True democratic government depends on citizens being able to monitor and participate in the actions and activities of their government.  And this is not only true in our country, obviously. Just like Sunlight, My Society in the UK and VisibleGovernment.ca in Canada are applying Web 2.0 tools to facilitate openness and transparency in their governments.

Jennifer Bell, VisibleGovernment.ca’s director, learned of Change Congress‘ national movement to end corruption in Congress. Specifically, Jennifer was impressed by Change Congress asking congressional candidates to make four simple commitments: No money from lobbyists or PACs; vote to end earmarks; support reform to increase congressional transparency; support publicly-financed campaigns. So inspired, her organization has launched I Believe In Open .ca where they are asking candidates to agree to five commitments: Support reforms that increase government transparency and accountability; make campaign promises specific and measurable, and report progress on promises and their metrics at least semi-annually; publish the content of his or her daily schedule (quite similar to our Punch Clock Campaign), including meetings with lobbyists and special interest groups; support reforms allowing free access to scientific and survey data gathered by government institution; and support reforms that make it easier for Canadians to obtain government information they have a right to know.

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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 Montana, Nevada, Oregon and Texas.

In Montana, MTPolitics.net highlights the new Montana Election wiki.  The wiki aims to be an all stop shop for all of Montana’s elections happenings.  It includes elections from the county to the federal level.

In Nevada, Blue Sage Views talks about how much money in earmarks Rep. Dean Heller has gotten in the last two years.  There is definitely some work in EarmarkWatch.org for Rep. Dean Heller according to his $32 million earmarks.

In Oregon, Loaded Orygun blogs about his experience trying to cover an Executive Session of the Lake Oswego Council.  Executive Sessions are closed except to journalists.  There are no clear rules about whether citizen journalists are allowed to be credited and so TorridJoe was asked to leave.  This incident is requiring Lake Oswego to adopt a policy regarding new media journalists.  Stayed tuned to Loaded Orygun for more info.  They should check out the Open House Project’s section on Citizen Journalism Access.

In Texas, blogHouston points to Texas Watchdog posting of Houston City Council’s financial disclosures on their website.  Since this information is not available online now this watch dog group is doing it for them.  How nice.

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(cross-posted from the Open House Project)

Fulfilling one of the recommendations of the Open House Project report, The Library of Congress has published on their THOMAS web page directions for creating permanent links.

From our report:

We also recommend that:

THOMAS provide permanent links to all documents, in an obvious way, to enable Web researchers to directly refer to these documents

From THOMAS:

Legislative Handles are a new persistent URL service for creating links to legislative documents from the THOMAS web site (http://thomas.loc.gov). With a simple syntax, Legislative Handles make it easy to type in legislative links to bibliographies, reference guides, emails, blogs, or web pages. Legislative Handles, for instance, http://hdl.loc.gov/loc.uscongress/legislation.110hconres196, are a convenient way to cite legislation.

This matters because linking is one of the most basic components of online dialog. Without citations and primary sources, commentary and analysis are just opinion and rumor.

The “Handles” allow a simple procedure for linking to specific legislation, without that link expiring, as often happens if you create a link to a bill’s page accessed through a search.

This is a great first step toward modernizing THOMAS. We’d love to see additional changes, like access to bulk legislative data, or permanent links automatically created within bill pages. As it stands now, however, it’s great that THOMAS is recognizing the needs of its users, and helping the public create permanent links to legislation is long-awaited first step towards doing just that.

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Loudoun County in Virginia just launched a new wiki to collect community news and information. Loudounpedia is run by the Loudoun county library system and has sections for local government information, blogs, job board, recreation and other community related activities.

The government section now has all information regarding the election including a Google map of polling places. This is an excellent resource for the community and the choice of a wiki allows people to edit it with their own knowledge making it a resource that is owned by the community.

h/t to the Municipalist

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Government Technology reports that Kentucky just launched a draft of its E-Transparency Web site and is asking citizens to comment on it. The Web site will be fully operational by January 1, 2009 and will offer all kinds of information related to state spending, from a government spending database to a game that will allow citizens to see if they can balance the budget. So go check out the site and submit your feedback! They are collecting comments until October 17^th.

A government body giving an opportunity to citizens to have an influence over a government Web site is a rare occurrence. This will hopefully create a site that is not only informative but also user friendly.

So kudos Kentucky! I can’t wait to see the final product.

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Sunlight grantee NewsTrust.net helps citizens make informed decisions about our democracy by making it easier to find good journalism online. Each day the non-profit, non-partisan group features a selection of articles and opinion pieces that its members rate for fairness, accuracy, context and sourcing. NewsTrust has just launched a new version of its site that promises “a better user experience with enhanced review tools, more visual appeal and higher performance.” And in true Web 2.0 fashion, the redesign was partially guided by suggestions from its members.

As their site states, “it now offers a number of innovative features, such as distinctive  ‘trust-o-meter’ ratings, separate listings for news and opinion, new review forms for beginners and professionals, new rating criteria tracking both quality and popularity, faster story submissions, personal bookmarks and special comment sections.”

And I want to congratulatie Fabrice Florin, NewsTrust’s founder and executive editor. Ashoka recently named him as one of their social entrepreneur fellows. Way to go!

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On Friday, we told you about the happy ending to months of negotiations to modernize the Franking rules that govern how members of Congress can use the Internet to communicate with us about their work. The new rules just passed by the House and Senate allow members of Congress to communicate with us on sites such as Twitter, YouTube and Flickr without recrimination. (We advocated for these rules changes through our bipartisan collaborative effort, the Open House Project, and through our popular Let Our Congress Tweet campaign, the first Twitter-based petition to Congress, which hundreds of you joined.)

Before these new rules were passed, lawmakers could not officially embed a YouTube video on their official Web site, nor could they join us in political conversations around the popular virtual water cooler that Twitter has become.

To celebrate this historic precedent, we created Capitol Tweets, a widget you can embed on your site that updates you every 10 minutes with the latest tweets from members of Congress who use Twitter.

Download the widget, and while you’re watching the tweets fly, check out this effort by David All (who co-wrote the Open House Project chapter on Franking reform with Sunlight’s Paul Blumenthal) to grade them on their tweets.

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(Cross-Posted from the Open House Project)

Yesterday, after months of negotiations and proposals, the House joined the Senate in updating the arcane guidelines that govern how Members of Congress use the Internet.

In May of 2007, the Sunlight Foundation released the Open House Project report, which included an entire chapter on the issue of Franking Reform. That chapter, prepared by David All and Paul Blumental, has guided our advocacy and discussions of web use restrictions since then.

Those discussions simmered until earlier this summer, when tensions between Members of the Franking Commission briefly escalated (the part of the Committee on House Administration that handles Web restrictions). This summer’s discussion caught some media attention, and unsettled some web-savvy Representatives, and ultimately engaged both parties’ leaders in the House.

The Sunlight Foundation capitalized on the chaos, creating the first twitter-based petition in the site, Let Our Congress Tweet, which amassed twitter-based signatures, and displayed vigorous support for updated rules from online communities across the political spectrum.

While House officials maneuvered publicly, the Senate passed similar reforms with a bit less fanfare. As recently as last week, agreement looked unlikely from the House committee, with Roll Call reporting that an attempt at negotiations ended in “an emotionally charged hearing and a breakdown in negotiations.”

That’s why we were suprised and delighted to get word from the Committee on House Administration that a new agreement had been reached. This measure wasn’t just a slight rewrite, however. The new guidelines represent an enormous change, one which has new media staff from both parties glowing.

Speaker Pelosi’s statement calls the revisions a “significant step forward toward bringing the House rules into the multimedia age and allowing for members to effectively communicate with their constituents online… I also thank citizen initiatives such as the Open House Project for their thoughtful recommendations and continued efforts to encourage Members to engage their constituents through internet technologies.”

Ranking Member Vern Ehlers was similarly laudatory of the new rules, and of Chairman Brady’s leadership: “Mr. Brady recognized the need to allow enhanced constituent communication, and demonstrated outstanding leadership that enabled this Committee to adopt a long-overdue change,” Ehlers stated. “It is imperative that Members have the ability to use whichever web services they feel will best inform their constituents about the important issues facing this country.”

The new rules, as written, make a very important distinction, and one we’re delighted to see considered: Member web use will be evaluated based on the “official content,” and not the venue in which the materials are posted. This puts new media communications on similar footing to traditional media, where Op-Eds and TV interviews are proximal to commercials without causing a conflict of interest.

The revisions should cause a renaissance in official political Web-use, with eager new media staff and savvy Members now able to confidently engage with their constituents. We can’t wait to see what they come up with, and can only hope that all government reform arguments have such happy endings.

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Check out this really cool word cloud created out of the 110-page Emergency Economic Stabilization Act of 2008 that the House failed to pass on Monday. A digital media and technology enthusiast based in San Francisco, who blogs using the pseudonym Thomas Hawk, produced the graphic by pasting the bill into Wordle.

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Imagine if you could get a list of all the meetings with members and staffers of the House and Senate initiated by lobbyists for the likes of Goldman Sachs, Bank of America, CitiGroup, American International Group, Washington Mutual, Wachovia and other parties with, shall we say, something more than an academic interest in the $700 billion financial bailout that the Senate just approved? Suppose you could see, for each meeting, the subject discussed. Suppose you could also get a list of the dates and amounts of campaign contributions those lobbyists had made, the expenses they’d incurred on behalf of their clients, even lists of calls to reporters and columnists and editorial writers that they’d made to sway public opinion for their clients?

For those clients, of course, you can’t — the Lobbying Disclosure Act of 1995 doesn’t require that sort of detail. But for lobbyists representing foreign governments, political parties, organizations and individuals, there is a different disclosure regime — and Sunlight’s new FARAdb prototype let’s you search and sort a sampling of these forms to get a sense of how lobbyists work the Hill.

The forms–required by the Foreign Agent Registration Act (FARA) — are filed twice a year by firms hired to lobby Congress and the executive branch by foreign clients. The lobbying firms disclose specific details about which government officials, including members of Congress and their staffs, were contacted by lobbyists for each client, and gives details about what specific issues were discussed. The firms must also disclose all the campaign donations made by their employees who lobby for foreign clients.

The database covers two years worth of forms — January 2006 to December 2007 — filed by lobbyists representing 15 countries; they’ve reported collecting more than $67 million in fees and expenses while pushing the agendas and bolstering the images of foreign governments and organizations in the United States.

The database allows users to search by clients, government officials contacted, lobbyists and issues, making it easy to navigate the data. Using the search function, users can quickly learn that, according to FARA reports, lobbyists for these countries contributed $97,000 to the campaign of Republican presidential nominee John McCain between the latter part of 2005 to the end of 2007. His Democratic rival, Sen. Barack Obama, received $11,000 from lobbyists for these countries during the same period. For more details, and more digging into the disclosures, check the Real Time Investigations blog.

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