In the past, it was a victory simply to get Congress and government agencies to disclose information on paper. Then came the Internet, which, particularly in its beginnings, meant government could conduct a “paper-style” kind of disclosure—with unwieldy PDFs, for example. Now we’re in a new era, with increasing amounts of information made available in raw, machine-readable format. Every day, new experiments bloom that are helping to turn outsiders into insiders.
For years, the CRP was a lonely voice, doing the hard work of collecting and coding campaign contribution and lobbying data, and making it publicly available online for reporters, researchers, and activists. Now, thanks to support from Sunlight, CRP has made this data available via APIs and downloadable databases so that anybody can take it, enhance it, and link it to other information. Already, the group MAPLight.org has taken this campaign finance data and mashed it up with congressional votes so that anybody can find out quickly how money may have influenced a lawmaker’s actions (see Chapter 20). Now, creative developers are creating new interfaces, such as “Know thy Congressman” (a winner in the Sunlight Foundation’s Apps for America contest; http://know-thy-congressman.com/), which combines CRP’s information on campaign contributions with data from elsewhere on earmarks and biographical and legislative information. New venues bring this information alive for different audiences. For example, remember during the 2008 elections the wild popularity of The Huffington Post’s “FundRace” feature, fueled directly from FEC downloads, which people could use to look up who had given contributions to a particular presidential candidate via an interactive map? Millions of people went to check on their neighbors’ political giving histories.
What Malamud did for the SEC and the Patent Office, he also recently did for congressional video. His campaign reached a tipping point after C-SPAN tried to stop House Speaker Nancy Pelosi from posting C-SPAN hearing footage on her website. Bloggers, led by Malamud, protested online. In March 2007, C-SPAN responded by liberalizing its copyright policy and opening up its archives. The result is that now bloggers, citizen journalists, and anyone can post any federally sponsored event covered by C-SPAN online without fear of copyright reprisals, allowing websites such as Metavid.org to focus more on the application layer, building interfaces for remixing, contextualizing, and participating with the audio/video media assets of our government. As a result, it’s now possible for anyone to find, annotate, tag, clip, and display a snippet of video of lawmakers speaking from the floor of Congress on a particular bill or topic.
Providing this kind of information isn’t just an exercise in entertainment. It helps citizens become more involved and hold government accountable. In 2005, a coalition of bloggers known as the “Porkbusters” was behind efforts to help expose Alaska’s so-called “Bridge to Nowhere.” This transportation project in Alaska to connect the tiny town of Ketchikan (population 8,900) to the even tinier Island of Gravina (population 50) cost some $320 million and was funded through three separate earmarks in a highway bill. The same group helped expose which senator—former Sen. Ted Stevens, R-Alas.—had put a secret hold on a bill creating a federal database of government spending, cosponsored by none other than then-Sen. Barack Obama, D-Ill., and Sen. Tom Coburn, R-Okla. Recently, the Sunlight Foundation launched Transparency Corps, where people can volunteer small amounts of time to help enhance the transparency of government data. The first project underway—Earmark Watch—is helping to digitize earmark data, which lawmakers are making available but only in awkward formats. Armed with easily searchable data, citizens will be better equipped to track government spending on these projects.
OpenCongress.org is another example of making information more available so that citizens can digest and act on it. Through this site—which provides baseline information about federal legislation along with social networking features—users can sign up for tracking alerts on a bill, a vote, or a lawmaker and link up with other people who are interested in monitoring the same topics, monitor and comment on legislation, and contact their members of Congress. In 2008, more than 45,000 people posted comments on legislation extending unemployment benefits; first they used the OpenCongress platform as a way to press their representative to vote for the legislation; then, once it was enacted, they turned their comment thread into a de facto self-help group for people looking for advice on how to get their state unemployment agency to release their personal benefits. (Who needs lobbyists when you have the power of many?) This spring the OpenCongress Wiki launched, providing web searchers an entry on every congressional lawmaker and candidate for Congress by pulling together their full biographical and investigative records. And that’s open for anyone to edit.
We’re starting to see change from without become change for within, as government starts to move toward a more modern, twenty-first-century understanding of its obligations to provide up-to-date, searchable online information to the public. For example, FedSpending.org was the first publicly available database on all government spending, created by the nonprofit OMB Watch with support from Sunlight. Through it, citizens can find out not only how much money individual contractors get, but also what percentage of those contracts have been competitively bid. The database has been searched more than 15 million times since its inception in the fall of 2006. Its creation helped to prompt passage of the Coburn-Obama bill mandating that the U.S. Office of Management and Budget (OMB) create a similar database. But instead of spending $14 million appropriated for that task on re-creating the wheel the OMB ultimately struck a deal with FedSpending.org to license the software to build the backbone of what is today USASpending.gov, which provides citizens with easy access to government contract, grant, and other award data.
Now, with the launch of Data.gov, the Obama administration is taking government transparency to a new level. The site is still early in its development, but the idea is sound: to provide a one-stop shop for all government data. If successful, it will ultimately make hard-to-find, obscure databases, once the province only of experts, much more accessible. We can’t imagine yet what new uses people will come up with for this information.