Zephyr Teachout (former Sunlight colleague and continuing great ally) had an interesting post at techPresident last Friday: airlines have started using mass emails in an attempt to influence Congress. Friday morning, she received an email from United Airlines asking her to visit a petition site, “which asks me to enter my zip code and send a note to my (member of Congress) to ‘Stop Oil Speculation’ and lower energy costs.” Zephyr reports Tracy Russo told her that she received the same email from Northwest Airlines. (I have heard nothing from either of my most frequently travel carriers - USAirways or United.)

Calling it big news, but not in the good way, Zephyr says that it looks like corporations are starting to use their huge databases to try to leverage their users to lobby Congress. She suggests that potentially tens of millions of emails could be generated, since airlines are among the biggest owners of email/databases in the country. She speculates that in a few years we’ll see many more corporations leveraging their databases to advance their agenda. “As someone concerned about concentrated power in any form, this is not a great development,” she writes.

She outlined a theory: “There were three powerful forces in modern society–civic democracy, corporations, and religion–and which ever of these learned how to harness the collective action power of the internet would, in effect, win–would define the basic framework for society for generations to come.” She says that one hopeful sign is that corporations have been slow to leverage the Internet for collective action. “They’re getting faster,” she warns.

A disturbing trend. And I wonder where the lobbying is reported.

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Micah Sifry (our strategic consultant and editor of techPresident) highlights another government transparency experiment coming out of the UK. The Power of Information Task Force is a British government agency working to improve the way government shares information with its citizens.  Yesterday, the Task Force launched “Show Us a Better Way,” a contest that asks citizens to identify what they would like to see done with public information. If they like the idea they will help fund it, to the tune of £20,000 to develop the idea to the next level. Here are some examples of ideas they are looking for.

The Task Force itself just launched in March, largely because of the vision and efforts of Sunlight friend, U.K. Cabinet Office Minister and Member of Parliament Tom Watson. As Micah wrote back in April, “Watson is part of a new vanguard of political leaders who understand that the real gains are to be had in enabling people to connect to each other to identify common concerns, come up with solutions, and organize on their own behalf.”

Can you imagine a similar task force in operation in our federal government?  This is such a terrific idea. The whole sentiment is so different from that of the US Government where the burden of getting information from government rests with citizens. I really  like what the contest site says, “Public data is your data.” Congress and the Executive Branch could learn quite a bit from the likes of Minister Watson.

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Micah Sifry (Sunlight senior strategic consultant) writes:

I’ve just finished spending two days at a mini-retreat on open government data organized by Carl Malamud of Public.Resource.Org, hosted by Tim O’Reilly of O’Reilly Media and funded by the Sunlight Foundation, Google and Yahoo!. The purpose of the meeting was to gather a bunch of folks from both the public and private sectors who are working on everything from pro-democracy websites to hyper-local news startups to see if we could draft some common principles for data and open government, and also to deepen connections and collaboration among a powerfully creative group of individuals and projects. (Full disclosure: I was there in my consulting role as a senior technology adviser to Sunlight, but this was another of those fortuitous events where I get to where all my hats as PdF editor, open government activist, and Sunlight consultant at once.)

In attendance were Adrian Holovaty and Daniel O’Neil of the soon-to-be-unveiled EveryBlock; Michal Mugurski and Eric Rodenbeck of Stamen Design, which does amazing work with data visualization; Josh Tauberer of GovTrack.us, which makes Thomas useful and amazes the rest of us with his efficiency; Lawrence Lessig of Stanford, who’s focusing his prodigious energies on the problem of corruption; Dan Newman of MAPLight.org, which is doing path-breaking work connecting money, legislators, votes and power; John Geraci of outside.in, which is localizing the blogosphere down the neighborhood level; Ed Bender of the Institute for Money in State Politics, which has state-of-the-art APIs for mashing up state-level campaign finance data; Tom Steinberg of mySociety.org, probably the world’s leader in pro-democracy web services (see TheyWorkForYou.com); David Moore and Donny Shaw of OpenCongress, which brings social wisdom to unveil what’s really going inside Congress now; JL Needham of Google, you’ve probably heard of them; Ethan Zuckerman of the Berkman Center, who has more accomplishments in the geek-to-social-good sector than anyone I know (and he’s only 34!!); Greg Palmer, whose stepping down as Congressman Henry Waxman’s tech director soon to venture into some exciting projects in the private sector; Jamie Taylor of Metaweb, which is building a powerful platform called Freebase for public information sharing; Bradley Horowitz of Yahoo!, you’ve probably heard of them too; Zack Exley of the New Organizing Institute, whose one of my favorite progressive agitators; Michael Dale of Metavid, which is bringing transparency and interactivity to Congressional video; Joseph Lorenzo Hall of UC Berkeley, one of the world’s experts on e-voting; Marcia Hoffman, a staff attorney for the Electronic Frontier Foundation, which I am a proud member of; David Orban of Metasocial Web, who is exploring the frontier of networked politics; Will Fitzpatrick of Omidyar Network, which is moving toward embracing transparency as a top priority; Aaron Swartz of Open Library, which is working on creating a wiki page for every book in the world; and myself and Greg Elin of the Sunlight Labs.

The common denominator of this group of non-profit and for-profit social entrepreneurs is the conviction that freedom of information is a cornerstone of democracy, and that the internet is the most powerful system ever invented for expanding public information and participation in the decisions that affect our lives. Thus just about everyone in attendance is actively involved in projects that take publicly available data and, using all kinds of new software, make it dramatically more meaningful and engaging.

Thanks to this movement, it is now possible–or soon will be possible–to do all of these things:
-discover your member of Congress’s full voting record (the official record at Thomas only chunks out votes by bill, not by member), and explore oddities like "late-night" votes, at the Washington Post’s votes database, courtesy of Adrian Holovaty and crew.
-explore precisely how money from an industry or interest group correlates to specific votes, and then produce fine-grained charts with your own analysis of these relationships, thanks to MAPLight.org.
-search for video of speeches by Members of Congress from the floor of the House and Senate–and soon to annotate those snippets, edit them and package your own video for exporting on other sites, thanks to Metavid.
-track a bill or a vote or a Member, and soon, to add your own comments and point of view all of the same, and see what others are saying, thanks to OpenCongress.

If you want to get a sense of the presentations, read Ethan Zuckerman’s post from Saturday, which describes some of the cutting-edge work that participants (several of whom are grantees of Sunlight) are currently doing. David Orban also shot some video and created a discussion group around the event (details here).

3-D Journalism
I had a great conversation over dinner with Adrian Holovaty, who helped pioneer this growing field of public data mashups with his ChicagoCrime.org site. He agreed with me that there’s a new kind of story-telling being done with many of these projects, a kind of dynamic, data-driven journalism that is simply impossible in print–but we struggled for a simple phrase to describe it. I like the word "charticle," but most of the people around us, including Adrian, thought that sounded vaguely unsanitary. Then it hit me, how about "3-D journalism"? That is, online sites or charts that are built around data, that may be dynamically produced by other web services (or by combining several services), that a reader can interact with, produce a kind of 3-D view of an issue or story. So, whaddya say? have I coined a term?

The group spent some time brainstorming about tools and products that we wish we had, and I am hopeful that this conversation will continue and expand. Some of the things that we discussed included: better tools for groups to annotate and discuss specific paragraphs or items in a text (such as a bill); a safe hub for public servants from school-teachers to bureaucrats to blog about what really needs to be fixed inside their institutions; better tools for incumbent legislators to receive and respond to the huge flow of email they currently receive (and ignore); better tools for converting audio to text; and a hub for tracking the promises politicians make (and whether they keep them).

How to Open Government Data
Underlying all of our discussions was the sense that we stand on the verge of much greater developments in the field of networked democracy, but that we need all branches of government, from the national and the local, to update how they handle data to enable the greatest possible flowering of beneficial public uses. Too often, data that taxpayers have paid to develop is published on government websites in essentially unusable forms–locked in pdfs, abbreviated in summary tables, delayed by months or even years from when it was timely; unreadable by computers and thus unmashable; and with all sorts of unnecessary restrictions on its use. So the group spent a lot of time working out a basic set of principles for defining when government data can truly be considered open, and at the end of the afternoon on Saturday we posted these "Open Government Data Principles" to the web.

Government data shall be considered open if it is made public in a way that complies with the principles below:

1. Complete
All public data is made available. Public data is data that is not subject to valid privacy, security or privilege limitations.

2. Primary
Data is as collected at the source, with the highest possible level of granularity, not in aggregate or modified forms.

3. Timely
Data is made available as quickly as necessary to preserve the value of the data.

4. Accessible
Data is available to the widest range of users for the widest range of purposes.

5. Machine processable
Data is reasonably structured to allow automated processing.

6. Non-discriminatory
Data is available to anyone, with no requirement of registration.

7. Non-proprietary
Data is available in a format over which no entity has exclusive control.

8. License-free
Data is not subject to any copyright, patent, trademark or trade secret regulation. Reasonable privacy, security and privilege restrictions may be allowed.

Compliance must be reviewable.

Each of these definitions is hyperlinked to additional clarifying pages, and the group is inviting further discussion on its wiki pages to help flesh out these definitions further. Perhaps, in the same way that the Open House Project has helped kickstart a productive dialogue with the House of Representatives on how it can improve how it uses the web to share information with and engage the public, these Open Government Data Principles can fire a bigger conversation with government insiders at all levels, as well as policy thinkers and technologists worldwide, to seize the moment and bring government data practices further into the age of the open, networked public sphere. I, for one, am very optimistic.

Cross-posted at TechPresident.

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TechPresident is continuing its mission to create new innovative ways to communicate and interact with presidential candidates by launching 10 Questions. Here’s how it works: you submit a question via YouTube or other video services and tag it 10questions. Then, your video will be loaded to the 10 Questions site where it will be voted on by others in the online community. The top 10 questions will be submitted to the candidates, who will then answer the questions on their campaign sites. Citizens can then vote on whether the candidates actually answered the questions. This experiment in people-powered online democracy allows regular citizens to submit questions and, more importantly, to determine which questions the candidates should answer instead of a debate moderator.

Below is our question. Don’t forget to submit one and don’t forget to vote.

Disclaimer: Micah Sifry and Andrew Rasiej are consultants for the Sunlight Foundation.

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Congratulations to our good friends over at techPresident for winning the 2007 Knight-Batten Award for Innovations in Journalism Grand Prize. The University of Maryland-affiliated J-Lab organized the award. Andrew Rasiej and Micah Sifry, Sunlight’s technology advisors, founded techPresident to focus on how the campaigns are using the web, and how the web is using them. They are encouraging ordinary citizens to be their own Woodsteins, covering the candidates using all the new tools of the new web. The site covers campaign websites, online advertising, and postings on YouTube and has a must-read group blog and daily digest. Their tracking of which candidate has the fastest growing group of friends on MySpace and Facebook supporters has become a political bellweather.

Andrew and Micah have collected a couple dozen veterans of the 2004 and 2006 elections, both Republicans and Democrats, to blog on the site. This powerhouse stable includes the likes of Patrick Ruffini, former eCampaign Director for the Republican National Committee and webmaster for Bush-Cheney ‘04; Zack Exley , director of online organizing and communications for Kerry/Edwards ‘04; Morra Aarons, former director of Internet marketing for the DNC, and Chuck DeFeo, general manager of Townhall.com.

Micah and Andrew and the rest of the (very small) techPresident team are the innovators of the ongoing mashup of politics and Web 2.0. As the campaign heats up, techPresident will increasingly be an essential resource for journalists and average citizens alike. Congratulations guys!

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From TechPresident this morning…

Following in the footsteps of Leonardo DiCaprio, Oprah Winfrey, and Al Gore, Barack Obama has posed a question on Yahoo! Answers, reports the Chicago Tribune. His question? "How can we engage more people in the democratic process?" . . . The Tribune notes that Obama isn't the first candidate to use the forum; Hillary Clinton and John McCain have been there, done that.

Why aren't members of Congress doing this? And if they are, let me know.

As of this writing there have been more than 12,000 responses to Obama's questions. They are quite revealing:

"I think we need to give people a personal stake in the process. I think most of us feel that we have little to no power. We all need to feel that we are important and that our opinions matter."

"Ban Ads, make people research candidates. A computer can be used for more than spreading hate and division on yahoo . . .

"Restore their faith in Congress by providing concise information about the workings of the legislature. The past 6 years of inaction and obstruction were horrible, but Congresses' reputation is being further eroded as it begins to expose Executive branch wrongdoing. Every provision in a bill that benefits a particular legislator or district seems to be called an "earmark" or "pork." Congressmen and Senators are being portrayed as craven creatures who trade votes on nationally important issues for this pork, and who "fish" and "grandstand" for purely selfish political motives.

All of this seems to feed cyncism and citizen apathy. I think we need to know something positive and informative about the work of Congress. For example, What is proper role of pork? and, How is the executive branch being investigated in a way that will have a positive impact for our country?"

"On YouTube for the first time last week, a presidential candidate responded to a video when Dennis Kucinich responded to some statements someone else had made about him. This could be an incredible way to have a dialogue with people……allow people to record questions to you via YouTube, and then respond with a publicly accessible video for all to see. Voters will know where you stand, candidates will take positions, and all videos are easily accessible by all! I'd highly recommend beginning this, Mr. Obama, it would set you apart as a trendsetter, would show that you're above the old type of politics, and allow you to really interact with your grass-roots supporters, who are the bread and butter of your campaign (at least we like to think).

"People want things easy to access…like information. Yet with the vast amount of media & resources, it is hard to determine who stands for what. I don't have a whole lot of time to read through candidate web sites, and I don't always make it home on time for the 6 o'clock news beat on candidates. I just want to know who stands for what, what their plans are and how it will benefit me and my family. If you can make it simple yet informational then I am sure more people would be more inclined to be involved.

 

 

 

 

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