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 – July 17, 2009
Here are a few of the more interesting media mentions of Sunlight and our friends and allies from the week:
Jeff Jacoby, columnist for The Boston Globe, mentioned ReadTheBill.org in a piece he wrote calling on congressional lawmakers read legislation before they vote on it. Glenn Reynolds, at his Instapundit blog, linked to Jacoby’s column. Andrew Sullivan’s blog, The Daily Dish, followed by linking to Reynolds.
In Washington Monthly’s July/August edition, Charles Homans wrote about the Obama administration’s “experiments with data-driven democracy.” The article centers on the work of Vivek Kundra, the White House’s chief information officer, and mentions both the District of Columbia’s Apps for Democracy contest and Sunlight’s Apps for America contest. Homans quotes Clay Johnson, Sunlight Labs’ director, saying Kundra has his work cut out for him. “I have nothing but respect for what he’s trying to do. But it’s a hard job, and it’s going to take some time for this to actually happen right. I mean years.” While discussing Kundra’s launch of Data.gov, Homans again quotes Clay, “The top data source is on the world’s copper smelters, which isn’t going to tell us very much about what’s going on inside of our government.”
As Ellen Miller, Sunlight’s director, wrote earlier this week, “When it comes to following the money that’s flowing to power on Capitol Hill, no one does it better than the Center for Responsive Politics.” For instance, MAPLight.org used CRP data to show how money watered down the energy bill, the American Clean Energy and Security Act of 2009 (HR 2454). With Congress debating health care reform, Forbes used CRP data to show how America’s Health Insurance Plans, the political advocacy and trade group for the health insurance industry, has spent nearly $10 million on lobbying Congress in the past two years. Robert J. S. Ross, writing at The Huffington Post, quotes CRP about how the insurance industry has contributed $568 million to political campaigns since 1998. CNN’s Jonathan Mann used CRP data in noting how doctors have spent roughly two-thirds of a billion dollars lobbying lawmakers in the last 10 years.
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Our One Click Future
Last Thursday, Richard MacManus, founder and editor of ReadWriteWeb, posted an interesting piece titled “Understanding the New Web Era: Web 3.0, Linked Data, Semantic Web” where he explains how he sees the Web evolving with the three trends converging. And this morning, MacManus posted another more focused piece discussing Linked Data, where the Web allows users to connect related data that wasn’t previously linked. MacManus sums up the concept nicely: “Linked Data allows you to discover, connect to, describe, and re-use all kinds of data. It is to data what the World Wide Web was to documents back in the 90’s.” Data exists to be used, he wrote. “Linked Data enables data to be opened up and connected so that people can build interesting new things from it.”
MacManus embeds a TED presentation by Tim Berners-Lee, the inventor of the Web and director of the World Wide Web Consortium, and the leading evangelist for Linked Data. Here’s a YouTube video of Berners-Lee’s TED presentation:
Several weeks ago, Berners-Lee opened “A National Dialogue” discussion on what Open Linked Data is and why it’s important, including the governmental implications.
Linked Data has great implications for federal government data, but obviously, its promise reaches far beyond the confines of government. But here at Sunlight, making government data open, online and usable is our goal. And so is connecting the dots. Last month, Sunlight Labs envisioned an OpenData.gov, the new central repository for government data and research that new federal CIO Vivek Kundra is working on. We are all eagerly awaiting to see what Vivek unveils soon. But as Berners-Lee says is his Linked Open Data mantra…”Raw Data Now!
Think of LinkedData as our one click future.
