Part-Time Policy Wonk

From Ars Technica:

A political spat erupted in Washington, D.C., earlier this month over rules governing how members of Congress may use the Internet. House Republicans argued that proposed changes to the rules amounted to "new government censorship of the Internet," while Democrats said the charges were exaggerated. Whichever side is right or wrong, the fact remains that current rules governing official communications prohibit members of Congress from using video-sharing or social networking sites like YouTube, Flickr, or Facebook. As a result, many House members, including Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-CA), are currently in violation of the rules.

Current rules do not allow members to post video or other content outside the house.gov domain. This thwarts members who wish to use YouTube and other services to host video. . .

. . . The Sunlight Foundation, a good-government group that advocates for transparency in government, also launched an online campaign at www.LetOurCongressTweet.org that demands sensible congressional web use rules.

Posted by Anne at 08:37 PM | Permalink

From the Google blog:

In this U.S. election year, what information could be more important than the candidates' own words to describe their views, actions and platforms? . . .

. . Today, the Google speech team (part of Google Research) is launching the Google Elections Video Search gadget, our modest contribution to the electoral process. With the help of our speech recognition technologies, videos from YouTube's Politicians channels are automatically transcribed from speech to text and indexed. Using the gadget you can search not only the titles and descriptions of the videos, but also their spoken content. Additionally, since speech recognition tells us exactly when words are spoken in the video, you can jump right to the most relevant parts of the videos you find.

Posted by Anne at 04:56 PM | Permalink

From the Open House Project:

I’m ecstatic. All right, so this all goes back to late 2006, a bunch of people sitting at their computers writing some emails about what Congress should do with data. I distinctly remember Dan Newman and I both thinking that the Library of Congress should make its raw legislative database (that powers THOMAS) available directly to us to build applications off of, rather than the screen-scraping that I was doing. One thing leads to another, the Open House Project, the legislative databases section of the OHP report in May 2007 (which I principally wrote), then later that year with the support of Rep. Mike Honda, in November CHA asked the LOC to look into the issue (more), and then in the last month his office submitted text for the House Legislative Branch Appropriations Report, which made it through subcommittee markup of the bill, to give this request a little more teeth (like, ehm, the force of law).

Posted by Anne at 04:29 PM | Permalink

From Federal Computer Week:

Having an effective presence on the Web is no longer as simple as putting up a home page and letting visitors do all the work to come to you. Many organizations now enhance their Web-based communications with various techniques to push news and fresh information out to interested recipients or seed links to the updates in places people frequent online.

Many government agencies have been dabbling with these Web 2.0 tools for some simple tasks, such as sending occasional press releases. Now, taking a cue from some pioneering private-sector firms and a thriving interactive Web community, some agencies are looking at the tools as a way to conduct more frequent, and at times more critical, information exchanges with other agencies and groups and individuals outside government.

Posted by Anne at 08:18 PM | Permalink

From Information Week:

OpenCongress and MetaVid give citizens an open window into government activities

One unemployment bill before the U.S. Congress has generated more than 17,000 comments, thanks to one of many sites using technology to increase transparency, accountability, and participation in government.

OpenCongress aims to make everyone a political insider. It gives readers access to more detail and depth of information than traditional news stories. The free, open source, nonpartisan site does so by combining traditional news stories, summaries of bills, sponsors, status, roll calls on the latest issues put up for votes, and an area for user comments.

The site is a project of the Sunlight Foundation and the Participatory Politics Foundation. David Moore, executive director of PPF, spoke about the site at the Personal Democracy Forum conference in New York on Monday. . .

. . . Another site featured during the conference is MetaVid, an open source online domain that archives video from proceedings in the U.S. House of Representatives and the U.S. Senate. Citizens who want to see what their representatives said on a specific issue can search for and play the specific footage they see.

Posted by Anne at 08:14 PM | Permalink

From LegiStorm:

LegiStorm has launched a new database of all foreign gifts (whether tangible gifts or travel) received by members of Congress and their staff in the past decade.

Our database covers from 1999 to the present. In that time, more than 450 gifts in all were reported having been received by congressmen and their aides by foreign governments. These gifts include tangible ones, such as a ceremonial sword, or travel, such as a ride in a military helicopter. Only gifts above what the law has determined to be "minimal value" is considered reportable. The Senate defines "minimal value" as $100, while the House and executive branch adjust the value by inflation. In 2008, the value for the House and executive branch was $335.

Posted by Anne at 08:36 PM | Permalink

This is an interesting approach to getting old UK government documents freely available online. From Times Higher Education:

. . . So, I've taken it upon myself to start an organisation called MLOP, the "Movement for the Liberation of Old Papers". What I do is hack into restricted websites, download the documents I'm interested in, and then use my favourite open-source paint program to remove the copyright statements from each page. Next I assemble the pages into one single pdf file and upload it to the Internet Archive, where it will become universally available to both researchers and citizens. Yes, it does take a bit of time, but it's a very worthy cause (and I have a hardworking research assistant to help me).

I feel strongly about this, and I'm prepared to live with the legal consequences of my actions. This, after all, is the new frontier of civil rights - the right of access to information. How else can corruption be stopped and falsehoods exposed? How else can people in power be held accountable? I'd go to prison for the old parliamentary papers if I had to. Ever after I would proudly brag about having liberated an old House of Commons report from the clutches of market capitalism.

Posted by Anne at 08:44 PM | Permalink

From Free Government Information:

Last month we posted a story about the Iraqi Perspectives Report being available only by mail from the U. S. Joint Forces Command. Lo and behold, today I received a CDROM in the mail with the 5 volumes of the report in PDFs. I just uploaded the whole thing to the Internet Archive. Catalog away!!

Iraqi Perspectives Report Saddam And Terrorism: Emerging Insights From Captured Iraqi Documents. January 2007. IDA Paper P-4287. 5 volumes.

Posted by Anne at 05:55 PM | Permalink

From the Washington Times:

Disclosure in government frequently discomfits, but it also illuminates and guards the public trust. The latest row over the Capitol Hill Web firm LegiStorm is no different.

Founded in late 2006, LegiStorm offers easy and free public access to the salary information of Capitol Hill staffers. This information is already public record. It used to be difficult to access, but LegiStorm changed that. This year, the firm started to offer much more detailed personal financial disclosure information on senior staffers. Investment portfolios, bank information and home addresses are among them. House staffers have cried foul, citing a fear of identity theft. One went so far as to accuse the company of aiding and abetting the burglary of his home.

Staffers should get used to this level of scrutiny. They should purchase identity-theft protection if they fear fraud or erect window bars to guard against burglars. Those who require private-sector levels of anonymity should decamp to the private sector. The dominance of Capitol Hill by a select group of well-paid staffers commanding legions of twentysomethings is one of Washington's most noteworthy open secrets, one which has begged attention for some time. It is due for a change.

Posted by Anne at 09:08 PM | Permalink

From the Austin American-Statesman:

There is nothing unusual about an open-government group advocating new legislation that would shine a light on the secretive ways of Congress and the executive branch.

But rather than hire an army of lobbyists to push the proposal, as is the custom in Washington, the Sunlight Foundation is taking its measure directly to the public.

The foundation has posted its Transparency in Government Act of 2008 on the Web at publicmarkup.org and has invited the public to tweak, add to or criticize any aspect of the proposed bill. The goal, said Ellen Miller, executive director of the foundation, is to change the backroom, secretive way that legislation is typically passed in Washington.

Posted by Anne at 08:35 PM | Permalink

From the Google Blog:

As the 2008 election progresses, more and more voters are tuning into YouTube to stay on top of the action. Our You Choose '08 platform now features content from candidates, news organizations, and voters, and we've made it easier than ever to see where the candidates stand on each of the major issues in this election. The next big stop on the campaign trail is Pennsylvania, so we're partnering with C-SPAN to collect videos from voters across the country who will answer the question, "What is the most important issue to you in this election?"

Posted by Anne at 08:22 PM | Permalink

From LegiStorm:

The House has worked itself up into hysteria over LegiStorm’s recent release of staffer personal financial disclosures. There are demands in Congress for a taxpayer-financed lawsuit against us.

One House staffer has even gone so far as to suggest that LegiStorm aided and abetted in the burglary of his house. This has gone too far.

We have a solution for the mess of the House’s own making.

Posted by Anne at 08:27 PM | Permalink

From The Hill:

Furious senior House aides are demanding committee action against a website that has posted their bank account numbers, signatures, home addresses and children’s names that are included in financial disclosure documents.

Some are demanding legal action against the website LegiStorm, which since February has been posting congressional documents online as a way to increase transparency in government. Aides have brought their complaints to the House Administration Committee and the clerk of the House.

Posted by Anne at 08:10 PM | Permalink

From the Sunlight Foundation:

So this is a cool new resource. One with a definite opinion about the role of money in politics.

Follow the Oil Money is a new website that tracks which oil companies are pumping their money into politics, who is receiving it, and how it correlates to key climate, energy and other votes. You can check out the connections via relationship graphs, or tables of information.

Posted by Anne at 08:52 PM | Permalink

From the PACER Recycling FAQ:
How does recycling work?

A12: Just upload all your PACER Documents to our recycling bin. Click on the recycle bin and you'll be presented with a dialogue to choose files to upload. Then, just hit the “Start Upload” button and you'll hear the sounds of progress as your documents get reinjected into the public domain.

We'll take the documents, look at them, and then put them onto bulk.resource.org/courts.gov/pacer for future distribution. This is a manual process and you won't see your documents show up right away. But, over time, we hope to accumulate a significant database of PACER Documents.

Posted by Anne at 08:45 PM | Permalink

From the Sunlight Foundation:

The issue of SuperDelegates is really heating up. The group of citizen journalists, bloggers and activists convened over at the SuperDelegate Transparency Project (hosted by Congresspedia) have produced the only reporting on SuperDelegate commitments in the race for the 2008 Democratic presidential nomination that is fully broken down by delegate, by state,congressional district and has full and transparent sourcing. No major news organization provides such detail or provides their sources.

Posted by Anne at 08:40 PM | Permalink

From the Open House Project:

The House Rules Committee is making legislation a little easier to follow online, by voluntarily posting updates of special rules, as they are approved, to their website in a structured format. This means that you can receive updates on newly approved special rules that structure floor consideration for impending bills. They’re also offering a feed of amendments submitted to the committee.

Posted by Anne at 09:13 PM | Permalink

From SourceWatch:

The Superdelegate Transparency Project (STP) is a project of LiteraryOutpost.com, OpenLeft, DemConWatch and the Congresspedia community on SourceWatch.

The Superdelegate Transparency Project is the central gathering place for compiling primary and caucus results--Congressional district by Congressional district--for states that have to date held their races, and going forward until the Democratic nomination is secured. We are compiling the district-by-district results of the popular vote and pledged delegates, and then tracking these results against how superdelegates are currently pledged (or have publicly endorsed a candidate), and how they eventually vote. The aim of this project is to open up the Democratic nomination process, and to gauge what effect the superdelegates have on the nomination. Rather than hypotheticals at the end of this nomination process, we seek to make hard data available to all interested parties, including citizens, activists, journalists, bloggers, campaign staffers and people around the world who are following this U.S. election. This is the only project currently tracking this data at the district level.

Posted by Anne at 05:59 PM | Permalink

From Taxpayers for Common Sense:

Congress has cut earmarks by 23 percent from the record 2005 levels, according to a new groundbreaking analysis and database of congressional earmarks released today by Taxpayers for Common Sense, a national budget watchdog organization.

The database can be accessed at http://www.taxpayer.net/budget/fy08earmarks/fy08databasemain.html.

Posted by Anne at 08:11 PM | Permalink

The February 2008 issue of Searcher magazine has an article by Laura Gordon-Murnane entitled The 51st State: The State of Online - Tech Tools for the American Voter and the 2008 Congressional Elections (pdf) in which she talks about the other (non-Presidential) federal elections.

So what do you want to know about your congressional representative or senator? Or even about representatives and senators out of your district or state? Pick up any newspaper (online or hardcopy) these days and you will find the presidential horse race dominating the daily headlines. Who’s ahead? Who’s behind? Who triumphed at the latest debate? Who tanked? Whose war chest brims over? Who’s down to his or her last dime?

Tech Tools for the American Voter and the 2008 Congressional Elections

This tutorial is a visual walk-through of how to find what you need to know for the upcoming Congressional elections. Use the tutorial to help you find out if you are registered to vote, biographical information on your Congressman or Senator, his or her voting records, and money donations and campaign fundraising for the upcoming election.

Posted by Anne at 08:41 PM | Permalink

From Government Computer News:

People demand good data, especially when it comes to matters of human health and the environment.

They get frustrated when it isn’t easily available or if they feel it’s incomplete or not organized in a way that’s useful. So, not surprisingly, Environmental Protection Agency Chief Information Officer Molly O’Neill is intrigued by the new crop of Web 2.0 technologies that could help better deliver information and establish forums for the resulting discussions.

O’Neill spoke with GCN about a successful wiki-based pilot involving the Puget Sound Leadership Council in addition to the challenges agencies face handling large amounts of data.

Posted by Anne at 08:51 PM | Permalink

From Information Today:

A free, searchable database of the 2008 State of the Union Address by President George W. Bush has been released by askSam Systems. The askSam database contains a full-text searchable archive of the complete address divided by topic. Also available is a free searchable database of all State of the Union addresses given from 1790–2008. You can search, browse, and analyze these online at www.asksam.com/ebooks/stateoftheunion.

Posted by Anne at 06:51 PM | Permalink

From the Washington Post:

When President Bush challenged Congress to cut the number and cost of earmarks by half, the administration's budget chiefs turned to their wiki.

That's right, the Office of Management and Budget, where caution and precision rule, has embraced Wikipedia as a model, hosting an online place where federal officials can swap information and ideas outside traditional boundaries.

After hearing the president's challenge last year, the budget officials knew that the White House would need a tally of the pet spending projects that Congress had inserted into the federal budget if they were to measure progress toward the president's goal.

With the wiki, federal agencies compiled a database of 13,496 earmarks in 10 weeks. In the old days, it would have taken six months to get the information to the OMB.

The budget wiki is not as freewheeling as Wikipedia, the sometimes-controversial online encyclopedia. It is the government, after all. For security, federal officials have to ask permission to join; it is not open to the public or Congress.

Still, the earmarks project underscores how technology is helping change the way the government works. The OMB and other agencies used the Web's interconnectivity to more efficiently gather information and draw conclusions.

Posted by Anne at 06:09 PM | Permalink

From WashingtonWatch.com:

WashingtonWatch.com delivers the numbers behind proposed legislation and regulation. It is important to understand where these numbers come from and what they mean.

WashingtonWatch.com starts with government predictions about the costs or savings from proposed changes to government spending, taxation, and regulation. We take these predictions and calculate their “net present value.” That is the value today of changes to future spending, taxes, or regulation.

Then, we divide that “net present value” calculation by the total number of people in the United States. The resulting figures convey the significance to average Americans — in dollars and cents — of proposed changes to the nation's policies.

Posted by Anne at 07:34 PM | Permalink

From OpenCongress:

Maplight.org, the amazing site that seeks to illuminate the connection between campaign cash and legislative outcomes, just launched a widget that lets you post fundraising stats to your blog or website. With the widget, you can easily monitor the fundraising activities of incumbents and challengers from your state, or of any candidates that interest you.

Posted by Anne at 07:33 PM | Permalink

From OpenCongress:

As Congress returns tomorrow to start a new session, OpenCongress is excited to announce a major update that will put all the bills and votes at your fingertips. It's never been easier to track what's happening with your government.

Now you can build a personal profile on OpenCongress of the bills and people you're tracking, network with other users, comment and vote on bills, and much more. To get started, create your own "My OpenCongress" profile, it's free and only takes a minute.

Posted by Anne at 07:32 PM | Permalink

From the Library of Congress Blog:

. . . That’s why it is so exciting to let people know about the launch of a brand-new pilot project the Library of Congress is undertaking with Flickr, the enormously popular photo-sharing site that has been a Web 2.0 innovator. If all goes according to plan, the project will help address at least two major challenges: how to ensure better and better access to our collections, and how to ensure that we have the best possible information about those collections for the benefit of researchers and posterity. In many senses, we are looking to enhance our metadata (one of those Web 2.0 buzzwords that 90 percent of our readers could probably explain better than me).

The project is beginning somewhat modestly, but we hope to learn a lot from it. Out of some 14 million prints, photographs and other visual materials at the Library of Congress, more than 3,000 photos from two of our most popular collections are being made available on our new Flickr page, to include only images for which no copyright restrictions are known to exist.

Posted by Anne at 07:26 PM | Permalink

From Tufts University:

A New Nation Votes is a searchable collection of election returns from the earliest years of American democracy. The data were compiled by Philip Lampi. The American Antiquarian Society and Tufts University Digital Collections and Archives have mounted it online for you with funding from the National Endowment for the Humanities. Provides state, county and city election results for federal, state, and local officials, 1787-1825. You can search by combinations of states, candidates, office titles, and dates.

Posted by Anne at 08:46 PM | Permalink

From Public.Resource.Org:

Public.Resource.Org, the Internet Archive, and the Boston Public Library announced today the commencement of phase 1 of a project that aims to create a comprehensive digital archive of 60 million pages of government documents over the next two years.

Phase 1 of the project will produce a minimum of 2.5 million pages of digital text using a scanning and optical character recognition (OCR) technology suite developed by the Internet Archive. The Boston Public Library is the first Contributing Library in the program, and has agreed to lend a 50-year run of Congressional Hearings from 1936–1986, as well as a complete copy of the Catalog of Copyright Entries. Scanning will take place at the Boston Library Consortium's Northeast Regional Scanning Center.

Posted by Anne at 08:38 PM | Permalink

From Radar Magazine:

Behold, the Bush Administration in chart form: Federal spending on paper shredding has increased more than 600 percent since George W. Bush took office. This chart, generated by usaspending.gov, the U.S. government's brand spanking new database of federal expenditures, shows spending on "contracts for paper shredding services" going back to 2000. Click here for the full, heartbreaking breakdown. In 2000, the feds spent $452,807 to make unpleasant truths go away; by 2006, the "Cheney Effect" had bumped that number up to $2.9 million. And by halfway through 2007, the feds almost matched that number, with $2.7 million and counting. Pretty much says it all.

Posted by Anne at 08:10 PM | Permalink

From Free Government Information:

The 50-State Agency Databases Registry, which I coordinate, has launched a new set of subject-focused database collections under the heading of history:

* Biographical Databases - Databases that provide biographical sketches of authors, state officials, famous state residents, etc.

* Historical Media Databases - Databases that provide online access to photographs, video, or audio.

* Historical Newspaper and Magazine Indexes - Databases that index articles in older newspapers, journals and magazine that contain historical information. These databases will usually lead one to microfilmed items that may be obtainable through Interlibrary Loan.

* Museum Collection Databases - Catalogs of state museum holdings which often have historical notes. Museums listed here are either run by a state or by one of the state's political subdivisions

* Official Records Databases - vital records, (birth, death, etc), war pensions, etc.

These pages just launched, so they are a little light on content. The Registry volunteers will be adding to these pages in the next few weeks.

If you are registered with the ALA GODORT wiki and would like to help the effort along, please browse the state pages or search for words from the historical categories and copy and paste databases from the state pages to the appropriate subject page.

Posted by Anne at 08:05 PM | Permalink

From the Sunlight Foundation:

Boing Boing highlights CommitteeCaller.com, a new app that allows people to easily call an entire congressional committee to express their views. Consider it speed dial for congressional committee members. The site was built by Fred Benenson, a master's degree student at NYU's Tisch School of the Arts, as a final project for a class he was taking this fall. . .

. . . This is how it works: Go to CommitteeCaller.com and select a committee. Then enter your phone number and click "Put me in touch with democracy!" The site's software will call you and patch the call through to the front office of each member of that committee. Easy as that! And there's no fee. The site also allows users to rate the responsiveness of each office. CommitteeCaller.com will compile this information and grade the responsiveness of each member to the public.

Posted by Anne at 08:02 PM | Permalink

From the Washington Post:

Robert Shea is a Republican insider with a head for business and a yen for federal program performance standards. Gary Bass is a government watchdog with a mean bite who wants openness and knows how to get it.

Official antagonists, political opposites, brought together by a wild, crazy idea: federal budget transparency. Online and searchable. Free for the asking.

Today, the White House budget office officially launches USASpending.gov, a Web site that shows taxpayers where their dollars go and which legislators, contractors and regions get the most.

The site was created by Shea, associate director of the Office of Management and Budget. It was modeled on a site pioneered by Bass, director of OMB Watch, one of the budget office's harshest nonprofit critics.

Posted by Anne at 08:22 PM | Permalink

From the Sunlight Foundation:

Beginning in 2006, the Sunlight Foundation launched the Punch Clock Campaign, asking all candidates for congressional office - challengers and incumbents - to promise, if elected, to post their daily schedules on the Internet. Lawmakers who agree to share their schedules, including who they’ve met with and why, show that they are responsive, open, transparent and above all accountable, leading to greater public trust.

Inspired by the 60 percent of Americans who 'punch a clock' to account for their time at work, Sunlight asked why members of Congress should not also account for their time to their employers: the citizens they represent. With the aid of ordinary people across the country, Sunlight asked candidates to sign a pledge to post their schedules on the Internet once elected. One member who took the pledge was elected; to date, seven other members of Congress have agreed to post the daily schedules of their meetings and activities on and off Capitol Hill.

The Punch Clock Map is an extension of the Punch Clock Campaign. It provides a visual representation of the meetings detailed in each member's schedule, to make it easy for everyone to see whom lawmakers have met with and how they serve their district's needs. Each point on this map represents the home-base location of the person or organization with whom a member of Congress has met, not where the meeting took place. The site also provides a weekly updated RSS feeds of the schedules for each member.

Posted by Anne at 08:28 PM | Permalink

From OpenCongress:

Now you can share the bills that matter to you in Congress with your friends on Facebook. Today we are launching our new Facebook app that lets you post bills to you profile, announce your support or opposition and comment on why you care about them. And, of course, the bills you post will have links back to their OpenCongress pages, so your friends can get all the information they need in order to learn more and get involved with the issues themselves.

Posted by Anne at 08:26 PM | Permalink

Hearing, U.S. Senate Committee on Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs. E-Government 2.0: Improving Innovation, Collaboration, and Access 12/11/07 10:00 AM (EST).

The hearing was broadcast live and will be available for viewing later here.

Witnesses Testimony is already available online as PDF documents:
• Karen S. Evans, Administrator, Office of Electronic Government and Information Technology , Office of Management and Budget
• John Lewis Needham, Manager, Public Sector Content Partnerships , Google, Inc.
• Ari Schwartz, Deputy Director , Center for Democracy and Technology
• Jimmy Wales, Founder , Wikipedia

Posted by Anne at 08:24 PM | Permalink

From the Washington Post:

These days you can Google just about anything, from your favorite celebrity's pet to your boss's middle name. But using the biggest search engine to get information about the government often falls short.

That's what leaders from Google and Wikipedia plan to tell the Senate Committee on Homeland Security and Government Affairs today, urging Congress to require federal agencies to make their Web sites, records and databases more searchable.

Posted by Anne at 08:23 PM | Permalink

From the Center for Democracy & Technology:

CDT and OMB Watch today jointly released "Hiding in Plain Sight," a report highlighting a critical gap in online access to vital government information. The report, presented to a Senate panel today, exposes a simple technological roadblock as the culprit and notes the problem has an equally simple technological fix. The problem comes to light as the E-Government Act of 2002, which promotes access to government information and services, is up for reauthorization.

Full Report

Posted by Anne at 08:21 PM | Permalink

From SLA’s Government Information Division:

The U.S. General Services Administration (GSA) has posted a new edition of its USA Services Intergovernmental Newsletter with an e-government theme.

How E-Government is Changing Society and Strengthening Democracy, the Fall 2007 issue, presents 47 pages of articles on the topic, including:

• MAPLight.org: Shining a Light on Money and Politics, by Dan Newman (who was a speaker for our Mashups and Re-mixes program at SLA/Denver 2007)
• Stimulating Citizen Engagement in Government: Hampton, Virginia, by Charles N. Sapp and John Eagle
• Australia's Principles for ICT-Enabled Citizen Engagement
• Generational E-Democracy in Maine, by Matthew Dunlap and Lisa Ann Leahy
• Government Participation in Social Networks: Joining the Conversation, by Kevin Novak
• E-Authentication: Safeguarding Citizen Identity, by Georgia March and Jeff Gallimore
• and more ...

The articles are organized around the themes of building trust in government, engaging citizens, public comment, using social media, and getting to mature e-democracy.

Posted by Anne at 07:51 PM | Permalink

From Public.Resource.org:

Public.Resource.Org and Fastcase, Inc. announced today that they will release a large and free archive of federal case law, including all Courts of Appeals decisions from 1950 to the present and all Supreme Court decisions since 1754. The archive will be public domain and usable by anyone for any purpose.

Posted by Anne at 08:41 PM | Permalink

From Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington:

Today, Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington (CREW), in conjunction with a coalition of government watchdog groups, launched a new online government document database, governmentdocs.org, at a tele-news conference.

The database will house Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) responses, and other government documents, from a number of organizations, that can be browsed, searched and reviewed. It is the only one of its kind. . .

• Each and every document goes through an optical character recognition (OCR) process, so that the text of each document is entirely searchable.
• A powerful search engine provides full-text searches and hit highlighting.
• Citizen reviewers can add information to each document page and highlight important findings, allowing for more robust and targeted searches.
• Every page of every document has its own unique URL so that documents can be linked, shared, or posted onto websites.
• The database is a coalition effort, so all of the organizations' documents will be housed on governmentdocs.org and searches will work across collections.

Posted by Anne at 07:43 PM | Permalink

Hack, Mash & Peer: Crowdsourcing Government Transparency by Jerry Brito (October 22, 2007):

The federal government makes an overwhelming amount of data publicly available each year. Laws ranging from the Administrative Procedure Act to the Paperwork Reduction Act require these disclosures in the name of transparency and accountability. However, the data are often only nominally publicly available. First, this is the case because it is not available online or even in electronic format. Second, the data that can be found online is often not available in an easily accessible or searchable format. If government information was made public online and in standard open formats, the online masses could be leveraged to help ensure the transparency and accountability that is the reason for making information public in the first place.

When the government makes data available in a structured format, it opens the doors to innovative and enlightening remixes of information known as mashups. Mashups, in turn, are tools that can potentially be used by journalists, bloggers, and citizens-the Internet's intelligent crowds-to better scrutinize government's activities. When government does not make data available online, or makes it available but not in a structured format, third parties take it upon themselves to fill the void by implementing ingenious "hacks" to free the data.

Dowload the full article (PDF).

Posted by Anne at 08:18 PM | Permalink

The Seattle Times has launched a database of 2007 defense earmarks for every member of Congress compared to the political contributions they received from the recipients of those earmarks.

This database shows who received earmarks and who gave them in the 2007 defense bill.

It also shows how much companies and their employees gave to lobbyists and lawmakers who helped deliver the earmarks.

You can search by lawmaker name or by the name of a company or nonprofit that got an earmark in the 2007 defense bill. You can also browse lawmakers or earmark recipients by state.

Posted by Anne at 07:43 PM | Permalink