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
Today I am giving a high five to Minnesota’s Bluestem Prairie.
Written by Sally Jo Sorenson, she keeps track of what is going on in Minnesota. What attracted me to Bluestem in the first place was the focus on keeping track of Rep. Tim Walz from MN first district. Sally did a great job of looking into his record and the announcements that would come out of his office. Now the blog has evolved to focus on Minnesota in general and lately they have been doing great research on stimulus spending in Minnesota.
Tired of waiting for your city to become more transparent? Tony Webster, John Schrom and Ryan Johnson decided to take responsibility for their city of Minneapolis and create a software platform in order to “open municipal government, encourage clean and information-based elections, track issues and inspire community engagement and public participation.” Their new project is called Open Minneapolis.
Webster, having formerly interned for a city council member in college, had seen first hand how much information never made it to the public or was difficult to access.
Talking with Webster on the phone he explained the rationale behind the project. “There is so much that happens behind the scenes that we don’t know about. There has been a lot of great projects at the federal level, and in some cases state level, but not usually in Minnesota. I really wanted that transparency to come to Minneapolis.”
The project has been active since July 2009 and this week they launched a site listing their goals and showing some fantastic preview images. As a journalist, having worked with numerous city and state websites across the country, I would eat my hat in exchange for this type of data accessibility and clear user interface.
While all the goals of Open Minneapolis are important to me as a journalist and a citizen one is particularly catching my eye: the implementation of a standardized XML format for public meetings.
Municipal meetings are difficult enough to sit through in person. Waiting to mine a PDF release for the data you need is even worse. With the implementation of an XML format for public meetings analysis of this data will become a breeze.
Imagine visualizations of city council actions going back years or interactive flow charts showing how a particular proposal was fought over. Ideas that are possible now but only with a disproportionate amount of work – an XML standard would make it straightforward and quick.
The team behind Open Minneapolis has formed a charitable non-profit, CivicEquity, that would oversee such a standard as it expanded beyond Minneapolis. CivicEquity would also distribute the software Open Minneapolis is based on: the team will release it as open-source for any non-commercial use!
As the Sunlight Foundation expands its activities into states and cities it is projects like these that will truly make our mission successful.
If you’re interested in policy work, web development, have legal expertise or data acquisition experience head on over to their site and get involved today. The team has a grant application to the 2010 Knight News Challenge – their grant proposal is here – please rate it!
This year has seen more attention than ever given to transparency – most focused on the White House and federal government. That’s no surprise given the years of “rain-checked” reforms. Change is needed at a fast pace and in more areas. But the pressure to deliver extends beyond Washington DC. State legislatures across the country are starting to reexamine their own data, transparency rules and regulations. Earlier this month, Minnesota legislative staff met with department heads, IT experts and non-profit leaders to discuss possible changes.
The state legislature in Minnesota finds itself in a challenging situation. Engaged citizenry who are clamoring for more access, more data and a better user interface for the legislature’s web site versus a state budget that has been cut down to the bone by massive state deficits as far as the eye can see.
Legislative staff see the need for additional transparency and real time data but are challenged to deliver with scarce financial resources on one hand and a deeply federated departmental system on the other. Politicians are loathe to legislate unfunded mandates (or a funded one for that matter).
Let’s be clear though: if introducing data standards and increasing transparency costs government more in the long run – they’re doing it wrong.
Dan McCreary, Semantic Solutions Architect at Syntactica in Minneapolis, attended the meeting with legislative staff. McCreary estimates that “$100 million per year in Minnesota alone” could be saved if the legislature adopted “National Information Exchange Model (NIEM) standards for all statewide data exchanges.” NIEM standards are developed jointly by the US Department of Justice and the Department of Homeland Security.
Donna Roy, Chair of the NIEM National Priority Exchange Panel says the “[Minnesota] Department of Public Safety anticipates saving over $10 million over a three-year period by using the XML Data Model rather than developing its own statewide standard for information systems.” That’s just one change in one department! If state legislatures can save money by sharing information between departments they can definitely find the money to share that information with the public.
State legislators need to start seeing transparency as improving service while cutting costs. Without the grassroots backing strong legislation, change will be slow or non-existent in Minnesota.
I’ll be diving deeper into the transparency movement in Minnesota in future posts. Tell me about your challenges or success stories in getting data out of the legislature. Comment below or reach me on Twitter @noahkunin.
Every week I climb into the depths of the local political blogosphere to find the Sunlight. I use this series to highlight local blogs that do a great job of covering local, state, and congressional political news. This week I have highlights from Missouri, Maryland, Louisiana, Arizona, and Minnesota
In Missouri, The Turner Report has a post about an earmark the Center for Public Integrity reported on obtained by Rep. Roy Blunt. Blunt got a 4 million earmark for EaglePicher a client of his former chief of staff Gregg Hartley. Clearly there is some revolving door can’t be stopped.
In Maryland, Brian Griffiths has a post about the earmarks Sen. Mikulski has been getting for her top campaign contributors. She has gotten $42.1 million total for three companies Northrop Grumman, Thales Communications, and L-3 Communications who also have been giving her a generous campaign contributions over the years.
In Louisiana, We Could Be Famous has a post about Louisiana’s Ethics Review Board trying to dodge a disclosure requirement. Government organizations who spend more than $10,000 a year have to file financial disclosure forms. However, the Ethics Review Board requested an exemption to disclosing and was granted the request. If the ethics board gets a pass I wonder what other agencies get one too?
AZ Central has a post about the city of Surprise, Arizona’s proposals to build public trust had a few financial mishaps recently and so the city decided to clean up its image. They want to hire an outside auditor to review the books; they will be creating a searchable Web site of city spending. The interesting part of the spending Web site will be that they will update the site when the checks are written not later. I look forward to seeing the site.
Bluestem Prairie goes looking for stimulus spending. There has been a good deal of research into what the problems of tracking the money given to states has been. There is apparently no one state or federal agency that maintains a comprehensive public list of projects and no one central clearing house for everything. Recovery spending and its affects are hard to determine. This makes judging Recovery’s affectiveness impossible.
Every week I climb into the depths of the local political blogosphere to find the Sunlight. I use this series to highlight local blogs that do a great job of covering local, state, and congressional political news. This week I have highlights from Illinois, Minnesota, Montana, and Nevada.
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PolitickerNJ.com has a great March Madness esque competition to find the smartest
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Oregon’s Earmark Blog posts a CRS report about the Executive Order restricting state agencies from considering earmarks not found in the historical texts of bills. Another example of how useful and informative CRS reports are.
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South Texas Chisme posted about how the
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KentuckyPolitics.org highlights the Kentucky Senate passing legislation that would require Section 527 groups to disclose their contributions.