Every week I climb into the depths of the local political blogosphere to find the Sunlight. I use this series to highlight local blogs that do a great job of covering local, state, and Congressional political news. This week I have highlights from Hawaii, New York, Tennessee, New Hampshire, and Florida.

I have highlights this week from Delaware, North Dakota, New York and Earmark Corner.

This week I have highlights from Tennessee, South Carolina, Oregon, New Jersey, Minnesota, Delaware and Hawaii.

Via PJNet.org, last week the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation and Aspen Institute announced that they are funding a $2.3 million study to see if citizens are being provided the information they need in order to participate in a democracy. The goal is to find out is the information needs of communities is being met and to recommend solutions if they are not. According to the Knight Foundation press release:

“The business models we’ve relied on to provide news and information to our communities are stressed and changing. New platforms offer an astounding array of choices, creating the most connected world we have ever known with the greatest volume of available data,” said (Alberto) Ibargüen (Knight Foundation president and CEO), a longtime newspaper executive and former PBS chairman who also chairs the Newseum board. “But as those choices proliferate and as those virtual communities connect us globally, the need for local, reliable, contextual civic information remains and, I believe, is being met less and less effectively.”

I think this is long overdue. The need for transparency in government isn’t just about getting the powers that be to open up, but to also make that information readily available to citizens so they can use it to keep tabs on their representatives. It will be interesting to see what information people feel they need and how they are receiving it. Needless to say, I look forward to the results of this study.

Last week John Wonderlich posted about the ongoing story of the GAO giving exclusive rights to digitalize legislative histories to Thomson West on the Open House Project blog. The government entering a deal with a private company and giving them exclusive rights to public documents creates a situation where the whole point of digitalization is lost. When large amounts of documents are available on the internet in easy to download formats it’s supposed to increase public access but this situation has the opposite effect. Unfortunately this problem isn’t exclusive to the federal government.

Via Boing Boing and Carl Malamud,

“The State of Oregon is sending out cease and desist letters to sites like Justia and Public.Resource.Org that have been posting copies of Oregon laws, known as the Oregon Revised Statutes.

We've sent Oregon back two letters. The first reviews the law and explains to the Legislative Counsel why their assertion of copyright over the state statutes is particularly weak, from both a common law perspective and from their own enabling legislation.”

Malamud goes on to state that Thomson West has also made copies of these statutes but haven’t received cease and desist letters from Oregon yet (it was stated that West will be receiving letters). Apparently many states have laws that are copyrighted and this begs the question of how appropriate this kind of copyrighting in an internet age is. How can a law that was written for the purpose of serving the general public not be available to them to reproduce?

(Hat tip to State Agency Database Highlights) 

Illinois has a new database for state contracts and campaign contributions.  OpenBook is a great new site where you can search by contract holder or contributor.  When you search for either the results will show you two columns. The first shows if the company or person has any state contracts and the second is what campaign contributions they have made.  This site allows people to see if a relationship could exist between contracts and campaign contributions.  It is simple to use and the easy to understand, which is pretty impressive for a government database.  Kudos Illinois!

This week I have highlights from Virginia, Maryland, Missouri, New Jersey and Alabama.

There is a new Web site that is consolidating documents from the state government of Maine. GovRake now has session records from 1999 to 2008, bills from the current session, and hearing schedules. The site also features a public hearings calendar, a blog for the latest updates, and a list of state data sources. You can also listen or watch live sessions or hearings from the site.

This is a great new resource for the citizens of Maine. The tagline says it all “Keep raking, the needle is in there somewhere.”

This week I have highlights from South Dakota, Tennessee, New York, Pennsylvania, and Delaware.

This week I have highlights from Virginia, New Jersey, Alabama, Hawaii, and Maryland.