New Campaign Finance Tools from FEC
The Federal Election Commission (FEC) "now has an online map that graphically displays individual contributions to 2008 Presidential candidates, organized by zip code. Users may also look at and compare contributions to specific candidates, all candidates, or all candidates from a political party. Republican presidential hopeful U.S. Sen. John McCain, R-Ariz., speaks during a town hall meeting, Friday, June 8, 2007, in Pella, Iowa. (AP Photo/Charlie Neibergall) The new system also allows users to export campaign finance data to an Excel spreadsheet."
- FEC Helps Bloggers Track Campaign Cash, by Amanda Carpenter, Townhall.com, June 12, 2007.
The online map was modeled after graphics the New York Times' website used to present contribution data after the first round of 2008 presidential finance reports were filed in April. The New York Times version allowed users to expand and contract bubbles, according to the size of campaign donations, over geographic areas. To build a similar map, Palmer said it would have cost the FEC $800,000. Instead, Palmer said "We'd thought we'd save the taxpayers some money" and went without the expandable bubbles. He said their map costs around $12,000 to build. Palmer also told reporters that the FEC hopes to have a similar mapping system for House and Senate candidates this fall. If all goes well, they’ll launch “seventeen categories you can drill down to a very detailed level†to see who is funding all federal candidates, Palmer said.Continue reading
400 Years of NARA War Records Now Online at Commercial Site
Ancestry.com is making available "more than 90 million U.S. war records from the first English settlement at Jamestown in 1607 through the Vietnam War's end in 1975. The collection includes the names and gravestone details of 3.5 million deceased U.S. soldiers, including 2,000 who died in Iraq." Users can pay $155.40 a year for unlimited access.
- Dot-com to unveil 4 centuries of military records, by Donna Borak, Associated Press, Sunday, May 27, 2007.
The records came from the National Archives and Records Administration (NARA) and include "37 million images, draft registration cards from both world wars, military yearbooks, prisoner-of-war records from four wars, unit rosters from the Marine Corps from 1893 through 1958, and Civil War pension records, among others." Ancestry.com spent $3 million to digitize the military records.
Budget constraints and a long list of unfinished priorities have limited federal efforts to make roughly 9 billion public documents available online, said National Archives spokeswoman Susan Cooper. "In a perfect world, we would do all this ourselves and it would be up there for free," she said. "While we continue to work to make our materials accessible as widely as possible, we can't do everything."Continue reading
Release of CIA documents
NYT: "The Central Intelligence Agency will make public next week a collection of long-secret documents compiled in 1974 that detail domestic spying, assassination plots and other C.I.A. misdeeds in the 1960s and early 1970s, the agency's director, Gen. Michael V. Hayden, said yesterday."
- C.I.A. to Release Documents on Decades-Old Misdeeds by Scott Shane, New York Times, June 22, 2007.
The National Security Archive separately obtained and posted a "six-page summary of the illegal CIA activities, prepared by Justice Department lawyers after a CIA briefing in December 1974, and the memorandum of conversation when the CIA first briefed President Gerald Ford on the scandal on January 3, 1975."
- The CIA's Family Jewels, National Security Archive Electronic Briefing Book No. 222, Edited by Thomas Blanton, June 21, 2007.
Agency Violated Charter for 25 Years, Wiretapped Journalists and Dissidents CIA Announces Declassification of 1970s "Skeletons" File, Archive Posts Justice Department Summary from 1975, With White House Memcons on Damage Control
CIA director Gen. Michael Hayden announced today that the Agency is declassifying the full 693-page file amassed on CIA's illegal activities by order of then-CIA director James Schlesinger in 1973--the so-called "family jewels." Only a few dozen heavily-censored pages of this file have previously been declassified, although multiple Freedom of Information Act requests have been filed over the years for the documents. Gen. Hayden called the file "a glimpse of a very different time and a very different Agency." The papers are scheduled for public release on Monday, June 25.Continue reading
Sunlight Foundation Mashup Contest Winners
I've posted about this earlier at my home blog, but I thought it was worth a revisit and fuller entry because it did not get the attention it deserved. The Sunlight Foundation, the group that has fostered Congresspedia , the Open House Project, & OpenCongress.org, held a government "mashup" competition in April. In May, the winner, Uninfluence , was announced and won $2000. What follows is a list of the winner and the top 5 finalists. The 'project descriptions' are copied from the Sunlight project page. Additional entries can also be found there.
Winner
Uninfluence Developed by Skye Bender-deMoll and Greg Michalec. Project Description: Uninfluence, is an interactive information visualization of state level political contribution data. Screencast: http://sunlightlabs.com/mashupfinalists/unfluence/unfluence.html Mashup: http://unfluence.primate.net/index.htmlThe Finalists
CityCon (First Runner Up) Project Description: CityCon allows you to find detailed information about any member of the current 110th U.S. Congress. Screencast: http://sunlightlabs.com/mashupfinalists/citycon/CityCon%20FInal.html Mashup: http://www.tetonpost.com/citycon OpenHearings Live (Second Runner Up) Project Description: A mini-site of schedules for current and future Senate committee hearings. Includes links to live audio and video of hearings in progress, anRSS feed of live hearings, iCalendar schedules for all committees and hearings, and the ability to import the "Live Hearing" view into your personalized Google homepage. Screencast: http://sunlightlabs.com/mashupfinalists/openhearingslive/OpenHearings.org%20-%20final.html Mashup: http://openhearings.org/live EchoDitto's Congressional Similarity Visualizer Project Description: Java applet that lets users explore which legislators vote most similarly to one another. (Detailed explanation on the site provides background on the statistical analysis the visualization represents.) Screencast: http://sunlightlabs.com/mashupfinalists/Echoditto3/Echoditto3.html Mashup: http://labs.echoditto.com/projects/sunlight/ Second Life Congressional Info Project Description: A mashup of the Sunlight APIs with Second Life, creating an interactive info center (kiosk) at the virtual Capitol Hill - a pro-bono educational area - in Second Life. Visitors can (and do!) access the information in a venue where they can discuss the information in the context of politics, policy and place. Screencast: http://sunlightlabs.com/mashupfinalists/secondlife4/Second%20Life4.html Writeup: http://clearnightsky.com/node/288 State-Machine Project Description: Data Visualization showing the relationship between members of Congress and political access committees. (Watchingscreencast and reading description highly recommended.) Screencast: http://sunlightlabs.com/mashupfinalists/statemachine/State%20Machine%20-%20final.html Mashup: http://state-machine.org/ -- Tim Dennis Continue readingFeds are blogging, are they listening?
Update 6/24/2007 - The incredible efficient folks at usa.gov have added the Future Digital System blog to their blog directory, which I hope will expose GPO's efforts to more citizens and allow for a broader range of input than just contractors and docs librarians. The usa.gov folks added the blog a few days ago, I just haven't gotten around to mentioning it. So if you see a federal blog that should be on their list, notify them with the confidence that they are responsive. Now for the original post: ----------------------------------------- The federal portal USA.gov has started a new page of government agency blogs at http://www.usa.gov/Topics/Reference_Shelf/News/blog.shtml. The list currently stands at ten active blogs, although I know they are missing at least one because they don't have GPO's FDSys Blog at http://fdsys.blogspot.com. I have reported this oversight to USA.gov and hopefully one of our GPO readers will contact USA.gov directly. The blogs are from a range of agencies and I was a little surprised to find that a majority allow for "blog-standard" commenting. A seventh blog, Pushing Back from the Office of National Drug Control Policy surprised me by at least accepting comments on blog entries, but these seem to be mailed to ONDCP staff and never seen by the public. Rather than rant against the agencies that run blogs without public feedback, let's celebrate the agencies that understand that Web 2.0 is about interaction:
- Eye Level - Smithsonian American Art Museum
- GLOBE Program – Blog for the chief scientist of Global Learning and Observations to Benefit the Environment (GLOBE) program.
- Health Marketing Musings from Jay M. Bernhardt, PhD, MPH - Centers for Disease Control and Prevention
- Library of Congress Blog
- Pandemic Flu Leadership Conference - Time limited blog but very active with dozens of comments to every entry.
- Peace Corps Blog - Very unstandard looking page that doesn't really seem to have been active for awhile, but USA.gov lists it as active and it does allow comments.