Sunlight Foundation

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

• 24 Days Of Local Sunlight – Day 18

  By Nisha Thompson on 12/18/09 @ 2:49 pm | 0 Comments

  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.

  

• Minneapolis on road to transparency

  By Noah Kunin on 12/16/09 @ 10:03 am | 2 Comments

  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!

  

• Looking for the Transparency Dividend in Minnesota

  By Noah Kunin on 10/14/09 @ 11:21 am | 1 Comment

  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.

  

• Local Sunlight

  By Nisha Thompson on 10/08/09 @ 7:00 pm | 2 Comments

  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.

  

• Local Sunlight 6/1/09

  By Nisha Thompson on 06/01/09 @ 1:02 pm | 1 Comment

  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.

  (Continue reading…)

  

• Local Sunlight (Update)

  By Nisha Thompson on 04/25/08 @ 12:16 pm | 0 Comments

  

  This week I have highlights from Tennessee, South Carolina, Oregon, New Jersey, Minnesota, Delaware and Hawaii.

  In Tennessee, Knox Views reports that the Knox County has put the campaign financial disclosure reports online for all candidates in Knox County races. The financial disclosure forms are pdfs of the actual paper reports and put on the election commissions’s Web site.

  In South Carolina, SC6 has three very interesting posts investigating the campaign contributions given to Rep. Jim Clyburn. Part one looks into Rep. Clyburn’s campaign donors and where his contributions are coming from and how many of them are coming from constituents versus out of staters. Part two looks at companies that have never contributed to Rep. Clyburn in the past but suddenly started and then received a federal grant. The third part goes into the interesting donations coming from a New York City based corporate law firm that gives barely any money to federal level candidates outside New York but have given to Rep. Clyburn. These posts are interesting and are another reason, for why it’s important, to have campaign donations available on the Federal Election Commision’s Web site and OpenSecrets.org. Good job SC6.

  In Oregon, Orygun has a great post that thoroughly explains the issues happening with the Oregon Revised Statutes that I highlighted earlier this week.

  PolitickerNJ.com has a great March Madness esque competition to find the smartest New Jersey legislator. All you do is vote on which lawmaker you think is intellectually smarter. While I don’t know if someone can really measure someone else’s intelligence without knowing them, it is a fascinating way to see what constituents think about their lawmakers.

  In Minnesota, Bluestem Prairie has a list of federal grants Rep. Tim Walz got (correction: I misunderstood Rep. Walz announced these grants did not get them) for area airports.

  Two bloggers in Delaware want a state spending database and can’t seem to understand what could be causing state legislators to not mandate one. DelawarePolitics.net writes a post about a new law under consideration that would be put the spending for school systems online and also would introduce a state budget spending database. He even goes into details about what other states spent on a database and what it would cost Delaware since FedSpending.org became open source. Kilroy’s Delaware highlights TheNewsJournals state spending database and asks why Delaware can’t get this done.

  In Hawaii, Poinography highlights a post at National Conference of State Legislator’s blog about how legislative voting systems don’t review voting by legislator. He then goes on to say Hawaii also doesn’t and you have to go through thousands of bill status pages to get the information. He might even take the initiative to “write a perl script able to automatically extract the data from those history pages… Which means that one of the (paid!) computer geeks at the Lege should be able to do the same.”

  

• Local Sunlight

  By Nisha Thompson on 02/28/08 @ 3:57 pm | 0 Comments

  

  This week I have highlights from Oregon, South Dakota, Texas, Louisiana, Kentucky, Florida and Minnesota.

  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.
  

  S.D. Watch posted a press release from South Dakota’s Secretary of State Chris Nelson. The press release states that the secretary of state has updated their website to include a free, searchable database of corporate records.

  South Texas Chisme posted about how the Harris County government is looking into closing a loophole that allows high ranking officials to not include personal financial information that could cause a conflict of interest.

  In Louisiana, Between the Lines, has a post on new ethics reform legislation going through the state senate. The legislation would limit gifts and meals from lobbyists and is being opposed by many lawmakers because it was cause hardship to their legislative life.

  KentuckyPolitics.org highlights the Kentucky Senate passing legislation that would require Section 527 groups to disclose their contributions.

  Florida’s The Buzz, highlights how the Florida House is now wireless. “Anyone with a wireless-capable computer can pick up a signal now in committee rooms, public areas, etc. No registration is necessary, says Jill Chamberlin, spokeswoman for House Speaker Marco Rubio.” Kudos to you Florida House.

  In Minnesota, MinnPost, is using Sunlight’s new Lawmaker Profiler. The Profiler allows you to find campaign contributions, earmarks, federal contracts, and lobbyist expenditures that are associated with a member of Congress. It is a great tool for any blogger or news organization who wants a new innovative way to see congressional data.