The following is an update of what I’ve been up to recently, in several different areas…
Transcript Pledge and Letter:
Even if the leadership in both parties make a priority of publicizing committee proceedings, the committee chairs in their variable discretion (as we called it in the report) still need to make it a sufficient priority for [...]

Even though that video centers on intellectual property issues, Lessig talks about how his focus came to shift away from hoping Congress would pass rational policy. He remarks that the "economies of influence" that dictate congressional policy are fundamentally corrupt, as a system. That made me reflect that Sunlight’s mission is, [...]

(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 [...]

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 [...]

This post from information aesthetics has me thinking again about ontology, linguistics, and semantically derived hyperlinks. How else can you describe a system that effectively matches photos’ content in a maneuverable spatial context than a successfully implemented visual semantic web?
(this video is really amazing. follow the above link.)

I find it hard to stay away from compelling data visualization. That’s probably a big part of why I’m passionate about government information. The connection isn’t entirely clear to me, but it goes something like this: digital analysis of information illuminates subtle connections and trends that would have gone otherwise unnoticed. New [...]

I’m writing to give a general update on the status of our recommendations, and to give some other various updates. The impact of this project has always been, to some degree, contingent on the clout generated by the distributed expertise of its participants. This list and project will retain their unique productive appeal [...]

GovTrack.us is a perfect choice to be our first review as an Insanely Useful Website. GovTrack is one of the original web 2.0 type sources for government information: both an excellent example of a new model of political information distribution, and a compelling story of Web-programming genius expressed as an ambitious civic undertaking.
Josh Tauberer, [...]

A couple of weeks ago I was fortunate to get in touch with three people at the Library of Congress, including the LOC’s director of web services (if I’m getting the title right), who took some time to talk to me about the information flow in the LOC that gets legislative information into the website [...]

John asked me to clarify a bit what legislative information exists in XML and what more would be a good idea for Congress to provide (this is the subject of the first chapter of our report, Legislative Databases).
What exists now, publicly, is an XML markup of the text of some legislation. First the counts, and [...]