The Center for Responsive Politics is celebrating its 25th birthday today. As its Executive Director for its first decade and a half, I couldn't be more proud of its breathtaking accomplishments over the years.

As a birthday present for all of us, their Web site -- OpenSecrets.org -- has undergone a dramatic transformation.

I've been playing around on the site for a few days and there are some fabulous improvements. According to CRP, here are some of the new features:

• The money-and-politics articles that we've published for years on CapitalEye.org are now front-and-center on OpenSecrets.org as part of our new blog. We'll continue to produce in-depth reports using our data, but we'll also be posting "quick hits" most every day in the blog. If you're an RSS user, make sure you sign up for our blog's feed.
• We've reorganized the site. You'll still navigate OpenSecrets.org using file tabs that run across the top of the page (along with more tabs on the interior pages, and options in the left navigation bars), but we've changed the site's main "buckets" to better accommodate the variety of data we track now.
• OpenSecrets.org is not just a campaign finance site, you know; in recent years we've expanded to also track federal lobbying, Washington's "revolving door," privately sponsored congressional travel and the personal finances of Congress, the president and top executive branch officials. OpenSecrets.org's old "Who Gives"/"Who Gets" tabs just didn't suit everything we do today. On the new site you'll find our data options split between "Politicians & Elections" and "Influence & Lobbying." It'll take some getting used to, even for us, but it makes much more sense given all that CRP does now.
  

Ars Technica has an article up about the "hyperconnected"--defined by the Interactive Data Corporation as those people for whom the line between work and personal has been blurred to the point that they're "willing to communicate with work on vacation, in restaurants, from bed, and even in places of worship."

The article offers some criticism of the purportedly overworked, suggesting offhandly that the hyperconnected will pose new challenges for IT departments, and possibly have questionable effects on workers' personal lives.

While these concerns over productivity and relaxation are certainly valid, there's another side of merging personal and workplace that's ignored by the commentary: the same breakdown that leads to work email being written in bed also leads to the breakdown of the limitations on the role of the "professional". Just as communications technology leads to more work being done at home, the Internet allows for the intellectual entrepeneurship of the online volunteer researcher, the blog-based organizer, the midnight advocate. As Clay Shirky's Here Comes Everybody makes clear, individuals who can organize without centralized leadershp form a new, powerful, agile force, harnessing what has been dubbed the "cognigitive surplus" to redefine the way we organize our ideas and ultimately ourselves.

While this may have some effect on the modes of our relaxation, the effects on business, government, and society will more than make up for them.

(full disclosure: I often work in the middle of the night.)

If you haven't discovered GOOD magazine yet, do yourself a favor and check it out. It bills itself as a venue "for people who give a damn." It's also a lot of fun. In the past couple of weeks, the magazine has published four political visualizations in its TRANSPARENCY section.

The first is an amazing graph illustrating the amount of work accomplished and time spent by the U.S. Senate over each of the last 20 years.

Another is a very cool three-minute video on where John McCain, Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama have received their campaign cash.

They have a fascinating graph titled "The Cost of Nation (Re) Building" illustrating the value of U.S. government contracts awarded in Iraq and Afghanistan from October 2003 through September 2006.

Monday's edition of the Rocky Mountain News, Kevin Vaughan has a detailed article about the 56 national corporations, from Allstate to Xerox, that are sponsoring/funding this summer's Democratic National Convention in Denver. And as Vaughan writes, they all either do business with the federal government or they have pending legislation in Congress or regulation issues with the federal bureaucracy. (Of course, the same situation exists for the Republican National Convention to be held in Minneapolis as well. Expect to see a story about that soon from someplace.) What the corporations get for their sponsorship of the conventions is access to party leaders, members of Congress and their staff, and to possibly the soon to be occupants of the West Wing of the White House.

Our friends at the Center for Political Accountability (CPA) received a great plug by Jeffrey Birnbaum in today's edition of The Washington Post. CPA's mission is to bring transparency and accountability to corporate political spending.

CEOs and other corporate officers have traditionally kept shareholders in the dark about the company's political contributions. CPA believes that large corporate political spending distorts the American political process while not necessarily serving the interests of the company or its shareholders. And lack of transparency exacerbates the problems.

CPA is helping build a movement among shareholders and activists groups to push companies to disclose publicly their political giving. They work with shareholders to submit proposals requiring disclosure to investors of political contribution policies, plus the amount, recipient and business purpose of each contribution.

The good folks over at Talking Points Memo need some help in making a Pentagon's military analyst's documents more transparent. Pitch in.

Legistorm, a Web site dedicated to providing a variety of important information about the US Congress, has launched a new database of all foreign gifts (whether tangible gifts or travel) received by members of Congress and their staff since 1999. The database details each of the 450 gifts members of Congress and their aides reported receiving in the past decade. Senate rules require that senators and their staff must report all gifts over a $100 value threshold, and House members and their aides threshold has been adjusted for inflation and stands at $335.

Gifts from foreign sources were not affected by the reforms pushed through in the wake of the Jack Abramoff scandal. The giving and receiving of gifts is all part of diplomatic protocol, and the Foreign Gifts and Decorations Act governs the practice. Congressional travel, including transportation, lodging, food and refreshments, make up the bulk of gifts received.

My friend Allison Fine is a senior fellow at Demos, editor at TechPresident, and author of the award-winning book Momentum: Igniting Social Change in the Connected Age. She writes frequently about the Internet and its impact on society and the promises it holds for democratic renewal. Allison has recently written Social Citizens, a discussion paper about how Millennials will use their Internet skills in civic engagement. The paper makes the case that this generation has unique potential to make impacts on the civic landscape.

The Case Foundation had asked Allison to write the paper, and as she wrote on the Social Citizens Blog, they decided to go deeper than just listing a litany of different ways these young people are using the tools of Web 2.0 to share information about their favorite causes. They wanted to know what the impact will be of Millennials having "...the ability to become an advocate for their cause instantly, broadly, inexpensively, and what does their ability to do so mean for the rest of us?" Fascinating questions.

Allison and the foundation invite everyone interested in social change and how technology can be used to foster it to join the conversation in an effort to define what it means to be a "social citizen." Do it.

I just discovered DARPA's Policy Analysis Market project. The idea has me wondering what the place is for market based deliberations solutions, and when it's appropriate to give actors a self-incentive that isn't already inherent to a situation.

There's a strong argument to be made for the predictive power of markets, and their stabilizing incentive structures, but their application beyond economics hasn't really been worked out yet. Some examples of market-like political models include Fantasy Congress, and National Journal's Political Stock Exchange.

When success isn't able to be neatly defined as profit (as in financial markets), and when motivators and strategies are as complex as they are in a legislature, sometimes, paradoxically, it's profitable to operate at a loss. Indeed, one could suggest that all non-profits are the pure form of incentives being isolated from broader incentive structures.

(hat tip to this tweet from "hytmal"; my initial response is here)