NextGenWeb’s Social Media for Staffers series has primarily focused on the social media tools legislators can use to monitor views and communicate with their constituents. But for our final event, the tables were turned as Hill staffers explored several websites that monitor Capitol Hill activity.
Many in Washington, DC, are familiar with the work of Sunlight Foundation. Founded in 2006, the organization has been instrumental in leading the fight for government transparency and accountability through technology. Using searchable databases, open API’s and other online tools, Sunlight Foundation has built a number of sites to make available to the public information on legislative language, campaign spending, political party activities and more—all in user-friendly formats.
Some of these sites include:
• http://publicmarkup.org/
• http://www.opencongress.org/
• http://earmarkwatch.org/
• http://www.capitolwords.org/
• http://politicalpartytime.org/
John Wonderlich, Policy Director of Sunlight Foundation, walked staffers through a few of these sites. Although he is calling for more structured, systematic data from Congress, he believes the Republican Cloakroom site is a good model for information and transparency.
One of Sunlight’s transparency projects was a contest called Apps for America. Second place winner Forum One Communications was also featured at our event, where they presented their winning website, http://Legistalker.org. Andrew Cohen and Chris Von Spiegelfeld demonstrated how their site pulls data on Members of Congress every 20 seconds from Twitter, YouTube, Capitol Words and hundreds of other sources, so users can get nearly real-time collections of Member activity. The site had more than 20,000 visitors in just its first three months and has received media attention from Wired, Lifehacker and more.
Interested in even more information on government transparency? Watch our event in its entirety below!
One Response to “Hill Staffers Explore Transparent Government”
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July 30th, 2009 at 5:24 pm
[...] Our last session was on Government Transparency. I was amazed at how much is out there now. So, we decided to tape it and post it up on the site. It’s now available online and I hope you will take some time to look at it. [...]