Our friends at Change Congress have asked their members and supporters to take a survey to help them decide what they should be focused on for the coming year. And a number of questions they asked dealt with government transparency: Are earmarks fundamentally wrong or just need to be more open and transparent to the public? What’s one thing that would create a more open and transparent government? And finally, should lobbyists have a role in government? All good questions.

Japhet Els, Change Congress’ political director, lists some of the responses they have received. Regarding earmarks:, “I believe that if earmarks are going to exist, they ought to be transparent.” Another, “Nothing is 100% wrong or right. Earmarks have their use and full and timely transparency should check abuses.” We agree with these sentiments. That’s why we worked with our friends at Taxpayers for Common Sense to create Earmark Watch, where we’ve placed over 3,000 earmarks online, and ask citizens to research them.

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Following the money just got easier. MAPLight.org (a Sunlight grantee) and Congresspedia, a project of the Center for Media and Democracy and Sunlight, just joined forces to bring their data together so you can learn more about members of Congress all in one place.

Now, when you are looking up lawmakers on MAPLight.org’s Legislator pages, click on the new Congresspedia Tab (example) to get background and source information without having to leave MAPLight.org’s site.

This is another great step toward creating more merged data streams to make it easier than ever to shine Sunlight on Congress.

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It’s quite surprising, but the UK’s House of Commons does not put the text of its bills on the Web in a user-friendly manner, making it bloody difficult — as they would say — for British citizens to know what’s really going on in Parliament when it comes to legislating.

Earlier today, our friends at MySociety.org, the U.K.-based nonprofit that builds Web sites to open up government and its services to benefit citizens, launched a campaign to convince Parliament to embrace the Internet Age.

The goal of the Free Our Bills campaign is to have Parliament put the text of bills online. The effort is titled "The Nice Polite Campaign to Gently Encourage Parliament to Publish Bills in a 21 Century Way, Please. Now." (We’ll give it an award for simply being the best named campaign ever.) How polite and British. (American style would be something like "Just Do It.")

As a Telegraph editorial from Sunday says, "this sort of initiative - non-partisan, volunteer-led, and driven by geeks using cheap technology cleverly does (much) to increase transparency and accountability" in the U.K. David Cameron, Conservative Party leader, endorsed opening up the workings of Parliament in a video statement, saying "I think that publishing bills in a way that works on the internet makes good sense — people should be able to see what Parliament is doing, what legislation means and how their MPs are voting." Here! Here!

Never thought we’d say it but Parliament has some catching up to do with Congress when it comes to openness and transparency in this arena. Here in the States we have Thomas, OpenCongress.org, Congresspedia, and other online transparency tools, but even these sources hardly touch all the information that we should have about Congress.

Congratulations to our co-conspirators at MySociety. I think you’ve got another successful project underway.

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Congresspedia has just teamed up with LiteraryOutpost.com, OpenLeft and DemConWatch to shed light on to the presidential nominating process with the new SuperDelegate Transparency Project. This project gives citizens the power — via the Congresspedia wiki — to collectively compile primary and caucus results — congressional district by congressional district. The aim of this project is to compare where the elected delegates stand versus the pledges that the SuperDelegates have made. This is the only project currently tracking this kind of information at the district level.

But this project is really your project and it won’t be successful without your help. Come collaborate and help compile the district-by-district results of the popular vote and pledged delegates. Add what you know about the SuperDelegates’ position too.

This is a great opportunity for you to help bring transparency and accountability to the Democratic National Convention by providing citizens with information on how the SuperDelegates could affect the outcome of the nomination. Sign up here to get started.

Let’s shine some light on the process!

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Dan Newman, of MAPLight (and Sunlight grantee) writes to say:

We just added links to OpenCongress from every bill on MAPLight. It’s part of our new "In the News" tab. For example click here.The link to the same bill on OpenCongress is just above the "Date" column on the right-hand side.

We also created a simple URL structure to make it easy for OpenCongress and others to link to specific bills on MAPLight. (Inbound links like this now work.

We’re also in the process of integrating Congresspedia entries into MAPLight’s legislator pages, pending some changes on the Congresspedia side to make this technically workable.

 And David Moore, of OpenCongress responds saying:

 We’re happily in the midst of adding reciprocal links on our bill pages. Shouldn’t be long.

This is great stuff. Check it the interconnections between these two sites.

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Earlier this week we talked about all the cool new applications over at OpenCongress.org (which are really taking off), and today we’re delighted to tell you that MAPLight.org has produced some new widgets that allow you to track fundraising for over 1,500 congressional candidates. These widgets are perfect for blogs, social networking pages, and personal Web sites, and they are completely customizable according to the candidates you are interested in.

The congressional money race widgets follow MAPLight.org’s August release of presidential money race widgets that allow users to track funds raised by presidential candidates.

Sunlight’s proud that MAPLight.org is one of its signature grantees.

On a related note, remember you can help our Congresspedia editors ‘Wiki the Vote’ by reporting on the full record of every candidate running for Congress.

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We’re launching something new over at Congresspedia.org today — "Wiki the Vote," a project to build citizen-written profiles on each and every candidate for Congress in 2008.

This project gives you the tools you need to research candidates and share your knowledge on the records, agendas and influences of congressional incumbents and challengers. We started with nearly 300 basic profiles to be expanded and updated by citizens, journalists and even the campaigns themselves (or those of their opponents). Unlike Wikipedia, people connected to the subjects of articles are free to add to them as long as their contributions are rhetoric-free and comprised of fully documented, verifiable facts. The citizen editors are assisted and fact-checked by professional editors.

The first set of articles is based on confirmed candidates according to 2008racetracker.com and will eventually expand to cover every candidate on the ballot in the primary and general elections next year. When the OpenSecrets.org 2008 congressional campaign contributions database goes online in a few weeks, the candidate profiles will also display live feeds tracking the money race and who is funding it.

Check out the site and start updating the profiles. Any technical questions should be addressed to Congresspedia’s Managing Director Conor Kenny at conor AT sourcewatch DOT org.

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This Sunday was the filing deadline for congressional and presidential second quarter FEC reports. Currently both the FEC and PoliticalMoneyLine are posting these reports in real time. Unfortunately, thanks to Mitch McConnell and other obstructing Republicans, we can’t view Senate campaign finance reports in real time because they aren’t filed electronically. If McConnell and his party would let the Senate Campaign Disclosure Parity Act (S.223) pass we wouldn’t have to wait another couple of months to find out how much our Senators raised and spent. In the meantime, let’s take a look at which members of Congress are caught up paying legal fees.

Congresspedia reports that there are currently 10 members of the House of Representatives under investigation. Not all of the reports have been posted yet, so you will notice that Rep. William Jefferson, who is certain to pay exorbitant legal bills, is not yet listed. Some names that pop up that aren’t on Congresspedia’s list of members under investigation include Don Young and John Boehner. Former Reps. Mark Foley and JD Hayworth clearly saved some money in their campaign accounts for a reason.

Friends of Mark Foley: $277,367

Alaskans for Don Young, Inc.: $242,306

JD Hayworth for Congress: $102,126

Hastert for Congress Committee: $59,884

Lewis for Congress Committee: $54,756

Friends of John Boehner: $52,938

John T. Doolittle for Congress: $50,584

Rick Renzi for Congress: $25,000

Alan Mollohan for Congress: $22,671

Tim Murphy for Congress: $6,585

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Congresspedia has expanded its platform to include new features on policy issues and legislation, adding to its great wealth of information on members of Congress. These new resources complement its existing profiles on legislators. We think that the new features will give citizens access to insider information on issues and legislation, and offer opportunities to collaborate with policy experts. Here's a link to the portal home page.

Congresspedia now has:

* 14 new federal policy and legislative portals for experts and interested citizens to update and improve articles on various policy issues and on specific legislation. Here's a really terrific example on Telcom policy.

* Live feeds of bill status and breakdown of congressional votes from OpenCongress.org.

* Expert knowledge and editing guidance from researchers from journalism organizations, policy advocacy organizations and think tanks, including the Center for Public Integrity's Well-Connected project, the Heritage Foundation, the Project on Government Oversight and Food and Water Watch.

* User-added links in the articles to relevant issue campaigns where readers can take action on legislation they read about.

All legislative information is linked to profiles of all members of Congress, providing accountability for their actions. We expect that Congresspedia editors will contribute information on legislative maneuvering on policy issues — both good and bad — that often gets unnoticed outside the Beltway.

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The Senate took some steps forward last week to make its activities more transparent, but honestly, some of the most innovative and exciting stuff to make government more transparent is coming from individual lawmakers themselves (and in one case government) and enterprising organizations and citizens.

First, take a look at Freshman Senator Jon Tester posting of his daily schedule. How refreshing is this!? I hope others will pick up on his efforts to be really transparent about how he's spending his time, and on those of Rep. Kirsten Gillibrand's too. (Sen. Tester's schedule and Rep. Gillibrand's can be found on their pages on Congresspedia too.) We hope that some of our readers will send what these two lawmakers are doing to their representatives as models for what it means to execute the public's business in a public way.

Rep. Steve Urquhart, The Republican Majority Whip of the Utah House of Representatives, has launched a new wiki that is focusing on improving access to legislative information. His wiki is called Politicopia, and through it he wants to make available information on "urgently-relevant" issues. He writes: "In just 5 minutes, my constituents will be able to look up actual issues that are moving through the political process, read a synopsis of the proposed action, see pro and con arguments, review comments and links, and check out the bill and its status. If they then want, they can jump into and shape the debate. In other words, they can be active, informed citizens. And I guarantee you, the policymakers will take note, because we are as starved for unfiltered, informed dialogue as the people are." See more details at the Personal Democracy Forum.

Next take a look at the distributed FOIA research tool that Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics has launched in beta form (Full disclosure: Sunlight is a funder of this project.). It's a really neat combination of easy design, nifty tool and just plain fascinating stuff to look at. (OK at least fascinating to me - I admit to enjoying looking a raw documents). As blogger Tim Hooker has said "for anyone who is nosy, this is like dying and going to Heaven." Indeed.

And DoWire.org posts about an effort by the Korean government that's  intended to "encourage citizens to discuss policy issues so that their opinions can be reflected in government policies…. One topic is selected every month and is discussed for the duration of one month."

Frankly, it's hard keeping track of everything that's going on to help make government more transparent. Help me by letting me know the new sites I am missing.

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