LegiStorm, the sister company of the for-profit Storming Media, provides information about the U.S. Congress to the public. In line with their goal to make Congress more transparent, they have just launched an earmark database using 2008 data from Taxpayers for Common Sense. Taxpayers’ data is currently displayed via a massive Excel spreadsheet. LegiStorm has integrated the data with their other data sets, creating this helpful tool to shine light on congressional and executive spending. LegiStorm says they will add the earmark spending data for 2009 after the budget process is complete.

The site allows you to easily learn earmark details such as who the sponsoring members are, which were sponsored by the president, all the earmarks designated to each state, what organizations received the funds, and what bills authorized each earmark. It also lists the number and dollar amounts each state received (Virginia just edged out Texas and California for the top in earmark dollars), the number and amounts designated by each member, a listing of the most expensive earmarks, top receiving organizations, as well as a list of “airdropped earmarks,” an earmark that is not included in the original legislation as approved by either the House or Senate but is later mysteriously inserted into the conference committee reports, which combine both chambers’ versions of the bill.

Sunlight is working with Taxpayers to build a site that will allow users to more easily search their earmark data too. And in the meantime congrats to them for completely making their data available to LegiStorm. And thanks, LegiStorm, for making this data more accessible.

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Jonathan Stein, with Mother Jones‘ D.C. Bureau, has written “Cleaning House,” a fascinating article about the process of moving newly-elected members of the House of Representatives in while moving those defeated and otherwise retiring members out of their congressional offices. Both groups use the same 3,900-square-foot basement suite in the Rayburn House Office Building during the transition, with the new members setting up temporary shop there for several weeks until they get access to their official office. Afterward, the outgoing members use the suite as a “basement purgatory” where they transition out of power into private life.

The really interesting aspect of Stein’s article, from Sunlight’s point of view, is that he reports that the strict rules (PDF) on gift giving and lobbying that apply to sitting members don’t cover members-elect. The fact that these incoming freshmen receive numerous invitations to parties and luncheons held by fellow lawmakers, special interest groups, and lobbyists opens up a big loophole in the ethics rules.

Stein writes:

During an orientation session on congressional ethics in 2006, a Hill staffer who managed the transition for a newly elected Democrat recalls the trainer joked to the freshmen members, “Now is the time to get any expensive gifts out of the way.” The staffer provided a schedule of the orientation period, during which his boss was invited to eight receptions and four meals in the span of five days. “I took home a bottle of wine, a white chocolate Capitol Dome filled with chocolate nougat, and a tote bag,” the staffer says. The new lawmaker got the wine plus a fruit basket.

Sounds less like cleaning house and more like cleaning up.

If you have any invitations to such events for newly elected Freshman, please pass them along. We’ll post them at Party Time.

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To kick off our Policy Review blog series, I’d like to start with Steven Clift’s chapter from Rebooting America*, Sidewalks for Democracy Online.

While Clift’s essay presents a number of ideas about how technology should enhance our civic lives, I’d like to focus on the two ideas I see at the heart of his argument. First, that legitimate government is a function of the larger populace, and that that that citizenry finds an ideal expression in well organized communities. The second idea is that the values and mechanisms we recognize in real-world communities are most readily replicated through a familiar online tool — the email list.

The essay initially connects representative government with geography, suggesting that local policy consideration forms a foundation on which all government rests:

Representative democracy is based on geography, on people connecting with one another locally to react to and influence government. And yet, rarely does anything truly interactive happen online that enables citizens to jointly solve problems or to get directly involved in efforts to make their communities better. Democratic participation online is having the effect of disconnecting us from our physical place in the world, to our collective demise.

While I would place much more emphasis on the importance of reason in policy creation, choosing to emphasize discourse over a sense of place, Clifts emphasis on geography becomes clearer when he movingly explains the sort of discourse he’d like to cultivate:

When I was a child and my father had cancer, I remember neighbors coming to our assistance in our time of need. Today, with modern life keeping neighbors as strangers, we must use these new tools to break down barriers to community. You deserve the right to easily e-mail your immediate neighbors the morning after you’ve been burglarized without having to go door-to-door to collect e-mail addresses. We can balance safety and privacy with selective public disclosure of such personal contact information with an intelligent “unlisted to most” directory option that is not the all or nothing of today.

This is big “C” community and small “d” democracy. A collection of better-connected blocks, tied to broader neighborhood and community-wide online efforts will serve as the vibrant foundation we need for accountable and effective representative democracy right up to the Congress and president. You cannot force everyone to be neighborly, but the bonds of community can be restored and nurtured despite dual income families and the assault on time for community involvement.

Whether government is considered at its national level or at a municipal level, Clift’s vision — one of empathy, shared responsibility, and interconnectedness — gives us a better sense of the civic life he values.

While this might seem too sentimental to have any impact on executive branch tech policy, productive community and a shared stake in outcomes — the stuff of the communities Clift envisions — are the stuff of successful online organizing. Most of the successful email lists I’m on, many of which I describe here, are public and open, but also function through the same sense of trust and connection praised in small communities.

All of this is familiar to Clift, of course, who has been a longtime community email list organizer.

I am helping build an online neighborhood forum that will soon connect 10% of the households daily (in an area with 10,000 residents) where I live in Minneapolis. Every neighborhood should have an online space (see links to E-Democracy.Org’s Issues Forums and projects like Vermont’s Front Porch Forum, and the academic i-Neighbors project from E-Democracy.Org/nf). We also need tools that allow people who live within a block of one another to connect many-to-many in secure, semi-public ways. This builds on the simple directory idea above and extends it to support all sorts of exchanges, from babysitting referrals to communicating as a group with city hall about potholes.

As the incoming Obama administration thinks about how to harness the enthusiasm generated by a campaign saturated with ideas about organizing community, they’d do well to listen to the advice of organizers like Steven Clift, who have thought long and hard about how to build civic communities online that are the best of both worlds, giving all the capabilities possible through digital technology without losing the intimate connection of a local email list.

While the policy consequences for transition organizers aren’t exactly clear, Clift has suggestions for the rest of us, including the following:

I have shared some big ideas that will help us make progress over the long term. But what can each one of us do now, today, to restore our democracy?
A. Join or create place-based forums or blogs for your neighborhood or community.
Recruit 100 people, require the use of real names, and open up your own local forum. Learn more at E-Democracy.Org/if. Be sure to give people a choice to participate by e-mail or online.
B. Work with your elected officials to introduce legislation requiring all public meetings to be announced on the Internet. Updating open meeting laws to first require announcements, then agendas, handouts, digital recording, is a good starting point. Learn more at DoWire.Org.
C. Tag the content you produce with geographic terms or “geo tag” if you are technically inclined.

Regardless of how online communities might change with a President who values them, we can be sure that the email list will remain at the center of that organizing world, given its low price, simplicity, and unversality.

*Rebooting America was prepared by the Personal Democracy Forum, which is headed by Micah Sifry and Andrew Raseij, Senior Technology Consultants for the Sunlight Foundation.

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Our friends at techPresident have posted an abbreviated version of a very interesting submission to the 2008 Buckminster Fuller Challenge (a $100,000 prize to support the development and implementation of a strategy that has significant potential to solve humanity’s most pressing problems) dealing with fostering open government. This submission by Gong Szeto, a designer and inventor based in Sante Fe, N.M., is a Web-based application geared to empower citizens of any democracy in the world to engage directly with one another and their elected leaders on important issues on the local, state and national levels. What he envisions is a “participation-incentive/voting-strength algorithm.”

His concept is:

• Apply today’s social networking, multimedia and financial tools to create a collaborative infrastructure that records and displays a population’s real-time sentiments.
• Using a sophisticated, but user-friendly design to explain complex issues and legislation to a broad voter base.
• Constantly measuring and visualizing voter sentiment data for the benefit of citizens, elected leaders and the media.
• Making all issues digestible and actionable, thereby increasing voter participation in a complex democratic society.

By going to techPresident you can see mock screen shots that Szeto has designed showing how the apps could possibly look.

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Ted Stevens is toast; Hawaii is the Big Kahuna; and K Street says hello and goodbye. Today’s news round-up below:

Down the tubes. Sen. Ted Stevens did not become the first convicted felon to win election to the Senate, as was previously thought. After counting all the votes (that’s always a good idea), Anchorage Mayor Mark Begich became the first Democrat to win election to the United States Senate in 30 years (the previous Democrat being Mike Gravel). Stevens was the longest serving Republican in Senate history and not only shaped modern Alaska, but helped it to win statehood when he worked in the Eisenhower administration. The Alaska Daily News has an article on “The rise and fall of Sen. Ted Stevens.” I suggest you read it.

With Stevens out and Sen. Robert Byrd stepping down as Chairman of the Appropriations Committee, Hawaii is poised to become the Big Kahuna in Washington. Chief among the reasons that Hawaii is set to high-jump over the competition is that the frail 90 year old Byrd is being replaced as Appropriations Chair by the spry 84 year old Hawaii Sen. Daniel Inouye. Hawaii already gets its fair share of federal money, including huge sums from earmarks.

With Democrats ascendent in Washington, K Street is kicking their GOP lobbyists to the curb or leaving them lonely in their offices with little to do. Meanwhile, frosh Democratic lawmakers are being introduced to business lobbyists in process not too different from an arranged marriage. Two young calves for a vote on the farm bill. “‘Introductions are being made to the business community of key moderates coming into Congress, so we can get an early start building relationships,’ one Democratic lobbyist said.”

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Starting today, you’ll be seeing blog posts three times a week on the Sunlight Foundation blog.

Building on the enthusiastic spirit of reform chronicled by Gabriela in our recently posted Open Letter to the Obama Administration, Sunlight staff will be reviewing and analyzing reform recommendations as prepared by our peers, like OMBWatch, the Constitution Project, or the Sunshine in Government Initiative.

While the recently envigorated world of transition white papers can be dauntingly complex, as even a quick look at our Congresspedia page on transition resources will attest, we believe that policy is at its best when it’s developed and discussed in public.

Many of the recommendations we’ll be reviewing have been prepared by large communities of experts and stakeholders, and we want to be sure that all of their hard work gets the exposure it deserves.

To make it easier to follow along as the posts are published, all of the policy review posts will be tagged “policyreview,” which you can see through this page, or you can just watch for “PolicyReview” in the title of Sunlight blog posts.

We expect to learn a great deal by going through all of the detailed recommendations prepared for the incoming administration, and we hope that you will too.

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My colleague Anupama Naranswamy writes at the Real Time Investigations blog about the lobbying campaign waged by Dubai businesses in their efforts in 2006 to both purchase the operations of numerous ports and fight off a wave of public anger against the foreign ownership of those ports. Most illuminating in the story is how Foreign Agent Registration Agency (FARA) reports, the lobbying disclosure forms required for all foreign lobbyists, allow for a muckraker to follow the lobbying trail.

By using disclosures required under the Foreign Agents Registration Act, which require firms lobbying for foreign political parties, governments and government owned organizations—including for-profit companies—to list their meetings with government officials, it is possible to trace part of the campaign to win approval for the deal. The Sunlight Foundation released a prototype database with records from lobbyists for 15 countries, which was used in this report.

FARA records show that Glover Park Group was active early. Lobbyists from the firm first met with House Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s national security adviser, then with staffers from the House Intelligence Committee. Lobbyists working on behalf of DAE also made early contacts with Rep. Peter King, R-NY. Both Pelosi and King had opposed the Dubai Ports deal.

At least another seven contacts were made during March with the offices of Rep. Rahm Emanuel, D-Ill., and Sen. Chris Dodd, D-Conn., both of whom questioned the DP World ports deal. In all, the Glover Park Group made contacts at least 18 times during the month of March.

Lobbyists for DAE began seeking the support of members of Congress in March 2007—before a formal deal to purchase the two aviation firms hammered out. The company was joined in its efforts by the Carlyle Group and trade groups including the U.S.-U.A.E. Business Council and the U.S. Chamber of Commerce. Overall, DAE spent $780,000 on lobbyists between February 2007 and August 2008.

Read the whole article here.

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File this under unintended consequences. It involves a bizarre case out of Germany over the weekend where a politician sued Germany’s Wikipedia over certain items that had been added to his biography. The politician is a member of the German parliament, and he argued that his Wikipedia bio included items he said were “false and slanderous.” He sued and a judge ordered the closure of the German portal for the Wikipedia, wikipedia.de, which was down for two days. It’s now back online.

The Wikipedia entry stated that the politician was formerly employed by the East German secret police. But this is not what he found objectionable, since that appears to be true and without question. What he found objectionable were items involving online pornography, questions about the status of his college degree and claims that he sent threatening text messages to an ex-partner.

AP reports the politician now says it was not his intention that the site to be forced to go dark, but only that the items on his bio he objected to be stricken. He withdrew his suit after the items were removed. Even though the version of the site housed in Germany was down, it was available to users who accessed another German-language version housed on U.S. servers.

I’m left wondering why the politician didn’t just edit his own pages and remove the inaccurate and offending material.

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Yesterday, ProPublica announced a set of awards to recognize outstanding investigative work by governmental groups in the United States.  They are calling on people — citizens, elected officials, government employees and journalists — to nominate work by federal or state government entities that expose corruption and hold those in power accountable.

Prizes will be awarded in five categories:

• Federal investigation-executive branch
• Federal investigation-legislative branch
• Federal investigation-independent agency
• State or local investigation-multi-district elective or executive agency
• State or local investigation-legislative branch/independent agency

“Some of the most important accountability information comes from inside government itself and ProPublica wants to recognize that,” said Paul Steiger, ProPublica editor-in-chief. “Our prizes will acknowledge the crucial role these investigators, and the institutions they represent, play in exposing corruption and shining a light down the darker, and too often secret, corridors of our public institutions.”

ProPublica is accepting entries now through January 31, 2009, and will cover work produced during the 2008 calendar year. They will fete the winners at a ceremony in Washington, D.C., next spring.

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The team from OpenCongress has done it again: added another really useful new feature “My Political Notebook” (MyPN) where, as their tagline says, you can save and share your favorite political content from around the web. MyPN gives you a new way to easily grab news articles, blog posts, YouTube videos, and more and save them to your personal page in seconds. By building your own unique notebook you can easily follow all the things you’re interested in the world of politics. As David Moore, OpenCongress’ executive director, writes in an email announcing their new feature, “My Political Notebook gives you a new place to save and share what’s really happening in Congress.”  (I was so obsessed with adding items there late yesterday that I ran out of time to write this post!)

You have to be registered with OpenCongress to get started. Once there, check the upper right-hand corner of the screen to find the link for “My Political Notebook.”

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