistic enterprise is or is not? The sheer opacity of the Press Gallery is infuriating.

If you think that journalists and bloggers should be able to exercise their First Amendment rights and report on the U.S. Congress just like the elite press than head over to the Open House Project and check out our recommendations to open up the House to citizens.

(hat tip: commonsense) 

0 Comments

The Hill newspaper began a series of Op-Eds today from authors of the Open House Project, a Sunlight sponsored endeavor to make the House of Representatives more open to citizens online and in general. Today’s piece comes from the Heritage Foundation’s Rob Bluey advocating for citizen journalist access to the press gallery in the Capitol. With the expansion of online citizen-generated media over the past few years it sometimes overlooked by those who consume this media how the obstacles created by old media that impedes citizens from observing and reporting on their own government.

Bluey notes, “House and Senate press galleries take their marching orders from mainstream journalists, who have little incentive to invite enterprising bloggers to their coveted stomping grounds.” Mainstream journalists are not willing to give up benefits conferred by their status as establishment journalists, thus bloggers and citizen journalists are often left with no way to cover Congress. If you can’t secure the press credentials, you can’t cover Congress. Matt Stoller at MyDD gives an excellent example of what he has had to deal with:

Yesterday I went to the Senate-side of the Capitol building, and I was stopped by a security guard who asked me where I was going, who I was going to see, and who invited me. He didn't answer my questions about the Capitol until I had satisfactorily allayed his suspicions. I adopted a disarming tone, and he let me through with a grudging wave to the metal detectors. And then when I went inside I had the same experience with someone at a desk who looked at me with deep suspicion before looking up my name and letting me through. This isn't to say that we live in an authoritarian state or anything, only that this is supposed to be the people's legislature, and surrounding it are huge blocks of concrete, armed guards, and an attitude of castle-like fortitude.

…

Our legislative chambers should be friendly places for citizens to go to retrieve information. Many members of Congress get this, on both sides of the aisle, and it's kind of a downhill battle to move us to a fully open Congress. We'll get there eventually, since the political case is too compelling.

The effect of treating citizens who want to cover their Congress with suspicion is to deter them from engaging in politics in one of the fulfilling ways: by observing and writing about Congress in the same manner that establishment journalists do. Rob Bluey has a very fair proposal to allow citizens to engage at this level of political activity and to make the House as open as it ought to be:

A much-overdue solution would be to create an Online Media Gallery to oversee the credentialing process. This gallery would serve as a sister organization to existing congressional press galleries, adapting the rules of those galleries for individuals who operate exclusively on the Internet. The formation of the gallery would allow a committee of peers to establish new rules applicable for websites.

This doesn’t mean Congress should throw open its doors to just anyone, which would undoubtedly draw security concerns and create space issues. However, with its own rules for membership, the Online Media Gallery would allow citizen journalists who cover Congress to at least have a fair shot at securing credentials.

In addition, the new Online Media Gallery would alleviate the problem that exists with access to lawmakers. Currently, bloggers seeking to gain access to events in the U.S. Capitol must secure approval from a congressional office, letting staffers control the credentialing process and creating the potential to discriminate against certain bloggers whom members would like to exclude.

The era of online media and citizen engagement requires these kinds of changes. In the short term Congress may feel that they can avoid opening the doors to a new group of engaged citizens, but in the long term these changes are inevitable. The online community of engaged citizens and bloggers will only continue to grow and gain in importance to each individual lawmaker. Which Member of Congress wants a local blogger coming to report on their legislative activities to get hassled every step of the way because of a system created by the establishment press to restrict access to an elite few? That doesn’t sound like an experience that any Member would want to happen to a constituent, let alone any citizen from another district.

Members of Congress and the Periodical Press Gallery should adopt Bluey’s solution. It’s high time that Congress open all of its doors to the public. Matt Stoller sums it up nicely when he says, “I want to be able to get the same access the press gets to cover Congress and its various hearings, and I don't think the AP should get to say whether I qualify or not.” Keep your eyes peeled for more from The Hill on the Open House Project's recommendations.

0 Comments

“All politics is local” goes the old saw, and the more time I’ve spent looking into members of Congress, the more I become persuaded that it’s mostly true, just as it’s also true that most political corruption is local as well. House members attend to their districts, Senators to their states, and they know the local movers and shakers quite well, and are more than willing to use their offices to keep those folks happy, even if their interests aren’t in the best interests of the country.

Those local relationships and the local issues they create are probably best understood by–well, locals. I know I learned more about the Prairie Parkway from people who lived in close proximity to the site than from The New York Times or The Washington Post. But finding those information-rich local sites isn’t always easy. So I’m really excited that Micah Sifry, one of Sunlight’s stellar consultants, offers seven smart ways to track down local political blogs. Want to find out if a blogger covers doings in Nancy Pelosi’s district? In Mitch McConnell’s hometown of Louisville, Kentucky? Now there’s a way to find out!

0 Comments

Mrs. Panstreppon, the nom de blog of one of the deepest diggers among citizen journalists, once again demonstrates how much can be done with a little curiosity, a little perserverance and a modem. This time she traces some of the intricacies surrounding the ongoing investigation of Rep. Curt Weldon, one of the inbumbents who won’t be returning to office in 2007.

Mrs. Panstreppon dug out information from Weldon’s personal financial disclosure, from non-profit tax returns, corporate records of businesses, real estate records and other sources to trace the connections between Weldon, his daughter and the various entities that employed her as a lobbyist.

There’s a lot to read–Mrs. Panstreppon and a friendly commenter, Citizen92, put the players under a microscope. They go so far as to track down records of a condo at the Jersey shore and the floor plan and tenants of a “preferred office club” that Weldon’s daughter uses (basically, a mail drop and shared receptionist that makes small businesses seem a little larger).

The number of leads they turn up and follow is astonishing–just start reading, and see what I mean…

0 Comments

This article in the Washington Post is the political class' (e.g. media, politicians, consultants, pollsters') lament that they've lost control of their candidate's message. But in fact it should be a celebratory piece about the fact that citizens are increasingly using the democratizing world of technology to spread the message about what candidates say and really think. Wouldn't you rather rely on YouTube clips, excerpts from speeches, and candid moments filtered by citizen journalists than political advertisements to tell you what a candidate really believes? No contest in my mind.

YouTube has put every campaign on notice that someone's watching," says Scott Reed, a Republican strategist who managed Sen. Robert Dole's 1996 presidential campaign. "This has been a real wake-up call to a lot of candidates who shoot from the lip when there isn't a big TV affiliate standing in the room. . . . Now they have to realize that every day is game day…

Someone's watching? You bet. And we're all better off for it.

0 Comments