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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Weekly Media Roundup – May 8, 2009
Today, May 8th, marks the 125th birthday of Harry S Truman, our 33rd president. He once said, “Secrecy and a free, democratic government don’t mix.” Amen, Mr. President.
Here are a few of the more interesting media mentions of Sunlight and our friends and grantees from this week:
Monday morning, Tom Lee, a technology director at Sunlight, appeared on C-SPAN’s “Washington Journal” taking questions about Recovery.gov, the Web site set up to track spending under the federal government’s economic stimulus program. Tom is working on SubsidyScope, a project of The Pew Charitable Trusts, that looks at the role of federal subsidies in the economy. Below is the video of the segment:
Speaking of Recovery.gov, Matt Kelley with USA Today reported that the Web site won’t have details on contracts and grants until October and may not be complete until next spring — halfway through the program. Kelley quotes Greg Elin, Sunlight’s chief evangelist, saying people accustomed to getting easily searchable information quickly could be frustrated. “If we have to wait until October to get the information or to the end of the year to get a powerful recovery.gov site, the Obama administration will have missed an important opportunity.”
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Weekly Media Roundup – April 24, 2009
Here are a few of the more interesting media mentions of Sunlight and our friends and grantees from this week:
Sunday evening, BlogTalkRadio posted an episode of “Talking Gov2.0,” where Clay Johnson, Sunlight Lab’s director, discussed Sunlight, Sunlight Labs and the Apps for America contest. Speaking of Apps for America, Clay announced the winners on Monday. And Marshall Kirkpatrick at ReadWriteWeb wrote about the contest, and included a screencast of the winners.
Victoria McGrane with the Politico wrote about the lack of online disclosure of campaign finance data by candidates for the U.S. Senate, and the efforts to rectify this through S. 482, the Senate Campaign Disclosure Parity Act. She mention’s Sunlight’s Pass S. 482, and extensively quotes Lisa Ronsenberg, Sunlight’s government affairs consultant, about the need for the Senate to join the 21st Century.
The National Journal reported on data from the Center for Responsive Politics (CRP) that shows last year’s top 20 Political Action Committee contributors to federal candidates poured a combined $22 million into lobbying efforts from January through March — an increase of nearly 20 percent over the same period in 2008.
Anne C. Mulkern with Greenwire (subscription required) used Capitol Words to look at the use of energy- and environment-related words by congressional lawmakers. The New York Times re-posted Mulkern’s piece.
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The Crowd Says It All
TransparencyCamp was awesome, but rather than my just writing about just how great it was — what we all learned, heard, and what we will do about it – I thought you ought to hear from the crowd itself. So I’ve randomly selected tweets from the some who attended, and some who didn’t who talk about the event and some of what they learned. Here’s just a sample of what folks had to say:
justgrimes: I wish transparency camp was monthly; maybe we could do something like CopyNight, a monthly social gathering http://bit.ly/sz4p5 (expand) #tcamp09
Jillfoster: Good to be here at #tcamp09
robertdoyal: Reading a lot of great tweets from #tcamp09. It feels as if I’m there! Transparency is a top priority for Texas Comptroller Susan Combs.
quepol: @Rasiej TransparencyCamp: transformational, connective, invigorating #tcamp09
Tcamp09: RT: @merici transparency camp community resources: transparencycamp.org/community #tcamp09
johnbreslin: Seeing lots of interesting posts from #tcamp09 – http://tinyurl.com/b7t9hp (expand) and @valdiskrebs is speaking…
kmcurry: I haven’t been able to tweet out of #tcamp09 b/c too in the moment of the conversation; will have to brain dump later
sitting side by side w/ passionate govies plotting improvements #tcamp09
sharontb: Will transparency and recovery.gov be the stimulus for the next revolution in business, it and world? How fast will it happen? #tcamp09
uigimontanez: This #tcamp09 session really helped me see the practical aspects of the Semantic Web. No longer just theoretical…
jroo: #tcamp09 show us the data! (and we’ll give you a beer)
justgrimes: One thing I’ve learned during transparency camp is the policy problems with procurement, it comes up almost everything session #tcamp09
joebird: Catching the tweets but wishing I was at Transparency Camp in D.C.: https://barcamp.pbwiki.com/transparencycamp | #tcamp09
DavidStephenson: #tcamp09 oops: will have to spend next 2 wks. learning about all apps @chrismessina has mentioned
atomiota: learning about the components of the social web from citizen agency/diso’s chris messina. i like when things get broken down for me #tcamp09
corbett3000: @brianbehlendorf: Hill staffers just shown version tracking at http://opencongress.org & http://govtrack.us; “blew their minds” #tcamp09
bashley: Transparency too often conflated as gov visibility. But transparency demands no less than full-frontal gov nudity. #tcamp09
kpkfusion: It is the citizen exchange “in network” that creates transparency – not the mere act of publication and search. #tcamp09
jedmiller: RT @bashley: Transparency is zero without compassion, surrender, confession, humility. Opacity is all too human. #tcamp09
Silona: this crowd has more EEEPC and netbooks than I have even seen before… #tcamp09
laurelatoreilly: Apps for Democracy: This is what democracy looks like! Check out Apps for America competition (http://bit.ly/HoeTx (expand)) #tcamp09
javaun: I wish I could’ve joined all of you at #tcamp09 . Wife went into labor Thursday night and our daughter was born Friday at 7.
sliqviq: Information and transparency helps alleviate unaccountable power structures standing in the way of change #tcamp09
sarahebourne: Wishing I were in DC for Transparency Camp #tcamp09 but glad I can follow on Twitter + that I won’t have to travel in snowstorm to get back
brianbehlendorf: #tcamp09 @cjoh Transparency is a neutralizer of apathy. [brilliant]
craignewmark: Home after Washington; listening to the rain, and over the drops dropping; a robin sings. (not #tcamp09)
Tcamp09: #tcamp09 sticker postcards didn’t arrive in time. We would love to mail you some… just ask! http://transparencycamp.org/stickers/
cheeky_geeky: Already saw @davidstephenson @valdiskrebs @leslieann44 @peteodell @ellnmllr @clayjohnson at #tcamp09
GregElin: #tcamp09 wrapping up. It was an amazing event, awesome people, conversations.
rmfretz: Thanks to all that put this together #tcamp09
bashley: Gratitude to #tcamp09 organizers, presenters, tweeters. You kept a Nova Scotian entertained, informed!
stereogab: Personally thrilled abt excitement, new ideas, knowledge sharing, connections being made to open gov, make info usable, efficient #tcamp09
Mlsif: RT @merici: RT @cjoh: @stereogab for MVP of TransparencyCamp. Truly the unsung hero of this event. #tcamp09
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Accountability for Government Spending
A week ago, I blogged about the launch of the Coalition for an Accountable Recovery (CAR). The coalition (of which Sunlight is a member) formed to promote accountability for the federal government agencies doling out the trillions of dollars, for the states and for the companies that benefit from recovery funds. CAR’s vision for a national system to collect and disseminate data on government spending is here (pdf).
It’s worth delving into that document. Its bottom line: CAR is calling for online reporting that allows the public to easily search, sort, track and download data on the use of funds from the massive Stimulus Bill.
The document proposes USASpending.gov, the federal Web site that discloses information about nearly all government spending, as the “data house” for the Recovery Act (and other government) spending. But as Greg Elin, Sunlight’s chief evangelist, in a comment to my blog, wrote, that might not be enough: “Spending from the Stimulus package will show up in USASpending.gov, but only at the federal contract level.”
Clearly a system needs to be in place to track the spending and all of its impacts. We should be able to know what’s happening with the money at all levels and all stages. Thus far, Congress has been far too vague about what it expects the online sites to provide. And we want to make sure we end up with a system that provides the most transparency and accountability as possible.
Be sure to check CAR.
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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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Ta Da: Interview with Greg Elin
Greg Elin — Sunlight’s Chief Data Architect — did a fascinating interview with Jon Udell last week. I have the daily benefit of Greg’s insights and so I want to share this very insightful interview so you can too.
Jon has blogged about the interview here. Udell is an author, information architect, software developer, and groupware evangelist himself. He writes a monthly column for the O’Reilly Network. It’s worth a regular read.
Update:
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A Wonderful Widget
We’ve been promising to introduce our Sunlight Labs more formally and today we’re doing that, along with the announcement of a really neat widget that we’re calling "Popup Politicians." Before you imagine the worst, like, Representative J. Dennis Hastert or Sen. John McCain or Representative John Boehner popping out of cake, take a look at what Greg Elin and Duncan Werner have developed — a web page plug-in that links the reader to information about who’s financing the lawmaker’s campaign, the lawmaker’s voting record, and their profile on Congresspedia. The widget appears as a small popup window when you mouse-over the little sun icon that appears at the end of the name.
We’re experimenting with the Popup on our site today. Check out all the technical information on the Sunlight Labs page.
What is it? Popup Politicians is an AJAX-powered widget which contacts a remote database here at Sunlight to retrieve links we’ve selected for a politician. The single Javascript that powers the mouse-over "bubbles" is served from Sunlight Labs server along with the data. When you load the page, the Javascript looks for Technorati-styled link tags for Members of Congress on the web page and then dynamically modifies found links to add the rollover action and a mouse-over bubble.
Sunlight Labs is readying various flavors of the widget for increased scalability. The basic widget can be added to a web site or blog by simply adding the Javascript and style sheet to the page’s headers and then manually adding a properly formed linked to each members of congress name where a popup is desired. Micah Sifry tried it last night on his personal blog and it worked. Other flavors include local server-side PHP code to automatically search and replace members of congress’s names with the necessary links. Sunlight has built a Drupal plugin that does this for our own site, www. sunlightfoundation.com, and also built a WordPress 2.0 plugin as well. Plugins for the major blogging and CMS platforms are planned and SunlightLabs is eager to find open source developers to help accomplish this and extend the the plugin.
That’s beyond the extent of my knowledge. Check it out here. And email Greg Elin at gelin@sunlightfoundation.com for more information, particularly if I have left you thoroughly confused. And remember, we’re still experimenting with this, so all is not perfect yet.
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First APIs Available
Already the Sunlight Mash-Up Labs announced in May is striding toward my fantasy of one-click political influence disclosure. Last week, Lab Co-director, Greg Elin, guided me through the results of a week of "hacking" with Mike Krejci, lead programmer for The Institute of Money in State Politics. Supported by a small grant from the Sunlight Foundation, Greg went to Portland, Oregon and helped Mike begin work on The Institute’s "web services API".
The Institute tracks campaign finance data on some 18,000 state-office candidates each election cycle and now manages a database of some 14 million records spanning many years. Even though The Institute makes this data available via its respected FollowTheMoney.org web site — which is pretty amazing when you think about it — the fact is getting at that data can be cumbersome, especially when you are on a different web site. As it is now, looking up information on your state candidate means leaving whatever website you are on and going to FollowTheMoney.org and searching through various pages to look up the data you want.
Web services API changes this picture dramatically. According to Greg, a web services API (short for Application Programmer’s Interface), "is a machine-friendly interface to a web site’s underlying complex database and application." By adding a web services API to their web site, The Institute is making it significantly easier for programmers at other web sites to dynamically incorporate The Institute’s data into their own web-based applications. And that means in the future you and I won’t have to change web sites to see the data that matters. It will already be there.
To give us non-ubergeeks a sense of this future, Mike and Greg mashed-up a few web page "widgets" which remotely search The Institute’s data. You can try one here. You can search by state, year, office, won/lost, party and even candidate without ever leaving the web page or even reloading the web page. Your search is automatically sent to The Institute’s API in the background which delivers the results dynamically into the page at which you are currently looking.
The ability to easily integrate data from one web site into another really changes the big picture. There’s simply too much data for a single entity to manage. It simply takes too long to bounce from site to site to research subtle patterns of influence buying. But allowing summary data, or detailed data, to more easily move between data silos creates the means to browse — and compare — hundreds of million data points simultaneously. Pretty neat.
Greg tells me Mike still has work to do before the APIs are ready for public release, but that Mike made enough progress they are ready for limited trials with The Institute’s partners. I can’t wait to make further announcements.
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Launching “Sunlight Labs”
I’ve long had the fantasy of one-click political influence disclosure. Imagine pressing one button and finding everything you need and want to know about a member of Congress, or a corporation, labor union or individual trying to influence her. Web 2.0 technologies – Web services, API’s, XML, AJAX, RSS – now make that possible.
To speed up making this happen, this week we decided to create a small, informal "Mash-Up Lab." We are going to treat this as a pilot project for six months to experiment on our own and to provide ad-hoc technical support to nurture other mash-up projects — some of which Sunlight has already nurtured, to realize a one-click future. These will be projects that strategically and tactically bring together nonprofit organizations, exemplary developers, and web-applications.
Heading this project will be Greg Elin, a software developer specializing in databases and interactive technologies. Greg is the creator of FotoNotesTM, a very cool image annotation program. For 15+ years he has helped organizations articulate requirements and prototype new technologies, everything from NYNEX (now Verizon) to dot.coms to non-profits. Since 1998, he has independently provided database and technology services for a variety of clients including New York University and the United States Naval Research Labs. Greg has extensive experience working with institutional and distributed data. Maybe most important, he can communicate clearly about all this. He maintains a thoughtful weblog at http://duhblog.com.
Operationally we envision a combination of activities: undertaking our own tractable projects and prototypes on a monthly/weekly basis; convening informal gatherings to nudge organizations that have already begun to have conversations about data mashing; and interacting virtually and face-to-face (and providing matchmaking with developers) to groups needing advice and technical support. We will also create and facilitate "Do-It-Yourself How-To’s" on mashable resources.
We’ve already heard from a number of organizations which we think would benefit from this kind of work we can offer. Let us know if you know of more.
