Massie Ritsch, the Center for Responsive Politics’ communication director, has declared 2009 “The Year for Open Data.” And judging by two announcements today, it looks like he’s right. CRP is just getting started opening up its vast databases to the world, making regular updates from here on forward. Check out what they are offering here.

Also today, The New York Times. As their announcement says, the API provides summaries of roll-call votes in the U.S. Congress; retrieves lists of members of Congress, vote data, and biographical information for individual House and Senate members. The Time’s data includes House votes since 1991 and Senate votes since 1989. Information on House members goes back to 1983, while the info on senators goes all the way back to 1947. Just a heads up: there are some concerns around our office about their TOS. Check the Sunlight Labs blog is a few hours for more details.

This has been a very good day for open data.

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John McCain and Russ Feingold are putting the old team back together to push for earmark reform in the Senate. Joining the old reformers are young guns Claire McCaskill, Tom Coburn, and Lindsey Graham. CongressDaily (subscription required) details what the reform package will look like:

[T]he measure would allow individual senators to raise points of order against unauthorized earmarks in appropriations bills. Earmark backers would need 60 votes to overcome the objection and the cost of the bill would be reduced by the amount of the earmark.

The measure also requires appropriations and authorizing conference reports to be electronically searchable for 48 hours before the Senate considers the conference reports and requires that recipients of federal funds disclose payments to registered lobbyists.

This is a big improvement over the current earmark process. While the Sunlight Foundation believes that all legislation should be available online for at least 72 hours before a vote, the 48-hour proposal is a step in the right direction. Making the bills searchable is an incredibly important step as thumbing through appropriations legislation is cumbersome.

Still to be determined is what would be disclosed for each individual earmark. Are recipients included? What else must be listed? Also, will the new reform team try to extend their reform package to cover the newly released rules for earmark request disclosure?

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Maybe I’m tilting at windmills here, but I think that the fact that one of the first pieces of legislation to be passed by the House is one that provides greater transparency — the legislation requires foundations which sponsor presidential libraries to reveal their donors  — is a sign of the times

The fundraising for presidential libraries has been a blind spot when it comes to disclosure. Unlike contributions to an electoral campaign, gifts to the libraries have been unlimited and undisclosed, and they can take money from corporations and foreign governments. So the passage of the bill is an encouraging sign.

Lindsay Renick Mayer at CRPs’ Capital Eye blog raises a serious concern, however. The House bill is prospective only, meaning, in its present form, it would not require former presidents to reveal donations to their foundations and libraries. That’s a big problem. No disclosure from President Bush no required disclosure from President Clinton (just a handshake agreement on to do so).

The bill requires only quarterly reporting. And I’ve seen nothing about requiring this information to be reported directly on line, though eventually it will make its way on line via the Archivist. Eventually isn’t good enough.

Hopefully, lawmakers will fix this good intended yet flawed bill.

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In Washington and have nothing to do on January 9th, the New America Foundation, Wired, and Google are hosting a discussion titled “Wiki White House” featuring Sunlight’s Executive Director Ellen Miller and Sunlight board member Craig Newmark. Currently there is a waiting list to attend, but the event will be broadcast online. Here are the details:

Technology evangelists believe that Barack Obama has the potential to fundamentally alter communication between the presidency and the people. Wikis in the White House? Online public comments on legislation? A real-time two-way conversation between citizens and their elected officials?

For better or worse, however, nothing is as easy as it might seem. Federal regulations, First Amendment issues, and just plain common sense are going to slow — and potentially stagnate — technological innovation in Washington.

The New America Foundation and Wired Magazine will host a discussion of what can, should, and must change when the Obama administration takes the reins.

Co-sponsored by New America Foundation, Wired Magazine, and Google.

Featured Speakers
Craig Newmark
Founder
Craigslist

Mindy Finn
Director of E-Strategy
Mitt Romney for President

Ellen Miller
Executive Director
Sunlight Foundation

Sascha Meinrath
Research Director, Wireless Future Program
New America Foundation

Moderator
Nicholas Thompson
Fellow, New America Foundation
Senior Editor, Wired Magazine

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Five ideas for better electronic government from MySociety.org

Tom Steinberg, Sunlight friend and director of the UK’s MySociety.org, has some advice for anyone thinking of running any reasonably technologically savvy country. He lists the top five actions any country’s government should take in relation to use of the Internet.
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Yesterday, the House and Senate announced new earmark rules, which Sunlight’s Bill Allison addressed here on the Sunlight blog and at Real Time Investigations. (John Wonderlich also looked at the proposal here.) Taxpayers for Common Sense has a similar take as Allison and listed changes that would make these reforms far more effective.

Perhaps the most crucial problem in the new rules is that they do not require a single point of disclosure, instead mandating each individual lawmaker disclose earmark requests on their official web site. In a response to a comment suggesting that Sunlight (or some other group) could create a unified, searchable earmark request database out of the soon to be newly disclosed information, Bill Allison explained how the dispersion of earmark disclosure can be such a huge problem:

We’d love to do all of that, of course, but how Congress publishes the data has a direct bearing on how feasible that is.

Let’s say that members have to disclose the following for every earmark: Project Name, Location, Recipient, Amount Requested, Dept. or Agency that would oversee earmark and Justification. So Sen. Smedley Smith does it like this:

Sen. Smedley Smith secured from the Defense budget $18 million to purchase state-of-the-art $600 hammers from Springfield-based Boondoggle Inc. as part of the Army’s Operational Management account.

Not exactly easy to turn into data. Rep. Rube Ryan does it like this:

$1 million: To the University of Shelbyville Systems Material Management Institute in Shelbyville, to develop crunchless potato chips for MREs, from the Army RDTE budget.

While you probably wouldn’t end up with 535 different formats, it’s unlikely that you’d end up with earmarks disclosed in a uniform format that could be easily scraped from member Web sites and loaded into a database.

Add to this the likelihood that these disclosures would be disclosed in different places by different members — Sen. Porkbragger puts them on his home page, Rep. Limelighter posts each disclosure as a separate press release while Rep. Fillibluster likes to hide the link in his 72 screen long list of legislative accomplishments (helpfully labeled, “other actions”), and you begin to see what you’re up against.

Let’s first make sure that Congress gets the basic disclosure done properly, and then we–along with other groups and individuals–would be happy to find ways to add value to it, allowing for citizen input, cross-referencing with other data, and all kinds of other tools.

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Sunlight is absolutely delighted to announce that Mitch Kapor has joined the Sunlight Foundation’s board of advisors.

Mitch’s list of accomplishments will leave you breathless. He’s the founder of Lotus Development Corporation, co-founder of the Electronic Frontier Foundation, the original chair and currently on the board of directors of Linden Lab, a member of the advisory board for the Wikimedia Foundation, board member of the Mozilla Foundation, the founder of the Open Source Applications Foundation, founder of Foxmarks, and founder and trustee of the Mitchell Kapor Foundation.

And most importantly, he was an early outside advisor to Sunlight. We look forward to having him as an even closer advisor to our work.

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PBS’ MediaShift has an interesting post by Mark Drapeau where he makes a compelling argument for how government could and should use social media tools to transform how it engages and relates with the public. Couldn’t agree more with Mark about the need of government to embrace the spirit of creativity and trial-and-error characteristics of the social software community. Mark writes:

“Social software has numerous government applications, including information-sharing within and between agencies; collaborating with outside partners like humanitarian workers; public outreach and crowdsourcing; and empowering people with inexpensive, simple, mobile technology. In addition, as hostile entities become more adept at using social media for propaganda, it is imperative that governments familiarize themselves with social technologies.”

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Roll Call is reporting that Inouye and Obey, the Chairs of the House and Senate appropriations committees, are implementing what look to be sweeping new earmark disclosure requirements:

The chairmen of the House and Senate Appropriations committees on Tuesday jointly vowed to slice the level of earmarks while providing unprecedented disclosure of Member requests.

House Appropriations Chairman David Obey (D-Wis.) and Senate Appropriations Chairman Daniel Inouye (D-Hawaii) said that starting with the fiscal 2010 appropriations bills, when Members make their earmark requests, they will be required to post the requests on their Web sites explaining the purpose of the earmark and why it is a valuable use of taxpayer funds.

In our experience, the idea of disclosing earmark requests has been rather unpopular with Members and staff, who often fear unintended consequences and uncertainty over such unprecedented disclosure.

Here’s Minority Leader Boehner summarizing some of that concern:

“He has all of the earmarks. He ought to disclose them,” Boehner said. But the minority leader also noted that part of the problem with disclosures is that lawmakers occasionally do not request certain earmarks requested of them, and that can get them in trouble with constituents back home.

“You know, apparently a lot of these members get a lot of requests for all kinds of projects in their districts. And they submit some of them, and apparently some of them they don’t submit. And I think the bigger problem is the ones that they don’t submit on behalf of their constituents,” he said.

This is something we’ve heard a lot, from Members of both parties, and part of why today’s announcement is such a surprise.  It seems to be either a significant reversal on the part of Obey and many other Members, or perhaps just a deepening of the reforms begun in the 110th Congress, or even an attempt to inure the Democrats’ legislative agenda from procedural criticisms.

Whether one views process reform cynically or not, however, the real requirement to disclose all earmark requests should go a long way toward ending the real or perceived quid pro quos of the earmarking process, but only if it’s given real teeth, taken seriously, and not able to be sidestepped by the procedural evasion that is commonplace, especially in the appropriations process.

Given the history of earmark reform, we’re genuinely surprised to see such sweeping reforms proposed by the Appropriations Committee Chairs. I think cautious praise is in order.

For more detail, here’s Pelosi’s page with much more detail on the reforms.

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People have been clamoring for more transparency in the presentation of bills since the TARP recovery program was shoved through Congress with little time for the public to have a say. And most people, while perhaps supportive of the recovery program and many of the bailouts, are not happy with the way the legislation was passed. That’s why this tune from the incoming Obama Administration and Congress regarding the stimulus package is refreshing. According to ABC News:

Democratic and Republican sources tell ABC News that President-elect Obama’s meeting with the bipartisan congressional leadership of the House and Senate went well with some quick agreement on the need for expeditious action as well as oversight and transparency for the pending, yet-to-be-drafted multibillion dollar stimulus package.

House Minority Leader John Boehner, R-Ohio, argued that public dissatisfaction with the Troubled Asset Relief Program money to help stabilize the nation’s financial systems and the way it was rammed through the Congress demands more transparency and accountability with the stimulus bill.

“I agree with you,” the President-elect said, adding later that he would “demand complete transparency and accountability in doing it.” ·

House Minority Whip Eric Cantor, R-Vir., suggested said the bill should be put on the Internet a week before Congress votes on it.

Mr. Obama smiled and said something along the lines of, “maybe if I was better at faking it , I’d say, ‘Great idea — we’ll take you up on that.’ But we’ve actually talked about this idea.”

Obama turned it over to incoming White House chief of staff Rahm Emanuel who essentially said they would do the Republicans one better. They’re planning a Google-like search function to show every program funded by the stimulus package, whether it comes in under or over-budget, whether it is meeting its intended purpose, and how many jobs it is creating.

Far too often do people hear about the bills passed by Congress, but they have little ability to see the success and progress of programs created. Adding transparency and accountability to legislation like this is a terrific step forward (if it happens, of course) and in direct opposition to the course taken by the Fed and Treasury in handling the bailout money.

(Hat tip to Jason Mercier at the Washington Policy Center’s Blog)

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