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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Digital Democracy Contest
Today we’re excited to launch the Digital Democracy Contest — a free web-based game for high school social studies classes.
Students learn how to use OpenSecrets.org and OpenCongress.org. Then they compete in teams to answer questions like:
- How much money did the pharmaceutical industry contribute to Congressional candidates since 1990? [Answer: $94,601,549]
- How often does Senator Hagan vote with her party? [Answer: 87%]
- Which Representative sponsored H.J.Res.5? [Answer: Serrano]
Once students learn how to investigate Congress they reflect upon technology’s influence on government using this worksheet (pdf). If the teacher wishes, students can then complete original research tasks using Transparency Corps. Once vetted by other students this research will go on the OpenCongress wiki.
The Sunlight Foundation works to make our government more transparent, but putting government data online is just the first step. Citizens must be able to use this data. Projects like the Digital Democracy Contest help close the loop.
The Digital Democracy Contest was created by the students behind GNIC.org in partnership with the Sunlight Foundation. The contest is funded by a MacArthur Young Innovator award and based upon a college contest.
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WashingtonWatch Rolls-Out Earmark Crowd-Sourcing Tool
Jim Harper, Webmaster at WashingtonWatch.com, can use our help this weekend.
WashingtonWatch is beginning a soft roll-out of its new crowd-sourcing effort to capture and display earmark data. (Sunlight has provided partial support for Jim’s project.) You can find the data-entry interface here (requires login). Jim is asking us all to help test it out by trying to enter earmark data for individual congressional lawmakers, whether your own representative or senator, or maybe one you particularly like or dislike. Jim says that he has found it to be rather addictive fun…And I can imagine many of us would too.
He says that after spending some time getting used to the interface and the buggy way each individual lawmaker listed their earmarks, it should start going quickly.
Next week, Jim will announce a contest – WashingtonWatch.com will award an Amazon Kindle to the “earmark hunter” who enters the earmark requests for the most individual lawmakers.
Jim has set it up so that any site can input data to a master database, however, you’ll need to get a login and instructions of how to set it up on your site from him. This “definitive” data-set will be freely available in whole or in part to anyone. He also says he is willing to help anyone who wants to write code to scrape data from individual lawmakers’ submissions and deliver them in bulk. (Frustratingly, each lawmaker announced and displayed their earmarks differently on their site.) Jim is hoping that those of you who are savvy enough will figure out how to collect data more efficiently by writing code to scrape the earmark data from all of Congress.
Just like Sunlight’s Transparency Corp, Jim is asking for volunteers to make government transparency a reality.
This is a neat weekend frolic. Have at it.
Send comments/questions/suggestions to him at webmaster@washingtonwatch.com.
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This Week in Transparency – July 2, 2009
Here are a few of the more interesting media mentions of Sunlight and our friends and allies from the week:
Last Friday evening’s June 26th program, CNN’s Lou Dobbs broadcasted a piece by correspondent Louise Schiavone about the Cap and Trade Energy Bill that the House of Representatives was to vote on and pass later that evening. Schiavone interviewed Jake Brewer, Sunlight’s engagement director, who said, “This is the kind of bill that’s going to affect our economy on a massive scale, our climate, our national security, and is not the kind of thing to be taken lightly. The opacity of this process is — to be perfectly honest, it’s infuriating.” Schiavone then stated erroneously that Sunlight opposed the bill. For the record, Sunlight has no position on the content of the bill itself, but advocates for the Congress to put all non-emergency legislation online for 72 hours before voting on it. The transcript can be read here, and the video is below.
