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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This Week In Transparency – June 12, 2009
Here are a few of the more interesting media mentions of Sunlight and our friends and grantees from this past week:
Federal law prohibits lobbyists and those that hire them from giving gifts or campaign contributions to congressional lawmakers. No such law exists prohibiting them from spending unlimited amounts to honor lawmakers or contributing to non-profits connected to them. Quite a limitation on the distinction, if you ask me. However, Congress passed ethics rules in 2007 requiring for the first time that lobbyists must report all such payments. On Monday, USA Today’s Fredreka Shouten and Paul Overberg reported on the paper’s comprehensive analysis of lobbying reports that found 2,759 payments, totaling $35.8 million, were made in 2008. They quote Ellen Miller, Sunlight’s executive director, “It’s another example of the many pockets of a politician’s coat.” The spending amounts to an “end-run” around campaign-finance laws “that are designed to limit the appearance of undue influence.”
(Continue reading…)
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New “RaceTracker” to Track Every Congressional Race Nationwide
This is pretty awesome: a non-partisan, fully-referenced, open-source and crowd-sourced wiki project that lists every candidate running in every U.S. Senate, House and governor’s race.The project, dubbed RaceTracker, was coordinated by the folks at the Swing State Project as they completed a nationwide survey of the candidates in each race. As we move into the 2010 congressional races, the site will use crowd-sourced participation to keep it current.
http://www.opencongress.org/wiki/RaceTracker
Project lead Conor Kenny of the Sunlight Foundation writes
You can now check on the status of each of the seven candidates considering a run for the seat of Illinois’ Sen. Roland Burris (D) or the eight who are eyeing Rep. Betsy Markey (D-Colo.). We’ll even tell you who’s a confirmed as a candidate versus who’s merely considering or rumored to be a candidate, how much money they’ve raised, the district boundaries and the district-specific electoral trends in the last three presidential elections.
In true wikified fashion, one of the most important aspects of RaceTracker is that all the data is freely available via an open API for use in other web apps or visualizations. I’m looking forward to seeing what others will come up with as the possibilities abound. (Continue reading…)
