The political Web continues to grow as new databases are established every week regularly using new technologies to present important information. I came across three new Web sites, one government and two from nonprofits, today and figured I’d pass them along. The first is the Government Printing Office’s online guide to members of Congress. The GPO’s online guide allows users to search members of Congress by a number of categories, including name, hometown, terms served, and more. The database is fairly rudimentary but it does allow someone to do quick searches for members from a particular state or see how many members have served for 5 terms. This is good step for GPO as it shows that they looking towards using the Web to project information; all they need is to add more search categories and more information for the member profiles. More links to more information makes the data more useful.

Second, we have a great collection and presentation of government RSS feeds from Legistorm. Legistorm’s "The Score" is a one-stop shop for up-to-the-minute government information hosting RSS feeds of the floor of the House, reports from the GAO, CBO, Executive Orders, and Statements of Administration Policy, and headlines from the blog Political Wire. The Score also shows the schedule for the House and Senate floors and the schedule for House and Senate committee hearings. For the lighter side of things they also post top political cartoons of the day. It looks a lot like a preset, government information-only Netvibes page. If you’re watching Congress this is a pretty sweet view.

Third, and somewhat of topic, is the new database on carbon emissions Carbon Monitoring for Action (CARMA) from the Center for Global Development. I bring this one up because it is a massive database, containing information on 50,000 power plants and 4,000 power companies worldwide, that is using the Web to provide information to citizens concerned about carbon emissions in useful ways. The site allows for searches in variety of categories. I just typed in my zip code and went to the page for Pepco Holdings, Inc., my power company. The individual page for the power company is a striking way at conveying information, using data charts, Google Maps, and allowing comments (particularly useful for individuals who are directly effected by polluting power plants in their area). While not everyone in America is concerned about finding the latest GAO report they are concerned about the air they breathe and the responsibility of the companies providing energy to their homes. The presentation in the CARMA database goes above and beyond that which I normally see. I would of course love to see this information mashed-up with lobbying records, government contracts and grants, member voting records from these districts, etc…

Conveying information that any American can understand and care about on a gut level, whether it’s carbon emissions or polluted water ways, and matching that to information that makes the powerful accountable for their actions (voting behavior or power of influence through lobbying and campaign contributions) will allow power to decentralize back to citizens and voters. The ProgrammableWeb government page that Ellen just wrote about is a great beginning step to making all government and company information mixable and matchable to suit the needs of each American. As the political Web innovates, politicians will have to become more accountable for their actions.

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The man who really introduced me to the power of Internet (long story, see his explanation here) — Gavin Clabaugh — reminds us what shining a light into hidden corners of Washington, and mixing the data with a bit of technology and a handful of the Internet (with a little Miller and co-conspirator pixy dust thrown in) can do. He says that the combination may result in nothing short of the power to save democracy from itself. I promise you, Gavin was not sitting at the table when we hatched the idea for Sunlight (though his wife was my communications director when I headed the Center for Responsive Politics, so maybe there’s something in the bloodline).

It was a long-time reporter of Washington’s hidden secrets who said to us "Many members of Congress do what they do, because they can get away with it." We responded, "Sunlight is the best disinfectant." And sunlight in the age of the Internet means something far more powerful than it’s ever meant before.

The mere act of opening the kimono changes behavior and changes the balance of power. …So too, the inherent "connectedness" of the Internet is also changing the relationship of money to power as well. Big money is still there (by the bucket-full in this particular election season), but it is being somewhat counterbalanced by so-called Internet campaigns, campaigns that are using the ‘net’s ability to aggregate lots of small things, in this case small contributions.

Nevertheless, today’s innovative (dare I say social) uses of technology have had a liberating effect. Instead of robbing us of rights, they have increased our participation, restoring power to the formerly powerless. It has strengthened our democracy, not undermined it. To paraphrase Al Gore in his (absolutely terrific) book, The Assault on Reason, "a connected citizenry" is our greatest hope. The new internet is all about connections and the open secret effect…

Gavin give us several other examples of how transparency, in the networked age, is changing the power dynamics - in the relationship between funder and grant seeker, passenger to airline (please say it’s so!), and the news media.

Read his whole post.

Transparency can make a difference.

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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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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 FotoNotes^TM, 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.

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Information Mashing. Don’t you just love that term? It’s one of the major goals of Sunlight and while we’ve been working on it for the past couple of months we have a ways to go before it happens in any substantial way. Our goal is simple: integrate in a user-friendly way individual data sets (like campaign contributions, lobbyists and government contracts) that makes the whole larger than the sum of its parts.

We’d like to create something we’ve dubbed an "Accountability Matrix."  A website where, with one click you can look up a major donor and see not just their campaign contributions, but also their lobbying expenditures, the names of members who’ve flown on their private jet, the names of former congressional staffers they’ve hired, and so on.

In a nutshell, we want to make information more liquid and more accessible to the public. Our initial thoughts would be to establish this as a distributed infrastructure where various groups maintain their specialty databases, but provide a mechanism to link the data sets. This idea of "information liquidity" will allow analyses and public access previously never before possible. Obviously we’ll have to come up with a really user-friendly interface.

Our initial experiment is likely to be to combine core state campaign finance information from the Institute on State Money and Politics with top federal donors as compiled by the Center for Responsive Politics. We’ve been talking with both groups about a beta project that would be publicly available this summer. Their techies have been putting their heads about how to mash their somewhat disparate data together and I expect to have a proposal from them soon.

 But imagine if we could go much further and link campaign finance information to information on lobbying, and to government grants and contracts and then linking all of that to regulatory compliance information, such as toxic releases and accident and injury information, and court decisions. This could make it pretty easy, for example, to figure out the behavior of federal contractors and whether the government is doing business with scofflaws. If we can pull this off we may be able to add exponentially to the understanding of influence peddling in Washington, and do it in a way that any citizen can use. 

Individually non-governmental organizations do not have the resources to build or maintain a broad-based "Accountability Matrix." The technology is currently available to make it happen - and at reasonable cost. Sunlight would like to have a hand in making it happen.

 Any thoughts on this subject? Ideas? Experience? Send them my way.

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