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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Sunlight.Live Recap: How We Did It
During the bipartisan health care summit on Thursday, Feb 25, Sunlight tried something new by connecting a live political event to the government data and information we work to make more accessible every day. The hope here was to give real-time context to statements made by public officials using government data, and let the numbers do a little more of the talking than just the politicians.Dubbed “Sunlight.Live,” our coverage of the joint Republican and Democratic event far exceeded our expectations, thanks to all of you.
These are a couple of notable stats that we think thoroughly debunk the notion that the public is disinterested in un-biased data-centric coverage of politics: (Continue reading…)
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New York Times’ Represent Feature
The New York Times just launched a new interactive feature called Represent. Represent allows New York City residents to type in their address and receive a stream of political information for all of their elected representatives from the City Council to the U.S. Senate. The information currently contained in Represent includes mentions in Times articles and congressional votes. It’s very much like a political coverage EveryBlock (and it wouldn’t be a bad idea for EveryBlock to integrate this data into their local data streams). The Open blog at the Times explains:
Using your address as a starting point, Represent figures out which political districts you live in and who represents you at different levels of government. It draws maps that show how where you live fits into the political geography of the city. And using information collected from around the Web, it presents a customized activity stream that tracks what the people who represent you are doing.
Represent crawls a collection of New York Times stories and City Room blog posts, looking for references to public officials. It also draws from official data sources — currently, Congressional roll-call votes, which we collect by parsing feeds and scraping government Web sites. It evaluates each article, blog post and vote to find the stories most relevant to you. (Both our article search and our Congressional votes database will soon be available to outside developers through free, open APIs.)
The fact that the Times is launching something that serves not just as a supplement to coverage, but also as a public service, shows the direction that large, traditional media sources are heading as they shrink in print and expand online. Another example would be the Washington Post’s congressional votes database. The Post also currently experiments with Apture to provide greater context in their political coverage. Here’s Apture explaining their partnership with the Post:
I can only imagine that we’ll be seeing a lot more information integration from large traditional news organizations in the coming years.
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Rangel v. New York Times
Embattled Rep. Charles Rangel writes a letter to the New York Times taking issue with their latest investigative article into his activities. The Times responds with a rebuttal. Here’s the link.
I really enjoyed the presentation.
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New York Times Opens Archives Online
Update: For some reason it appears the Times has pulled this awesome research tool. I’ll try to find out why.
The New York Times launched an amazing research tool, creating a great online browser for all their content from 1851-1922. The Times is also offering the data in API so that, if you can, you can create your own browser. The Times blog says:"As part of eliminating TimeSelect, The New York Times has decided to make all the public domain articles from 1851-1922 available free of charge. These articles are all in the form of images scanned from the original paper. In fact from 1851-1980, all 11 million articles are available as images in PDF format. To generate a PDF version of the article takes quite a bit of work — each article is actually composed of numerous smaller TIFF images that need to be scaled and glued together in a coherent fashion."
If you do research – or are in any way in need of scanning the 1855 adverts for local New York haberdashers – this is not to be missed. Check out the TimesMachine. (There might be some kind of server problems right now.)
The article to the left references a large scale congressional investigation into lobbyist actions in an attempt to block President Woodrow Wilson’s tariff bill, a key element of his New Freedom agenda. The investigation sought to discover if Senators had been bribed or received undue influence from these lobbyists and ultimately required every sitting Senator to testify to their personal finances, campaign contritbutions, and relationships with lobbyists and other company agents. This amounted to the first full disclosure by members of Congress in regards to the personal finances, their campaign contributors, and the nature of the lobby. A first for transparency in Congress.
