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Thinktank Aims To Crowdsource Government Earmark Analysis
Al writes "The Sunlight Foundation, based in Washington, DC, hopes to raise an army of web volunteers to analyze all the earmarks in government bills. The group's new Sunlight Labs transparency corps invites users to join an effort to analyze the information collaboratively. Users are presented with PDFs released by hundreds of different offices and asked to enter the pertinent information like the date and dollar amount of a request, name of the requester, description of the project, and so on. These then become part of a searchable database. The project's launch roughly coincided with the launch earlier this month of the government's new IT Dashboard. But this tool is somewhat limited — users can find the primary recipients of IT project funding, but not subcontractors; it's not easy to discern the origins of contracts or their geographic distribution, and it's almost impossible to see how they are connected to elected officials."
contrary to popular opinion, the big difference between lobbyists and ordinary voters isn't money (although money matters), it is access to information on a timely basis. Putting information online will have a huge impact on the legislative process.
other wise my generation will never help :-p
so first on their dev's list...
Iphone app... then
facebook app... then
myspace app... then
wait what are they trying to do agian?
bored? try this http://jadmadi.net/blog/2005/01/27/linux-wine-how-to-running-windows-viruses-with-wine/
In Capitalist American Sunlight Foundation raise army of web volunteers to analyze government bills. In Soviet Russia Army volunteers YOU and government send YOU bill...
I was thinking that this would already be part of the government system -- to index who makes each earmark or revision to a bill -- to add at least some semblence of accountability to the legislating process. Then I thought "Why doesn't the government already have a searchable website like this? Shouldn't they be accountable to make one?" then I realized the website probably would have been contracted out for $8 million to some governor's grandson's company... So Go Volunteers!
I am the richest astronaut ever to win the superbowl.
"These then become part of a searchable database."
There should be a law that agencies enter this information themselves.
At least they're going this far. Imagine this happening under the Bush office. Nope, I didn't think you could.
P.S. I am *not* an Obama fanboi.
It is pitch black. You are likely to be eaten by a grue.
On the surface, this does sound like a good project, one that does bring a bit more transparency to our government as a whole.
However, if there is a groundswell against earmarks, I wonder how it's going to affect projects which at first glance don't look worthwhile. I think it would disproportionately affect science and the arts as they're often seen as luxuries rather than necessities.
Recruiting volunteers is nice, but who owns the data at the end of the day?
Can I download a full offline copy of database? (Without having to sign an NDA, make payments, or resort to a custom rolled screen scraper?)
Can I reuse the data on my own private or public projects?
If not, then best of luck with your project 'fellas, lemme know how it works out.
You sunk my battleship!
<old people's laughter>Hahahahaha!</old people's laughter>
I had a similar notion when concerns were circling about bills being too long to feasibly read before a representative voted on it, but it was for bills in general, not just earmarks.
http://palshife.net/2009/02/27/government-in-the-eyes-of-a-technologist
Personally, I like the idea of doing earmarks specifically since it would go a long way toward showing just where the federal government's money goes.
Attention deficit disorder is a complicated issue, spanning several major... HEY LET'S GO RIDE BIKES!
If you put up free porn -- only requiring people to enter this information to advance to the next screen of free porn -- this database would be completed in 24 hours or less.
Or, if not porn, then lottery tickets.
Liberal? Conservative? Compare perspectives at Left-Right
Am I the only one tired of hearing/seeing the word crowdsource?
No one cares what your captcha was
Houston TX, USA
Legislation is public domain, so you do.
Even for other government data, Data.gov exists to explicitly allow anyone to download and use government data as they please for their own analysis. The Sunlight Foundation is even sponsoring an "Apps for America" challenge that awards a prize to the best web app that makes use of Data.gov information in a way that benefits taxpayers. Only a small percentage of all of the data that is desired is up there right now, and not all of the data is of high quality, but times, they are a changin'.
If you want to go the rest of the way, check out the Metagovernment.
Earmarks account for only 1% to 2% of the budget. What is really needed is a wiki that encompasses the whole federal budget (all $2.9 trillion of it). Then the crowd would really have a chance of finding waste in the budget and of making some really progress in bringing spending into line with revenues.
Source isn't a verb. Crowdsource isn't a word. It's linguisticing clusterfuckery.
Thinktank aims to take advantage of... to use.... *groan*.
English ownership's so many precise and eloquent cloudwords there's littleish reason to recreation them or inventize more at.
Utilizing the synergization of benchmark e-solutions to pre-workaround action items!
While a good tool and no doubt legislators should already be doing this electronically.
There is a strange ideology behind this whole 'transparency' movement.
The ideology is basically this
Money is best allocated by the democratic process and debate. The problem is we just need to provide accountability to the process and all will be well.
The reality is much darker.
This is like handing over your whole life to the student council. It wasn't a good idea in high school and it's not a good idea now.
Not only is it corruption prone as they are always spending someone else's money. Those in power will always work to benefit themselves first. It's not just mega corporations. It is teacher unions, lawyers, doctors... Everyone who can get power in the democratic process is going to abuse that power to the detriment of society.
The mere act of handing out money at the government level draws corruption. It draws the corrupt, the well-connected, the unscrupulous to the table like moths to the flame.
You cannot remove our human nature from the equation.
It's a simple lesson learned by societies all over the world. The western world seems to have forgotten this.
No amount of information or openness is going to 'cure' this.
Speaking of the wisdom of crowds P Why not bypass the legislators directly and give the money directly to the people. If you trust crowds and democracy, why not trust each person individually with money?
Why not have vouchers...?
WikiConstitution
can we tag this with 'compoundword'?
One problem is how one defines "earmark" and "pork". The "reasonableness" if a given request is often subjective and depends on one's personal politics. For example, is the F-22 an "earmark"? Sure, some senators probably want it because of local jobs in existing F-22 plants, but others feel we need a large, aggressive military to protect us from [insert boogyman of the week]. Lists of numbers cannot really tell you what's behind a senator's decision. But at least hopefully an easy-to-get-to database will make it easier to find and highlight suspicious patterns.
Table-ized A.I.
"Senator, have you read this bill?"
But we don't pay them to understand it so how are we supposed to know where the money went?!!
Quack, quack.
I'm all for exposure to the public of this type of data, but, can we trust them not to filter the data to forward their own political agenda. I think not. Like every group in Washington, they will filter out the sins of the people whose views they support while exposing the sins of those whose views they oppose.
Also, can we trust that the "Crowd" they attract to sift out this data will not be partisan in what they record. Again, I think not.
I've been watching this crap play out for half a century and studied the games that went on for the half century before that and it is always the same old crap. The design of our system of government perpetuates it.
The Credit Cardholders' Bill of Rights was a prime example. You have long overdue, well thought out, responsible legislation with a crap law tied to it. Legislation was tacked on to allow sidearms in National Parks. Now I can't take my kids camping / fishing without worrying about some drunk idiot with a sidearm. At least before this bill, hunting rifles were generally out of sight and out of mind in their tent / camper / truck by the time they got wasted. Now it's strapped to their leg.
One of these days I'm going to cut you into little pieces. - PF
Earmarks make up about 1% of *discretionary* spending. Which is considerably smaller than the overall budget (which includes things like Medicare and Social Security). And if an earmark didn't exist, that doesn't mean the money wouldn't be spent. It just means that the person administering the program under which the earmark falls would be able to allocate that money more freely (presumably to a more efficient use than a senator's pet project).
Earmarks are very easy for journalists to write up as news stories, though, which accounts for them getting so much attention.
I work at the Sunlight Foundation (though not on this project), and I feel I can safely say that we completely agree with you that the government *should* be issuing this data in a more easily usable format.
To be fair, though, it's not always as easy as all that: when you introduce such an infrastructure you need to make sure there are staff resources to handle the data entry, training available to help them do it, and somebody checking the overall data quality. My project's been looking at a lot of grant data, and we've consistently found that the central grant data directory -- a data set called FAADS -- is of lower quality than the reports issued on each program's website in excel, PDF, HTML tables or who knows what else. It doesn't make a lot of sense to people like you and me, but centralized systems really do introduce an added layer of difficulty for the data entry people. Just keeping track of the endless requirements imposed by legislation can be pretty daunting.
...none of which is to say that this shouldn't happen. It should! But it does explain why "publish earmarks" and "publish earmarks in a central location, in a machine-readable format" are two different things, and why the latter is more difficult to successfully ask for. We'll get there, though.
Why is it 'insightful' when one poster objects to tacking on 'arts to a defense bill', but I'm a troll for agreeing with that and going one further and objecting to tying a firearms bill to a consumer protection bill? Or is this the AstroTurf in action? I'm inclined to think the latter, but curious what the community might think. Just because you're paranoid doesn't mean people aren't out to get you.
One of these days I'm going to cut you into little pieces. - PF