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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Berkman’s New Media Cloud
Earlier today, Harvard’s Berkman Center for Internet and Society, teamed with Thomson Reuters, launched Media Cloud, a new project that tracks news content comprehensively with free, open and flexible research tools.
It’s the brainchild of Berkman fellow Ethan Zuckerman and Berkman Faculty Co-Director (and Sunlight advisory board member) Yochai Benkler. The goal is for the site to be an open research platform that allows unprecedented quantitative analysis of media trends by automatically downloading, processing, and querying the full text of stories and blog posts from thousands of media outlets.
Berkman’s announcement quotes Yochai, “While daily newspapers struggle for survival, political, niche and special interest blogs continue to thrive. In the midst of this upheaval, it is difficult to know where stories begin, who sets the agenda, and how these dramatic changes impact news coverage on the whole. We created Media Cloud to help researchers and the public get quantitative answers to these challenging questions.”
The hope is for Media Cloud will help map the interaction between mainstream media, citizen media and blogs to give a more accurate and comprehensive view of how people influence, shape and interact with the news.
The Nieman Journalism Lab put this video of Ethan describing and walking us through Media Cloud on their site:
Ethan Zuckerman on Media Cloud from Nieman Journalism Lab on Vimeo.Dave Weinberger calls it of Berkman’s most exciting projects, and Doc Searls notes that the Berkman folks are looking for feedback. So go check it out.
Congrats to Ethan, Yochai and the Berkman community on this great new tool.
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Doc Searls Interviews Sunlight’s Greg Elin
Doc Searls, author and Senior Editor of the blog Linux Journal, interviews Sunlight’s Greg Elin in an article about open source in politics and government. Here are the choice parts from Greg describing Sunlight’s work, the data that backs it up, and the future of it all:
Almost all of our projects and funded projects are open source — though sometimes our code is a bit hacked so it takes a while to release it. Nearly every group I know is completely invested in open source: MySQL, PostgreSQL, Apache… The frameworks are being rapidly adopted: Rails, Django, Symfony…
The work I’m most interested in these days is dynamic-scripting — what I think about as “flow-and-go” data sets instead of what Jeff Jonas coined as “rack-and-stack” data sets. Dynamic scripting is Unix pipes! That is, every application does input and output. We leave the world of databases-make-reports and enter the world of RSS-flows-in and RSS-flows-out.
Two examples of flow. A Sunlight database, LouisDB.com, scrapes the Congressional Daily Record daily, transforming it into XML. Garrett Schure (Sunlight Labs developer) and Josh Ruihley did a word count algorithm on the Congressional Record to come up with Congress’ “Word of the Day” and the microsite http://capitolwords.org — which goes back to 2001 and has an RSS feed, API, and a widget people can put on their site. Louisdb.com makes it easier to search the Congressional Record — and now there’s a script boiling it down into tweetable content that others can use, too. Second example, from MySociety: TheyWorkForYou. It provides profiles of what Members are doing in Parliament by parsing the Parliament’s daily record and votes. Lastly, many sites rely on the work of Josh Tauber’s http://govtrack.us b/c. Josh scrapes all sorts of data on bills in Congress and transforms it into XML. Josh’s data is open and so also is his code. It’s a tremendous contribution.
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Programmers and technologists who grew up with the web and with open source have been entering the political and e-government arena the past several years bringing with them the tools and practices of open source and Web 2.0. They are collaborating with — and sometimes competing with — existing technologists who were often activists who learned spreadsheets and databases and desktop publishing and then the web to communicate their message. So we are seeing a geek-i-fication of everything from campaigns to good government groups to government itself. More open source. More frameworks. More collaborative communication among individual developers. It’s uneven, it’s bumpy, but it is definitely happening. The tipping point has occurred now in politics and government — the question remains only where the tree is going to land.
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The Power of Video
Rumors that Texas lawmakers are a different breed are legend, and pillars of progressive journalism like Ronnie Dugger and the late, great Molly Ivins made careers covering the shenanigans and sleaze that goes on in Austin. Even reports of multiple voting have circulated. But the power of video makes this story come alive like nothing else. And this ‘report’ will not be thrown out with yesterday’s newspapers. (I received 5 copies of the video over the weekend and saw it posted several places.)
Hat tip: Doc Searls where I saw it first.
