Following John’s note on an OHP mail list email, I adapted the bill comparison tool I developed for GovTrack and used it to analyze the changes made between the draft PDFs that have been circulating of the economic bail-out bill that is now a large package of legislation. I found five drafts, going back to [...]

Happy 4th of July. I thought I’d share an interesting website that has nothing to do with government transparency but is about good use of government data. The USDA maintains a big database of nutrition facts about foods. You can download the database and build applications based on it, like a menu planner. This is [...]

From the always-worthwhile Information Aesthetics blog, links to an amazingly detailed visualization of ideological distribution in the US Senate throughout history.  From the description offered there:
This visualization rewards careful inspection–there are stories to be found everywhere: follow the positions of the Presidents, relative to their own party members; note how party leaders are typically close [...]

Broad access to fundamental data leads to compelling analysis. Here’s a TED talk from Hans Rosling, where he gives a tour of the recent history of countries becoming industrialized, using visualizations built on data from the UN.

The history of representative democracy and government is waiting to be similarly told; here’s a broad collection of [...]

(This is written in the style of a letter to the Senate… because hopefully it will turn into just that. Comments on its persuasiveness are welcome.)
Summary: The Senate’s current position on publishing voting records online is analogous to a reference library that has no copy machine. I explain below why the Senate website should publish [...]

One theme running through what we’re doing here, in my mind at least, is to blur the line between the explicit and the implicit, or, put differently, to make evident those things which were only implied. Effective data availability is certainly a case of this. Every time there is government information that is [...]

The New York Times has an interesting flash application that breaks down the text of yesterday’s Democratic debate (there was a debate? UPDATE: And it was in my own city??) by speaker and shows visually the distribution of who spoken when through the debate. I mention it here because it’s one of these data transformations [...]

Here’s a visualization of voters reactions to politicians’ statements distributed across either time or geography.
This stuff is really compelling, and will just become more pervasive and easier to use as data processing becomes better standardized (and therefore easier to repurpose) and as political parties, legislatures, and businesses see that it is in their interest to [...]