ProgrammableWeb recently launched a new central resource of over a dozen government-related mashups and Application Programming Interfaces (APIs) to improve access to legislative, civic and political information.

ProgrammableWeb is already a major hub for the Web 2.0 technology community around its directories of mashups and Web service APIs. The new site is now listing Web applications that help citizens examine and remix government data to shed more light on the work of the federal government.

ProgrammableGov’s APIs and Mashup Dashboard currently offers government information APIs and mashups developed by government agencies and those developed independently by citizens and transparency advocate organizations, including several created or supported by the Sunlight Foundation.

These include:

* The SunlightLabs API, which enables users to retrieve contact information for members of the United States Congress

* The LOUIS API, which provides searchable access to congressional, presidential, and GAO documents

* The FedSpending.org API created by OMB Watch, which includes methods for finding information about awarded contracts and information that assists businesses with applying for government contracts

* The Follow the Money API, created by the National Institute on Money in State Politics, which enables querying for information about individual candidates, political action committees (PACs), ballot measures, and campaign contributors, with options for filtering and sorting the results

* The MAPLight.org API, created by MAPLight.org, which enables querying for information about legislative votes in Congress and how they are connected to campaign donations.

ProgrammableWeb, also links to resources to help US citizens find contact information for members of Congress and congressional districts for any US address. Likewise, on the site, residents of the United Kingdom can access the TheyWorkForYou API, created by MySociety.org, to learn information about their representatives in Parliament and the House of Lords.

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Last week, the Institute on Money in State Politics annouced the launch of their APIs that give outside Web developers the ability to access and display the Institute’s data on their own Web sites, to program fully interactive displays using Institute data within their Web pages, and to create applications that return live data from FollowTheMoney.org.

The first group to jump into using APIs is Project Vote Smart. Here’s what it looks like on the Project Vote Smart Web site.

I just got a very encouraging update from Ed Bender, IMSP’s Director:

The API Mike built for Project Vote Smart is up and running. As of this morning, it has already logged 17,581 calls for data from the PVS site. Not bad for a few days of activity. In addition, the Pew-funded news outlet Stateline.org is programming an API to correspond to its ballot-measure work. Sunlight Labs is working on an API that will draw data from both our site and CRP’s. Newspapers logging on for an API password include: The Albuquerque Journal, The Olympian in Washington state, the Seattle PI, the Daily Hampshire Gazette, the New York Times, The Anniston Star and the Los Angeles Times. A couple of bloggers have logged in as has an activists with the Hawaii Clean Elections campaign.

 

We are very excited about IMSP’s leadership in this arena. Like Ed, we know that this is the wave of the future in how data should be presented on the Web. Kudos to them for taking the lead.

Full disclosure may be in order: Sunlight has funded IMSP’s work in this arena. 

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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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Not everyone is quite ready to gear down for the long July 4^th weekend. Our colleagues in Montana at the Institute on State Money and Politics, for example, just published their first newsletter. Check it out here.

The Institute — also known as the DataShaq — is a nonprofit, nonpartisan organization that compiles and analyzes campaign contribution reports for state-level candidates, political party committees and ballot issue committees. Their database of more than 15 million records is available on their Website, and is easily searchable within a given state and election year, as well as across the 50 states and multiple election cycles. It provides a wealth of information on the forces behind campaign contributions and public-policy discussions in the states. If you don’t know their work, and are involved in state-based advocacy, you should. Greg Elin, who heads the Sunlight Labs, has been working with them for most of this week to develop their first APIs. Sounds like that work has gone extremely well.

Rafael DeGennaro, who heads up ReadtheBill.org Education Fund, another Sunlight grantee, will speak on a panel at the Media Giraffe Project conference June 29-July 1 "Democracy & Independence: Sharing News & Information in a Connected World," the first summit conference of The Media Giraffe Project. If you’re in the Amherst, MA area, stop by at the University of Massachusetts. The conference’s goal is to be "the crossover meeting place for leading thinkers on the impact of Internet technology on journalism, media, education and politics — and the place to celebrate above-the-crowd innovation." Great topic.I’d sure like to know more about the project and the outcome of the conference.

Raf told me this morning that one question he’ll pose to the media-savvy attendees is this:How is it that a reporter can cover congressional passage of a major bill and never mention one little fact — that nobody, especially the reporter writing the story, has read the bill properly?  What would it take to change that?

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At the end of last week the Sunlight Foundation made a number of new grants. We’re really excited about the potential of each of them.

The work of ReadtheBill.org (which I’ve talked about before) is a hugely important effort. It could end the practice of ramming bills through Congress in the dark of night — bills that are filled with favors for special interests, earmarks, and heaven only knows ((truly) what else. And think of what activists can cook up (particularly online) if they have 72 hours to read legislation and get citizens to weigh in. We think that ReadtheBill.org will make a huge difference in making Congress’ work more transparent and in engaging citizens.

The other grants we made, though not as large, have potentially big impact too.  The Institute on State Money and Politics‘ is plowing ahead into the Web 2.0 world by developing an API  – the first of its kind  – to disseminate massive amounts of its campaign-finance data, open source style, on the Internet. We hope they will pave the way for other organizations into the brave new high tech world. We’re pleased to have had a role in stimulating their interest in this through conversations initiated by the folks running Sunlight Labs.

A third grant is to WashingtonWatchdog.org which is developing one of the most comprehensive and powerful internet-based research tools we’ve seen. Our grant is to help with them an immediate hardware upgrade so they can finish their prototype. When this site is ready to be launched, it will provide a way for citizens to stay on top of legislative and regulatory developments — in real time — and provide a law research library (think Code of Federal Regulations, Executive Order, all Public Laws) relevant to over 100 issues. What you see on the site now isn’t user-friendly — the interface is still down the road a bit — but we think that tranparency effort can be transforming to the way citizens participate in lawmaking.

And our fourth grant is to Room Eight, a very popular New York state-focused blog. The grant will allow them to expand their coverage to their Congressional delegation. We are excited by their work and the work of hundreds of other bloggers who cover state politics, and we feel like this grant will allow this blog to develop a prototype of how other state-oriented bloggers can expand their own work to federal office holders. Noone is a better watchdog that the citizens who lawmakers represent.

That’s all for the moment.

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I just got back from a long weekend of marathon meetings in Montana – the unlikely home of an outfit I’ve been working informally with since the early 1990s, the Institute on Money in State Politics.

Here at Sunlight we’re focusing on Congress, but out there in Helena, Montana IMSP tracks campaign money at the state level. Their website at www.followthemoney.org is the gateway to all this information. Essentially it’s a state-level counterpart to the DC-based Center for Responsive Politics, which analyzes federal contributions.

IMSP started their research with a core of eight western states (not including California), but over the years they’ve steadily added to that, gathering the records from state elections offices, cleaning the data and categorizing every contribution by industry and interest group. This will be their third election cycle covering all 50 states.

Their website lets you search the entire database, but it’s not very well known nationally, so to get their information out to a wider audience the Montanans are rethinking their approach and experimenting with new hi-tech ways of spreading their data to outside websites and blogs. That’s what the weekend meetings were all about.

They’ll be going full blast between now and the end of the year to gather the contribution data and disperse it as widely as possible. It should be very exciting to watch. Their 14-million-record database covers every state legislature, all the governors and other statewide-elected officials. In recent years they’ve also started tracking judicial races and initiatives.

Their reports – on subjects from private prisons to minority candidates – are first-rate and their data is available nowhere else. I’ve known all this for years [full disclosure: I’m on the board], and so do a growing number of journalists, academics and political insiders. But most people still don’t know this kind of data exists anywhere, let alone at a single website that makes it easy to sift through.

My only caveat: some people may find digging through their database addictive. One question begets another, and the answers are only a couple of clicks away. You can spend a lot of time on followthemoney.org once you know it’s there.

Primary postscript: Eight states are holding primary elections today. Much of the national attention has been focused on California, where there’s a special election to fill the vacancy left when Duke Cunningham resigned his seat after pleading guilty to bribery. Political reporters from everywhere will be reading much into the tea leaves of that matchup between the parties.

While I was in Montana, I got a look at another tea-leaf race to watch – the contest between two Democrats who are lining up to run against Republican Senator Conrad Burns in November. Burns was one of the top recipients of contributions from disgraced lobbyist Jack Abramoff and the Democrats see a chance to possibly pick up a seat. But the early front-runner, State Auditor John Morrison, stumbled into some ethical problems of his own and he’s since lost the momentum to State Senate President Jon Tester.

Tester is short, pudgy, cuts his hair in a flat top, and runs a ranch when he’s not running the state senate. He’s more liberal than Morrison, but he’s also a hundred times folksier and Montanans appreciate folksiness. If Tester pulls off a come-from-behind win today, Burns will have a bundle on his hands in November. If not, the ethics issue may be something that both candidates in the Montana senate race may want to downplay.

Post-election update: Tester won the Democratic primary in a romp. 

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