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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Publish the Mortgages on Line
Dan O’Neill (of Everyblock fame) is calling for publication of all mortgages that the government (read “we”) is going to buy in the bailout bill.
…. I’d like them to publish a list of all of the mortgages they purchase — the loan number, the address of the property, the lender, the amount of the loan, the status of the loan, the plaintiffs and defendants in any associated foreclosure cases, and so on.
As far as I can tell, it’s not currently possible for the public to determine the underlying assets of any of the mortgage security instruments that have been the subject of so much pop-culture sturm und drang. We all know that this is a big story, because the papers scream it and the numbers are enormous.
But we also know that it’s a big story because it is a local story. Foreclosures are plainly visible all of us, all over the country. We all know people — or are someone — affected directly by failing mortgages, decreasing home prices, and the accompanying social problems like crime, blight, homelessness, downward mobility, and despair.
Though it goes without saying, we assume Dan’s talking about publishing these lists with an API or in a downloadable format so that the information can be mashed by developers.
Do you hear us Congress? (I’m going to note this suggestion at PublicMarkup.org.)
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A Challenge from Beth Noveck
Late last week, after the Sunshine Week Lessig lecture, the always thoughtful Beth Noveck — law professor and director of both the Institute for Information Law and Policy and Democracy Design Workshop, and friend — compared the Lessig speech to a June 2007 speech, by open-source-licensing crusader Eben Moglen.
Beth said Moglen is an optimist who is inclined to trust people’s ability to collaborate and work together. She wrote that his take on government is revolutionary and evolutionary. Lessig is a pessimist, she says, full of dismay at the state of the body politic, yet wants to preserve the status quo ultimately. (I’m not sure I completely agree with the assessment of Lessig as pessimist but that’s not the point I want to make right now.)
Beth says that the best approach is a mash-up of both approaches:"Lessig’s orientation toward action and pragmatism with Moglen’s boldness of vision." She advocates that we take a whole new look at government institutions and governance, and start using technology to empower citizens in order to fundamentally change the way government works.
We need to stop viewing our institutions of government and governance as static and reified in their current form and, instead, start asking, not how to use technology to make Congress more transparent but how to use technology to make us more powerful.
I don’t want to blow up Congress (well, I do but that’s for another day) but to extend its intelligence by connecting the power of the network to the structure of the institution and to change fundamentally the way government works.
The idea that all we are good for is to blog about what happens in Washington or even to make maps and mash-ups of when and with whom the politicians went to lunch is to ignore the larger opportunity to get involved with making the science that contributes to our understanding of public health and obesity, analyzing the data about global warming, participating in the drafting of policies about these and other fields and overseeing the work of those who implement them through citizen juries assigned to every official.
Even though Sunlight is doing mashups of earmarks on Google maps and lobbyist meetings with lawmakers, and developing fun ways to visualize data, Sunlight is already heading in the direction that Beth suggests: experimenting with ways to engage citizens in research and in the shaping of government policy. We have a major new launch scheduled in this arena for next week.
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And the Winner Is …..
We had no idea what a tough task it would be to select a winner for the Mashup Contest we announced two months ago as a way to honor Sunshine Week, but it was. We had about a dozen fabulous entries – some very complex and sophisticated, some less so, but every single one of them was very effective. The staff was certainly glad that the burden for the final choices didn't rest with us.
Today we are announcing the winner is a mashup called "Unfluence". "Unfluence" was submitted as an entry by Greg Michalec and Skye Bender-deMoll. And while their mashup actually uses state campaign finance data (and the APIs developed by a Sunlight grantee – the Institute of on State Money and Politics), it is clear that the underlying code is directly applicable to federal politicians. In fact, the Center for Responsive Politics has been experimenting with similar network mapping. The more data that's available both from the government and the nonprofit sector in mashable forms, the more data can be examined from different perspectives and the more we know about Congress.
"Unfluence" creator Skye Bender-deMoll is a researcher and consultant on dynamic networks and visualization. He is also the author of skyeome.net, a blog that publicizes political network related research. Greg Michalec is a free-lance web developer from Oakland, CA who devotes most of his time working with The Midnight Special Law Collective, an independent non-profit organization dedicated to providing legal support to a wide range of activists. They hope more people will use "Unfluence" as a transparency tool to better visualize political contribution data.
Runners-up in the contest included CityCon and Open Hearings. Descriptions and links to all entries are available at http://www.sunlightfoundation.com/mashup.
We are very grateful to Sunlight Board Directors Esther Dyson, EDVenture founder, Craig Newmark, Craigslist founder, and Advisory Board member Jimmy Wales, Wikipedia founder, who served as judges of the contest.
We sponsored this contest to encourage more programmers to think about how to present information in ways that really connect with people's interests. It worked.
Thanks to all who participated.
