Greetings all, I'm honored to be guest blogging this month here at FGI.

I'm a web developer at Sunlight Labs, which involves the development of sites and projects that aim to enable citizens and journalists to more easily access government data.

Those of us that spend our days wrestling with government data often spend a lot of time talking about the data that should be available but isn't. An issue of equal if not greater importance is how to make the already available data useful to a general audience. Anyone that has dealt with raw data from any government agency knows that simply passing government data along is typically not sufficient.

One example of a project done here at Sunlight that emphasizes making some of the complex outputs of the federal government meaningful to the average citizen is Capitol Words - a site that provides a daily and monthly view of what the most commonly used word in the Congressional Record was.

The Congressional Record is the official journal of the daily proceedings of Congress. It is mandated by Article I, Section 5 of the Constitution, which emphasizes how essential it is for the people to know what their legislators are up to. It is even published today in a digital format. Unfortunately, today it is far too large to be of any real benefit to the general public.

Capitol Words was born out of a suggestion that it would be interesting to see simply the "word of the day" as a way of getting a sense of what was on Congress' mind. By giving the average citizen a window into what Congress is doing, it is possible that they will become more engaged then they otherwise might have been. Some citizens may even be inspired to dig deeper and look at the Congressional Record.

Simple presentations of government information such as the popular tag cloud, or even just a simple word, can provide access to data that may be freely available, but is still not accessible to the general public. As great as it is to see more and more government data being made available, hopefully people will also develop new and interesting ways to present government information in a manner useful to all citizens.

The Sunlight Foundation has launched a new web site, Party Time!, which aims to document the political party circuit -- not "political parties" as in "GOP" and "Democratic," but parties as in champagne, food, golf... and money: "the social whirl surrounding politicians in their quests to raise cash to run their campaigns."

There is a searchable database that lets you track parties thrown at the 2008 Democratic and Republican National Conventions as well as fundraising activities by all lawmakers running for Congress that happen all year round going back to 2006.

So you think you're a policy wonk? Well, why don't you take the Sunlight Foundation's PoliQuiz, an interactive, multiple choice political trivia game. Or better yet, play the game below as part of the Freegovinfo team? Everyone who plays PoliQuiz on freegovinfo.info will have their scores associated with the Freegovinfo team. Help us climb up the team leaderboard!

[cross-posted from Legalresearchplus.com]

As I wrote about earlier, I was having a fun, albeit geeky Saturday night following links hither and yon, and I ran across the fascinating PublicMarkup.org site.

PublicMarkup is a project of the Sunlight Foundation , and just like sunlight is the best of disinfectants, a bit of public scrutiny and participation should make legislation stronger and more viable. The folks at PublicMarkup drafted the Transparency in Government Act of 2008, and hope that the wonders of online collaboration will enhance and improve the legislation and will inspire lawmakers to carry it forward.

From the PublicMarkup site:
“The Sunlight Foundation has put together what we think can become model transparency legislation—the Transparency In Government Act of 2008—and we now need your help to further shape and refine it.”

Interesting? Inspired?
Well, you better move fast if you want contribute — You only have until May 19th before they close the site for comments and then try to re-craft/re-draft the legislation.
-Erika

Last month we posted about OMB Watch's survey to choose 5 (and only 5) favorite questions on government openness and transparency for congressional and presidential candidates. Last week, OMBWatch released their report (PDF) of the survey. Given the way things have been going over the last 30 years -- but especially over the last 8 years of the imperial presidency! -- it's no wonder that those surveyed feel that presidents should be more accountable, the public should have increased access to administrative information from both the legislative and executive branches (especially health, safety, and environmental information), and that those within the government should have increased legal protections when they report on government wrong-doing.

I think PublicMarkup's first effort at drafting openness legislation -- the Transparency in Government Act 2008 -- jibes perfectly with this effort.

Five questions to ask the presidential candidates to gauge where the candidates fall on the openness-secrecy spectrum:

1. Manipulation of Facts: "Do you support disclosure of all communications between the White House (including the Office of Management and Budget and other executive offices) and agencies regarding administrative decision-making and information disclosure?"
2. Executive Privilege: "What do you believe are the appropriate limits of executive privilege in the disclosure of information to Congress and the public?"
3. Whistleblowers: "In order to strengthen accountability against corporate crimes, would you support pending legislation that expands whistleblower protection rights to private sector workers who report violations of any federal public health and safety laws?"
4. Presidential Records: "Do you commit to reversing Executive Order 13233 to restore public access to presidential records after twelve years?"
5. Health, Safety & Environment: "Given the importance of health and safety information, how would you ensure that the public has easy access to understandable information about the air they breathe, the water they drink, and the products they use?"

Sunlight Foundation, a non-profit organization which develops and deploys new Internet technologies to make government information more accessible to citizens (i.e., Open Congress), is launching a new site called publicmarkup.org. The website is a place to post bills, to allow citizens to comment on, suggest edits to the substance of the legislation and promote participation. The idea of PublicMarkup.org is based on Transparency in Government Act of 2008. W00t!

The site is built with Django, Python, MySQL, and Debian. Double-W00t for being built on open source!!

This project is not intended to be the ultimate technical solution to the challenge of drafting legislation online, but an experiment in online collaboration. By collecting legislation, summaries, resources and commentary in a single linkable location, PublicMarkup.org provides a simple, blog-like framework for soliciting feedback on this legislation.

Just a reminder that Lawrence Lessig will lecture at the National Press Club on Thursday, March 20th at 1:30 pm. The lecture will also be available via webcast. Lessig will introduce a plan designed to increase congressional transparency, called "Change Congress". More information about Lessig and this event can be found at the Sunlight Foundation website.

Do you need Sunlightalinazinosec? The Sunlight Foundation helps to celebrate the power of the Web on OneWebDay!

The website OpenCongress.org was launched today by the Participatory Politics Foundation with help from the Sunlight Foundation. As stated on the website: "OpenCongress brings together official government data with news and blog coverage to give you the real story behind each bill" and also "OpenCongress is a free, open-source, non-profit, and non-partisan web resource with a mission to help make Congress more transparent and to encourage civic engagement." The site incorporates:

• Official Congressional information from Thomas, made available by GovTrack.us: bills, votes, committee reports, and more.
• News articles about bills and Members of Congress from Google News.
• Blog posts about bills and Members of Congress from Google Blog Search and Technorati.
• Campaign contribution information for every Member of Congress from the website of the non-profit, non-partisan Center for Responsive Politics, OpenSecrets.org.
• Congress Gossip Blog: a blog written by the site editors of OpenCongress that highlights useful news and blog reporting from around the web. The blog also solicits tips, either anonymous or attributed, from political insiders, citizen journalists, and the public in order to build public knowledge about Congress.

According to Govtrack creator Josh Tauberer, "OpenCongress is based (mostly) on the data set that GovTrack assembles and makes available for others to reuse, so I'm particularly happy that someone has finally reused it to make something new. As you can see from the front pages of the two sites, the focuses of the sites are fairly different, GovTrack being mostly reference and tracking, while OpenCongress is taking a stab at some analysis."

The Sunlight Foundation has just issued a press release about its new Open House Project. The goal of the project is to explore ways that the workings of the U.S. House of Representatives can be made more transparent using the Internet. The most encouraging news: the project has the support of Speaker Pelosi. The initial list of participants includes high-profile names such as Markos Moulitsas-Zuniga of Daily Kos and my favorite masher of congressional info, Josh Tauberer of Govtrack.us. The group intends to make a report to Congress in March 2007.