Planet Open Government Open Source Hacking

Open Secrets: Giants and Patriots Toss Political Dollars To Democrats

Fri, 03 Feb 2012 23:43:39 +0000

When the New England Patriots and New York Giants meet on the national stage in Super Bowl XLVI this Sunday, it's expected to be an event far removed from politics -- just two tough and proven football squads, squaring off in the biggest sporting event of the year.

Off the field, however, is another matter entirely.

A Center for Responsive Politics analysis of political contributions by players, executives and coaches, in addition to their spouses, shows that both squads are fully engaged in the world of political football. And both are very much on the Democratic bench when it comes to political giving.

Such affiliated interests of the Giants and Patriots combined to contribute approximately $51,800 to federal politicians and political parties between January, 2009 and December, 2011. A full $47,000 of that sum benefited Democratic causes.

The donations come almost entirely from the owners box.

Robert Kraft, the owner and chairman of the New England Patriots, donated $38,600, with 88 percent of that going to Democrats. In his counterpart's luxury suite, Steve Tisch, who co-owns the Giants, has given less than Kraft -- about $12,200 during the same time period. But every penny of Tisch's donations went to Democrats.

Recipients of Kraft's campaign cash include President Barack Obama. Kraft donated $5,000, the maximum any single individual can give to a candidate in an election cycle, to the president's re-election effort late in 2011.

Others included Democratic Sens. Chuck Schumer of New York, who received $4,800 in 2010, and Sheldon Whitehouse of Rhode Island, who gained $1,000 from the Patriots' owner.

Still, Kraft also reached out to Illinois Republican Mark Kirk, cutting checks worth $4,800 in 2009, while Kirk was still a member of the U.S. House of Representatives. (He's now a U.S. senator filling Obama's seat in the Upper Chamber.)

Tisch, meanwhile, joined Kraft in donating to Schumer, giving him $4,800 in 2010. He also shelled out $5,000 to Democratic Sen. Claire McCaskill of Missouri in May of 2011.

During the 2008 presidential race, Tisch bet heavily on the Democratic ticket, sending Obama $2,300 and then-Sen. Hillary Clinton $4,600 during their contentious primary fight. (Those totals pre-date this analysis, however, and aren't included in the $12,200 figure referred to earlier.)

No current player on the either the Patriots or the Giants squads made a political donation.

And the two teams aren't the only ones facing off on the political gridiron. The National Football League itself has also been investing heavily in politics in recent years.

The NFL ramped up its political influence efforts in 2011, as it went head-to-head with the league's players' association over a series of labor disputes that threatened the 2011 season.

The NFL's political action committee contributed $169,500 to Democratic and Republican candidates between January and September in 2011, with its donations more or less evenly split between the two parties. (Kraft also donated approximately $15,000 to the NFL's PAC in that same time period.)

But that's nothing compared to its K Street budget.

The National Football League spent more than $1.6 million last year on federal lobbying. That's a new record for the league, according to Center for Responsive Politics research, and an increase of more than 60 percent over its budget just four years earlier.

For its part, the National Football League Players Association invested just $230,000 (lower than the all-time high of $450,000 it spent in 2010).

Both sides lobbied on issues relating to labor, as well as telecommunications and anti-trust areas.

OpenSecrets Blog reported in October a full breakdown of all NFL teams' political giving.

Sunlight Foundation: Sunlight Weekly Roundup: "Ignorance of the law is not a defense"

Fri, 03 Feb 2012 23:18:21 +0000

After footage of a tense city council meeting in West Branch, Iowa was posted on YouTube, City Administrator Matt Mucker suggested a rule that would have required the public to secure mayoral permission to record meetings. This measure would would have violated the state’s open meetings law. After this breach of the law was pointed out to Mucker, he argued that would “ rewrite the rule to exempt the media.” Gregory Norfleet, editor of the West Branch Times, noted the law was not written for the media’s benefit. “It’s for everybody,” he said. Furthermore, Mark Tomb, director of membership for the Iowa League of Cities, warns, “It is important to remember that nearly anyone can bring an action against the city for violating the Iowa Open Meetings Law. Each member who participated in the violation may be assessed damages of not more than $500 or not less than $100. These penalties increase to no more than $2,500 or no less than $1,000 when the member knowingly participated in the violation. Ignorance of the law is not a defense.” For the whole story, check out Matthew E. Marquardt’s post on North Iowa Today.
After a disgruntled employee took to Facebook to air his grievances, Jackson, Mississippi was forced to come up with a policy regarding social media and public entities. The city itself is now developing a policy. In the meantime, the fire department has released their own policy: “The Department’s memo encourages employees not to: publicly discuss issues that might be detrimental to the Department or that might conflict with the duties and ethics of a firefighter; to air personal grievances; and clarify that their opinions are their own and not those of the Department.” According to Jennifer Peet of Local Open Government Blog,“ For public entities, the tool is useful for broadcasting to a growing Internet audience, but allowing feedback and conversation can be a risk. Like the Jackson Fire Department, every government entity will need to have a conversation about the inherent conflict between an individuals free speech rights and the government’s legitimate right to protect the government service.”

In New York, citizens will have better access to public information, thanks to a new amendment set to kick in on February 2nd. The law will now require municipalities, school districts and other governmental bodies to make all documents to be discussed at public meetings available at or before the meetings, either in person or online. Trustee Mary Bess Phillips maintains that the city has not been trying to keep information from the public, but rather, has become overwhelmed with the number FOIA requests. Phillips argues, “There’s an ongoing myth that we’re keeping information from people,” she said. “There’s an inordinate number of requests from a couple of people. There’s a great deal of time in the clerk’s office being spent making sure these things are being handled properly.” For more information, see Beth Young’s post on The Suffolk Times.
In an effort to improve the state’s transparency, Senate Majority Leader Loretta Weinberg has reintroduced two bills designed to improve and modernize New Jersey’s Open Public Meetings Act and Open Public Records Act in an effort to improve government transparency. The bill would improve access to government records, by allowing anyone to make an OPRA request, not just New Jersey residents, and by allowing records requests to be made on documents other than the adopted form. Weinberg maintains, “The public has a reasonable expectation to transparency from government, and while New Jersey has, in the past, led the charge nationally in adopting public records and meeting laws, it’s time that we update and expand those laws to stay ahead of new trends in technology. In the Digital Age, our current laws governing public meetings and records requests have fallen behind the times, and have created large gaps in transparency. It’s time to correct the deficiencies in the law, and bring OPRA and the Sunshine Law into the 21st Century.” For the whole story, check out Stacey Proebstle’s post on the New Jersey 101.5’s blog.

Connect with other transparency bloggers in this Transparency Bloggers Google group and see what others are doing in the transparency movement by joining this Citizens for Open Government Google Group.

Sunlight Foundation: Tools for Transparency: Google Reader is Still Relevant, Part III

Fri, 03 Feb 2012 22:20:28 +0000

In continuing with the "Google Reader is Still Relevant" meme (read Parts I and II here) I wanted to make a quick note on how I'm seeing extended value in Google Reader after integrating it with IFTTT. Google Reader has morphed from a somewhat useful curation channel to an incredibly useful one. On its own, Google Reader provides a number of ways to share content, including Google Plus, email and Send to:

In your Reader Settings, you can customize the services you want to use and manually add any that aren't included (here are few a services you can add yourself):

While I find the options provided by Google useful, they seem somewhat limited in comparison to what you can both add and automate through IFTTT. With the addition of Recipes to IFTTT, you can see the clever examples of how users are tying one service to another (although with a bit of redundancy).

If you click through to IFTTT and filter by Google Reader, you can sort by popular Actions or Triggers to see how others are using the service. Triggers will show you various ways to stream content into Google Reader, while Actions offer methods for curating and sharing content from Google Reader to other sites.

Some of the more popular Trigger recipes include sharing feed items to Evernote, Instapaper and Read It Later, which are great for personal consumption but you will quickly find ways to automatically share interesting posts and pieces to Delicious, Twitter, Facebook and Tumblr.

By starring items, pushing new items from a tag or folder or by using the Send to feature, you can begin to add content to your Facebook Fan Page, Twitter account, Delicious and Pinboard accounts, to Storyboard, Tumblr and Posterous, to name a few quick examples.

Of course you aren't limited to just those services. If you look at the available channels to push and pull content from, you find that you have plenty to begin working with:

I would love to hear what you come up with and if you create any public recipes. We've created a handful of recipes that you can find here.

Free Government Information (FGI): House to live-stream committee proceedings

Fri, 03 Feb 2012 17:45:48 +0000

House to live-stream committee proceedings, By Debbie Siegelbaum, The Hill (02/02/12).

The House is now offering live video streaming of committee proceedings online through the Library of Congress.

The Committee on House Administration announced on Thursday that the live webcasts would be available at http://thomas.loc.gov/video/house-committee.

The Library of Congress also will archive previous committee proceedings, which the panel said would create the first "one-stop shop for House committee video content."

Sunlight Foundation: Sunlight on #superPACs: Colbert edition

Fri, 03 Feb 2012 17:26:22 +0000

In case you missed it, last night some-time South Carolina Presidential candidate and super PAC founder Stephen Colbert gave a great rundown of the new campaign finance landscape in our elections. Colbert and his team of very sharp writers have smartly illustrated just how out of control our campaign finance system is. In short, it’s crazy: A handful of billionaires pouring incredible amounts of cash is fundamentally changing what our democracy looks like. Colbert’s team doing a great job making sure this news gets outside the Beltway. Watch the video here:

The Colbert Report

Mon - Thurs 11:30pm / 10:30c

America's Biggest Super PAC Donors

www.colbertnation.com

Colbert Report Full Episodes

Political Humor & Satire Blog

Video Archive

As you’ll see above, Colbert makes the point that these billionaires are doing this out in the open. There’s a little bit of truthiness to that. Yes, super PACs disclose their donors, but there’s plenty we don’t know. That’s because the FEC has done absolutely no work to regulate this new influx of cash. And neither Congress nor the FEC has had the guts to require the real-time, online reporting that would give the public an actual sense of who’s trying to influence their votes. After all, we only just got the super PAC disclosures from last year (!) on Tuesday, and many of the crucial primary elections are already over -- the Republican field is down to just a few left standing. It might have been helpful for voters in those early primary states to know just who was trying to influence them before they cast their votes. And although it’s great that we can name the top 22 donors, there may still be other billionaires who are funneling their money to super PACs through 501c4s, nonprofits which don’t have to tell anyone who their funders are.

Sunlight’s been working on this issue for a while, so we’ve got plenty of info if you’re interested. (Who doesn’t love a little campaign finance disclosure to spice up your Friday?) Our one stop shop for everything you ever wanted to know about super PACs but were afraid to ask is here: http://sunlightfoundation.com/superpacs/. We’ll be continuously updating that page, so make sure to bookmark it and come back.

We also have draft legislation that we think can solve many of the disclosure problems around super PACs, the SUPERPAC Act. We’re writing it out in the open (the way we wish Congress would write legislation) and we welcome your feedback to make it stronger. You can comment on any particular section or on the whole thing. Check it out: http://publicmarkup.org/bill/superpac-act/

The SUPERPAC Act hasn’t been introduced, yet, but it certainly wouldn’t hurt for you to get in touch with your representatives and let them know they should be on the side of transparency, which they could do simply by introducing and/or cosponsoring this legislation.

You can also read more about it, like -- Lisa’s blog post that Colbert showed on-screen and Lee’s analysis of the 22 donors that gave 48% of the presidential super PAC money (with fun charts!).

Our reporting group has also been spending some late nights going through the documents released Tuesday -- and they’re the ones who are tracking the spending so we can give you detailed data.

Want to help shine a light on super PACs in your area? We’ve also got the super PAC sleuth project -- you can check to see if there’s a super PAC in your area, take a picture, and upload it -- and if you want to dig in even further, you can join our Little Sis group, too.

It’s not enough to hope that the 22 billionaires that we know about pick someone we like for our next president (or representative, or senator -- super PACs aren’t limited to presidential contests). It’s up to us to demand transparency and make sure that everyone knows just who is trying to influence our elections.

Computational Legal Studies: Udacity – The Future of < Online > Education?

Fri, 03 Feb 2012 15:09:28 +0000

Sebastian Thrun of Stanford AI Class fame (you know the largest class in human history with 160,000 participants) has just left his tenure track position to start an online university – Udacity. Here is an article about Udacity and here is the statement from the website: “We believe university-level education can be both high quality and low cost. Using the economics of the Internet, we’ve connected some of the greatest teachers to hundreds of thousands of students all over the world. “ In other words, the for-profits (i.e. University of Phoenix) as well as all of us at standard four year universities should be very scared!

Sunlight Foundation: Our Omidyar Network Partners

Fri, 03 Feb 2012 14:54:00 +0000

Sunlight couldn't be in better company in the following video shot by the Omidyar Network, a significant funder of our work. The interviews done at a recent event in Menlo Park, California includes leaders from the Wikimedia Foundation, BRAC, the African Leadership Academy, Ushahidi, DonorsChoose.org, Landesa and IGNIA. What truly amazing partners they are.

We could elaborate, I suppose, but this quick video really says it all:

Open Knowledge Foundation Blog: JISC to fund development of TEXTUS project

Fri, 03 Feb 2012 09:30:23 +0000

The following post is by Sam Leon, Community Co-ordinator at the Open Knowledge Foundation.

We’re delighted to announce that JISC will be funding the initial development of the TEXTUS platform as part of its Digital Infrastructure Programme.

TEXTUS will be a lightweight, easy-to-use platform that will enable users to read, share and collaborate around public domain texts. It will use tools already developed by the Open Knowledge Foundation such as the Annotator and build on the OKFN humanities projects such as Open Shakespeare.

Goldsmiths University will lead the project with technical development and community work to be undertaken by the Open Knowledge Foundation.

Open Philosophy

The six-month JISC funded project will focus on developing a first instance of TEXTUS to be deployed as Open Philosophy on openphilosophy.org. Open Philosophy – which will focus on providing access to and encouraging scholarly collaboration around philosophy texts – will be developed in close consultation with the project’s academic advisory board, students from Goldsmiths University and project partners Oxford and Royal Holloway.

It is one of the main goals of the project to develop a tool that can be used by students and scholars to enrich their teaching and research, so user-centric design principles will be followed throughout to ensure that real researcher needs are addressed appropriately. There is a dedicated Open Philosophy mailing list that will focus on discussions about the content to be made available on openphilosophy.org which you can sign up to here.

Get Involved

Those interested in getting involved should contact sam.leon [at] okfn.org or send us a message on twitter @TEXTUSProject check out the TEXTUS Project website.

Quick links

Sunlight Foundation: Benchmarks for Measuring Success for Legislative Data Transparency

Fri, 03 Feb 2012 03:45:13 +0000

The following are my notes for remarks I delivered at the House Legislative Data and Transparency Conference on February 2, 2012. They've been updated to include hyperlinks, but were delivered largely as written. The official page for the conference, with video, is here.

Thank you to Matt Lira and Steve Dwyer for the introduction, and to the House of Representatives for holding such an important and timely conference. This kind of event has been a long time in coming.

I must acknowledge the excellent panels that have been happening all day. And I would be remiss if I didn't commend the Committee on House Administration for adopting "standards for the electronic posting of house and committee documents and data," which are already transforming the House in a very positive way.

Because I'm limited to 10 minutes, let me briefly commend three documents to all of you which lay out a transparency vision in greater breath and detail than is possible here. They are the Open House Project Report, the Ten Principles for Opening Up Government Data, and the report from the Congressional Facebook Hackathon.

I've been asked to speak about benchmarks for measuring success in making legislative data available online. I feel like a kid in a candy store, but I will try to restrain myself. When I speak about the House, please construe my remarks as applying to the Senate and the legislative support agencies as well.

What is Transparency For?

In determining benchmarks, it's incumbent on us to assess, at least briefly: what good is online transparency anyway? Here's how I see transparency adding value to our political process. It provides relevant information to decisionmakers at the time they need it. It levels the playing field between the special interests and everyone else so we all have an equal opportunity to find out what's going on. It lets the American people and their elected representatives have a solid basis for a conversation about priorities. It helps congress work more efficiently, by eliminating redundancies and identifying bottlenecks. It allows the agencies to better understand what they're supposed to do. It helps businesses make money by improving their ability to predict government actions. And most importantly, transparency is the cornerstone of a democracy.

This is all pretty ethereal, so I'll get to the point. To the maximum extent possible, legislative information must be available online, in real time, and in machine readable formats. With the exception of internal deliberations protected by the speech or debate clause, or national security and some personnel matters, the Congress's business is the people's business. So let me break down this formulation of online, in real time, and in machine readable formats into concrete benchmarks.

Online Publication

Publishing information online is a major hurdle in of itself. A lot of information isn't online, but instead is only available if you know the right person, or go to the right room and ask for a hardcopy, and so on. Should you have to know someone on staff to get a copy of the chairman's mark on a bill before it's voted on? Do we really want to make people trudge down to the House's legislative resource center to print out documents at 10 cents a page? It certainly cannot make any sense to have to request a CRS report through your representative or pay 20 bucks online to buy a copy.

Almost as bad as the failure to publish online is secrecy through obscurity. If information is locked inside an image file and not susceptible to a search engine, or is in an entirely random location, or is hidden on page 400 of the congressional record, it's not really helpful to anyone.

In addition, old information can be just as important as newly created information. For example, there's a huge gap in the availability of committee reports. Along the same lines, while ignorance of the law is no defense for a crime, the actual enactment of the law, known as the Statutes are Large, is not available online for a nearly 80-year period.

Let me offer some concrete benchmarks by which we can judge improvements on this.

The House of Representatives should conduct an audit of all the different types of information it produces and releases, including whether it's online, and where it can be found.
To the extent the House (or legislative support agencies) has information that is already in electronic format -- from the documents in the Clerk's office to CRS reports to hearing transcripts -- that information should be put online in whatever format its currently in. It's also worth considering whether legislative data should include sometimes released items like Dear Colleagues and Whip notices. We can worry later about improving how this information is made available, but just to start, put them online.

Real-time publication

Moving on, let's now talk about real-time publication. This is the kind of idea that makes a lot of people uncomfortable, but I'd suggest a common-sense starting point: think about the time frame and context in which a document is used. An amendment that's going to be voted on in 2 hours needs to be online just as soon as it's drafted. A bill that's going to be voted on in 2 legislative days needs to go up pretty quickly as well. You should know about a committee hearing a week in advance. Other items, like the House disbursement reports, can take a little longer.

Don't get me wrong. The goal should be real-time publication for everything. But the evaluation of what that means in the short term can be context dependent. But that context changes if the document is originally created in digital format -- in that circumstances, there shouldn't be any wait.

Here are some benchmarks:

All committee reports, amendments, and bills should be available online as they are introduced. The House should monitor the lag time between introduction and when they appear on THOMAS or the committee websites. I've done this, and it can be a while before some bills show up. Evaluate the extent of the problem, and work to reduce it.
All hearing notices should be available online 7 days prior to the hearing.
Many committees are skirting House rules about publishing video of hearings. House appropriators are particularly guilty of this. The House should review whether meetings are being held in rooms where video capability exists natively or could be added through use of the House's video service, and pester the committees if they're opting out of recording. When only one meeting in a particular committee is going on at a time, it should be streamed online so long as it is open to the public. It's time to review behavior and start slapping some wrists. Perhaps the House should create a mechanism for the public to report on non-webcast hearings.

Machine Readability

So let's move on to discuss machine-readable formats. This is what really allows the idea of House of Representatives as a platform for democracy to succeed.

The biggest wish of many staffers is to be able to dynamically see how an amendment would modify a bill, how that bill would change the law, (and eventually how an agency would promulgate a regulation, how the courts interpret that regulation, and back to congress again.) Along the same lines, people looking at a bill want to know if there are other, similar bills, in this congress or in previous ones, whether there are committee reports, CRS and GAO evaluations, and so on. If you cannot find a way to tie this information together, this dream becomes impossible.

Legislative data needs to be released as highly structured data. In other words, a machine needs to be able to look at the content and "know" what it is looking at. This would require the use of languages like XML, which allows this kind of value-added context. But to make it work, we also need a way to uniquely describe people and bills and amendments and so on -- cleverly enough embodied in commonly-accepted unique identifiers. There are already tons of these identifiers being used, but the House needs to consistently and widely employ them.

Sometimes, structured language is used when creating a document, or unique identifiers are used to describe data items in a document, but that document is stripped naked before it is released to the public. There are some circumstances where this makes sense, like hiding the different internal drafts of a bill. But most of the time, it serves no real purpose. The data that's removed could be very helpful to those on the outside. Leave it in.

Let me add that PDFs, especially PDFs that are image files, do not promote transparency. They make it difficult to impossible to extract data from documents. If you must use a PDF, make sure that the underlying data is available some other way as well.

That brings me to a point about how the data is made available. A lot of transparency advocates build scrapers to try to transform data that's published online and put it back into a useful structure. Josh Tauburer, for example, scrapes THOMAS to turn it into a database. It's like trying to unscramble an egg.

Legislative data, such as that in THOMAS, should be made available online in bulk. Give folks the database all at once or in very large chunks, and let them figure out how to use it.

Here are my benchmarks:

All bills, amendments, and votes should be published online in XML, or some other structured format. Make scrapers unnecessary.
End the tyranny of only publishing in PDFs. House expenditure reports are a giant database -- publish them as a spreadsheet file, not a PDF. The Constitution Annotated is prepared in XML, don't publish it as a PDF.
Encourage the use of unique identifiers, whether they come from inside the House or elsewhere. The data needs to be interoperable.

Concluding Remarks

My time is running short, so I will only make two more comments about process.

First, today's conference, and the standards released by the House in December, are a good thing.

As a benchmark, we need to have another conference like this one within the next year as a way of assessing how well we have done, and we should continue with these conferences on a regular basis.

Second, we need to foster collaboration between those inside and outside government. In particular, technologists who are trying to use legislative data need to be able to get technology questions answered by the responsible internal stakeholder. And policy works can help provide direction so that the new services developed by the House meet the needs of the public. I suggest:

The creation of a standing committee, composed of internal and external stakeholders, that meets at least quarterly, if not monthly, to discuss these issues.
A listserv where people who are not in DC can engage in this discussion with people inside and outside of government.

I appreciate your time and the opportunity to speak. Thank you very much.

Sunlight Foundation: Super PACs and Secret Money Undermine Elections

Thu, 02 Feb 2012 19:20:03 +0000

The New York Times looked at this week’s Super PAC filings with the FEC and demonstrated—again—what we knew would be the result of the Supreme Court’s Citizens United decision: The specter of hundreds of thousands of dollars of hidden money influencing our elections and those who will be elected.

The times notes that, “some checks came from sources obscured from public view, like a $250,000 contribution to a super PAC backing Mr. Romney from a company with a post office box for a headquarters and no known employees.” But, while the public remains in the dark, it would be naïve to think that the identity of the donor (or donors) of that generous contribution is unknown to Mr. Romney. So, what does he or she want? Favorable tax treatment? Fewer regulations for a pet industry? A bailout? An ambassadorship? It is possible that the money came from a generous citizen who simply believes Romney would be the best man for the job. But the system of secret dark money now in place means the voters will never know.

The Supreme court relied heavily on the theory that transparency would cleanse the unlimited money that would shape our elections as a result of their decision in the Citizens United case, noting, “A campaign finance system that pairs corporate independent expenditures with effective disclosure has not existed before today.” Unfortunately, the Court failed to realize that such a system of disclosure does not yet exist.

There is a solution. Sunlight proposed the SUPERPAC Act as one way to shine more light on the dark money infecting our elections. It would impose a regime of disclosure and disclaimers that would lift the veil of secrecy under which large donors may hide. But Congress needs to act. So far, we’ve heard talk. House Democrats say they will re-introduce a slightly paired down version of the DISCLOSE Act, a bill that failed to be enacted last year. And on the other side of the Capitol, Senator Schumer has promised hearings on disclosure by Super PACs.

These are important steps. (Although, arguably they should have happened well before the election season got under way.) Disclosure legislation is a critical tool in the fight against the undue influence secret money has on our campaigns and our elected officials. Unless Congress acts, we can be sure that we have only seen the tip of the dark money iceberg that is undermining the fundamentals of our democracy.

Sunlight Foundation: Bulk Data at the House Legislative Data Conference

Thu, 02 Feb 2012 19:09:41 +0000

Many of us from Sunlight have been at the House's legislative data conference today, as Daniel has noted on the blog. The conference organizers have done a fantastic job -- the day has been like an all day committee hearing, where the House's tech officials are the witnesses, and the public gets to ask the questions. This is exactly the sort of good faith attempt to take responsibility for data policy that we wrote about in 2007 with the Open House Project report. It's extraordinary for the leading providers of third party legislative information systems to sit as peers among the administrators, staff, and politicians responsible for how the House shares it work with the public. If that praise seems effusive, it should be; the House is setting an example for how to work with NGOs on data availability.

That's not to say everything we're hearing is good news.

The morning's last panel featured the leaders of the offices responsible for most legislative data processes -- like the Office of Law Revision Counsel, the Law Library of Congress, and the Government Printing Office. We saw valuable new projects -- mobile sites, web redesigns, and incremental improvements in data publication. All worthy efforts showing the legislative support bureaucracy adapting to new expectations for online information.

In cultivating these projects, though, these offices are also choosing to ignore another responsibility: their role in providing the data about Congress that enables third party web publishers (like Sunlight) to do their jobs. The officials were asked (by a number of us from Sunlight) why they still haven't begun publishing bulk legislative data, and their answers were telling: it's not a priority, they're more concerned about accuracy.

These answers were a bit of a surprise for me, since Sunlight has been asking for bulk legislative data since 2007, persistently. These agencies have seen letters from Members and leadership, appropriations language requiring a report on feasibility, a bill proposing to force the issue, public criticism, and steadfast activism from our colleagues like Josh Tauberer (of Popvox and GovTrack) and David Moore (of OpenCongress). Even with all that attention, we've been met with a shrug.

The people responsible for publishing this information should get a little more familiar with the third party publishers who are reusing and re-presenting congressional information. Right now, people are researching legislation and the records of their representatives using both official sites (like THOMAS), and also third party sites like OpenCongress.org, GovTrack.us, Popvox.com, WashingtonWatch, or Congress. Third party sites aren't going away -- they're essential to activists and analysts who rely on access to information that official congressional sites will never provide. Official and third party sites should be capable of coexisting amicably, reinforcing each other's role and mission.

By declining to provide bulk access to legislative data, support agencies are actually ensuring that third party sites will continue to rely on a brittle, complex system of scraping and parsing, where legislative data lags behind the official version, and errors from official sources spread even after they're corrected. Whatever concerns the LOC has about reliable data, the publishing system they're relying on now is probably worse. By withholding bulk data, they're creating the liabilities they warn against: the public relying on slightly less reliable data.

Part of Congress's job should be to empower third party developers who are are permanent part of the infrastructure that brings legislative data to a huge slice of the public. By ignoring the public's and Congress's calls for bulk legislative data, administrators are ignoring part of what it means to be a responsible steward of public data. That definition has changed, and this morning demonstrated that we've got a lot of work left to do to demonstrate that bulk data does in fact fall squarely within those responsibilities.

Open Secrets: Wall Street Money Continues to Flow to Republican Mitt Romney

Thu, 02 Feb 2012 18:44:52 +0000

Republican Mitt Romney relied on the finance, insurance and real estate sector for roughly $2 out of every $11 he raised during the fourth quarter of 2011, according to a new analysis by the Center for Responsive Politics of campaign finance documents submitted Tuesday to the Federal Election Commission.

These interests doled out more than $4.3 million to Romney in the final three months of the year, a period during which Romney raised about $24 million. As of the end of December, Romney has now collected a total of $12.2 million from the people and political action committees within the finance, insurance and real estate sector -- or about 22 percent of the $56 million he has raised.

People associated with the securities and investment industry have been particularly generous, contributing nearly $6 million to Romney's campaign coffers, according to the Center's research. That includes more than $2.1 million given during the fourth quarter.

Romney saw a surge of support from hedge funds in particular during the fourth quarter. Hedge fund employees gave Romney $353,900 between October and December -- a nearly 450 percent increase above what they gave during the third quarter of 2011.

Commercial banks, too, have been loyal backers of the former Bain Capital executive. Through the end of December, PACs and individuals in that industry donated $1.15 million to Romney, including about $608,000 during the fourth quarter.

No other presidential candidate has collected more money from these financial sector interests, and employees of the country's most elite financial institutions are all increasingly betting on Romney's success.

People associated with Goldman Sachs have donated nearly eight times as much money to Romney as they have to President Barack Obama: $496,400 versus $64,200, according to the Center's research. No other organization has given more to Romney's presidential campaign.

During the fourth quarter alone, Goldman Sachs employees favored Romney at a rate of 10:1, or $126,730 for Romney versus $12,100 for Obama.

A similar trend applies to people associated with Citigroup Inc. (six-and-a-half times more to Romney), JPMorgan Chase & Co. (five-and-a-half times more to Romney), Morgan Stanley (five-and-a-half times more to Romney), Bank of America (four times more to Romney) and Wells Fargo (nearly three times more to Romney).

Strikingly, during the fourth quarter, people associated with Citigroup donated $210,000 to Romney, while giving Obama just $3,750, according to the Center's research.

Romney's Bain advantage also increased during the fourth quarter: People associated with his two former firms, Bain Capital and Bain & Co., donated $69,500 and $62,550, respectively, to Romney's campaign. (During the same time, they donated just $12,500 and $7,000, respectively, to Obama.)

Obama was far more popular with individuals in the tech industry, in the legal field and in Hollywood during the fourth quarter of 2011, as well as small-dollar donors, who accounted for more than 43 percent of the money he raised between October and December.

During that period, Obama collected nearly $1.6 million from the legal sector, according to the Center's research, bringing his total receipts from that realm to more than $5.8 million. (That's nearly twice the $3 million Romney collected from such interests in 2011.)

Obama also brought in nearly $1.7 million from the computers and Internet industry during 2011, including about $342,000 during the fourth quarter. And he raised more than $1.2 million from people associated with the TV, music and movie industry last year, with more than $176,000 coming from October through December.

Through the end of 2011, Obama raised $139,000 from employees of Google -- with $43,450 coming during the fourth quarter alone. That was more campaign cash than any GOP presidential hopeful received from the search engine giant, and enough to rank Google as his No. 3 overall backer.

Obama was also the favored candidate of employees of Apple and Microsoft, which ranks as his No. 1 overall supporter.

Last year, Obama collected $36,300 from those on Apple's payroll and more than $188,600 from Microsoft employees. Romney meanwhile has not received a dime from Apple employees, and Microsoft employees have given him just $40,500 -- although he did out-raise Obama during the fourth quarter, $28,000 versus $17,000.

Notably, there's one interest group that has given almost equally to both Obama and Romney: health insurers.

In 2011, people in the health insurance industry donated about $142,000 to Obama and $167,650 to Romney. No other candidate in the presidential race collected more than $25,000 from these interests last year.

Center for Responsive Politics senior researcher Douglas Weber contributed to this report.

Open Secrets: Newest Campaign Reports Show Ramped-Up Chase for Cash

Thu, 02 Feb 2012 18:36:02 +0000

As supporters of Mitt Romney celebrated his big win in the Florida GOP presidential primary Tuesday night, the Romney campaign officially reported that he'd beat the competition in fundraising, too, logging $24 million between October and December.

His total haul for 2011: $56.9 million.

That's a daunting figure, and one that his remaining Republican rivals in the race for the White House can't touch. Indeed, by the end of 2011, Romney had raised more money than Newt Gingrich, Rick Santorum and Ron Paul combined. (Those three raised a combined $41 million through the end of December.)

Still, the fundraising of Romney's rivals showed signs of accelerating during the fourth quarter, as the race ramped up and entered early-voting states.

Paul, whose die-hard libertarian following helped him to a third-place finish in the Iowa caucuses and second place in the New Hampshire primary, raised $13.3 million during the fourth quarter -- nearly $5 million more than he collected during the third quarter, and triple what he pulled in during the second quarter. That sum brought his cycle-to-date total to $26.1 million raised.

Similarly, Gingrich pulled in $9.8 million during the final three months of 2011. That was more than twelve times what he raised during the third quarter, when his candidacy seemed all but done.

Santorum also saw an increase in fundraising during the fourth quarter. His $920,428 haul, though comparatively modest, was the highest quarterly number he's posted so far.

Gingrich's campaign got a boost in January when he decisively won the South Carolina primary, and conservative Christian voters in Iowa helped propel Santorum to a victory -- declared weeks after the fact -- that month. However, the numbers reported Tuesday reflect contributions only up until Dec. 31, 2011.

Yet even with fourth-quarter boosts, the fundraising of the entire GOP field still lags compared to how much candidates were raising at this point during other recent presidential cycles.

In 2008, a wide-open race for both parties yielded a major fundraising boom for candidates on both sides of the aisle.

At the end of 2007, the seven Republican candidates considered to be major contenders for their party's nomination had raised a combined $254 million, according to research by the Center for Responsive Politics. And the chief Democratic candidates -- buoyed by the close race between then-Sens. Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton -- raised even more: $318 million.

Meanwhile, at the end of 2003, the five top Democratic candidates had raised a combined $110.3 million for their presidential bids, according to the Center's research.

Compare these figures to the $150.7 million the top eight candidates seeking the Republican nomination this cycle had raised through the same period: The current crop of Republicans is more than $100 million off the pace of the 2007 group, and more closely resemble the Democrats of 2003 who were vying for the chance to challenge incumbent President George W. Bush.

For Romney, who was among the 2008 candidates running for the Republican nomination, an important fundraising theme this cycle has been the avoidance of his own wallet.

Romney had raised $90 million by the end of 2007. But more than $35.4 million of that, or about 40 percent, came from his own personal wealth. Without those loans, Romney had raised a total of $54.7 million at the close of 2007 -- a figure that's actually slightly below his current $56.9 million total.

A slow start to the presidential race offers one explanation for the tepid fundraising in the GOP field: All four of the current candidates missed a full fundraising period by launching their candidacies during the second quarter of 2011.

Another explanation: the emergence of the candidate-supporting super PAC.

Super PACs, a new breed of political animal, arose in the wake of the U.S. Supreme Court's Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission decision. They are allowed to accept unlimited contributions from corporations, unions, trade associations and nonprofits, on the condition that they don't donate the money they raise directly to candidates or coordinate with candidates about the group's operations. They can spend their funds on ads or otherwise expressly advocating for or against candidates.

A myriad of super PACs have sprung up to support and augment the campaigns of every presidential candidate. Most are led by former political advisers of the candidates. And their weapon of choice is negative advertising.

Restore Our Future, perhaps the most well-known candidate-specific super PAC, was created to support Romney's candidacy. Restore Our Future has spent more than $17.5 million on independent expenditures designed to boost his candidacy. More than $16 million of that sum has been spent on negative advertisements at key points during the race, such as when Gingrich's prospects seemed to be rising in Iowa.

Gingrich, for his part, is being supported by the super PAC Winning Our Future. This group has spent $8.8 million, with much of it going to negative advertising against Romney.

Supporters of Paul and Santorum have likewise created super PACs of their own, and they fulfill a similar role: To act as an independent arm of the presidential candidates' campaigns -- their phantom limb.

Such candidate-aligned super PACs raised a total of $47.8 million during 2011, according to the Center's research.

Adding in these extra pots of money, the total amount raised in 2011 by Republican candidates and their super PAC allies jumps to $308.6 million, far more than the Republican candidates had raised by this point four years ago.

Since the start of the new year, it's become apparent that a single wealthy investor, such as casino magnate Sheldon Adelson or Wyoming businessman Foster Friess, can provide rapid infusions of cash -- injections that were not reflected in the year-end numbers reported to the Federal Election Commission Tuesday.

Here is a graph showing how much all the presidential candidates raised during 2011, along with what was raised by the super PACs designed to boost their electoral prospects:

Notably, even Romney hasn't come close to President Barack Obama in terms of fundraising -- not even with super PAC money added in. Obama has collected more than $125 million for his own campaign, even as a super PAC created by two of his former top aides, Priorities USA Action, has collected just $4.4 million.

Center for Responsive Politics senior fellow Bob Biersack and senior researcher Douglas Weber contributed to this report.

Open Knowledge Foundation Blog: COMMUNIA’s response to the proposed amendments to PSI Directive

Thu, 02 Feb 2012 17:35:28 +0000

The following guest post is by Timothy Vollmer, policy coordinator at Creative Commons. It has been adapted from his post on the same subject over on the COMMUNIA International Association blog. Creative Commons and the Open Knowledge Foundation are institutional members of COMMUNIA. The mission of COMMUNIA is to educate about, advocate for, offer expertise and research about the public domain in the digital age within society and with policymakers.

The European Commission Public Sector Information Directive, which describes the conditions under which European public sector information (PSI) should be made available for reuse by the public, has been in place since 2003. PSI ranges from digital maps to weather data to traffic statistics, and there’s a lot of potential value in making PSI available for reuse for commercial and non-commercial purposes – up to €140bn. The EC says that increasing the reuse of PSI can generate new businesses and jobs – and to this end is planning to update its nine-year-old Directive. COMMUNIA International Association last week released a short policy document in reaction to the to the European Commission’s (EC) proposals, which the OKF’s Daniel Dietrich presented at the LAPSI conference in Brussells to a positive and interested audience.

To give a bit of background: in December 2011 the EC published a proposal to update the PSI Directive. The Open Knowledge Foundation already covered the basics of the Commission announcement. The COMMUNIA document draws attention to two areas where these proposals still need improvement: firstly regarding the conditions for re-use of public sector information that falls within the scope of the Directive; and secondly regarding public domain content that is held by libraries, museums and archives.

Conditions for re-use of public sector information

From the perspective of COMMUNIA, the way the amended Directive addresses licensing of public sector content remains underdeveloped and as such has the potential to create diverging and potentially incompatible implementations among the Member states. The article of the amended Directive dealing with licensing mentions “standard licenses,” but does not sufficiently clarify what should be considered to be a standard license, and encourages the development of open government licenses. Instead of recommending the use and creation of more licenses, COMMUNIA suggests that the Commission should consider advocating the use of a single open license that can be applied across the entire European Union. Such licenses (stewarded by the Open Knowledge Foundation and Creative Commons) already exist and are widely used by a broad spectrum of data and content providers.

Public Domain Content held by libraries, museums and archives

COMMUNIA is supportive of the Commission’s suggested change to include cultural heritage institutions into the scope of the amended Directive. Access to and re-use of PSI has been one of the issues that has featured prominently in the work of COMMUNIA. For instance, the EC’s amendments to the Directive are aligned with COMMUNIA’s January 2011 policy recommendation #13, which states, “The PSI Directive needs to be broadened, by increasing its scope to include publicly funded memory organisations – such as museums or galleries – and strengthened by mandating that Public Sector Information will be made freely available for all to use and re-use without restriction.”

The South Prospect of the Cathedral of St. Pauls / gallica.bnf.fr/Bibliotheque nationale de France / Public Domain

Including such content under the purview of the Directive will improve citizens’ access to our shared knowledge and culture and should increase the amount of digitized cultural heritage that is available online. But, while the amended Directive makes it clear that documents held by cultural heritage institutions in which there are no third party intellectual property rights will be re-usable for commercial or noncommercial purposes, it does not address the largest category of works held by cultural heritage institutions — those that are not covered by intellectual property rights at all because those works are in the public domain. COMMUNIA thinks that explicitly including public domain content held by libraries, museums and archives in the re-use obligation of the amended PSI Directive will strengthen the Commission’s position with regard to access and re-use of public domain content.

The full COMMUNIA association reaction to the EC’s proposal to amend Directive 2003/98/EC on re-use of public sector information can be downloaded here.

Sunlight Foundation: Tester and Cochran offer Electronic Filing Amendment to the STOCK Act

Thu, 02 Feb 2012 16:53:59 +0000

Senators Tester and Cochran, champions of common sense legislation that would require senators and senate candidates to electronically file their campaign finance reports, yesterday offered a version of their bill as an amendment to the STOCK Act. Sunlight applauds their effort and wrote a letter to all senators urging them to support the amendment.

Sunlight has long supported the Senate Campaign Disclosure Parity Act, a much needed and long overdue remedy to the absurd system in place in the Senate. Currently, senate candidates file their quarterly campaign finance reports with the Secretary of the Senate, who then prints them out on reams of paper and delivers them to the Federal Election Commission. The FEC then inputs the information contained in those reports into its computer databases. The archaic and costly process delays public access to information about who is funding Senate campaigns, sometimes until after the election takes place.

By contrast, senators’ counterparts in the House, as well as presidential candidates and PACs, have, for years, electronically filed their campaign finance reports directly with the FEC, avoiding the wasteful, duplicative and opaque senate system.

Versions of this Senate Campaign Disclosure Parity Act have been introduced with significant bipartisan support in multiple prior congresses. No Senator that we know of has ever publicly opposed the legislation. Yet it has not been enacted because it has been the victim of politics. Senator Mitch McConnell has repeatedly demanded that a vote on the electronic filing bill be linked to a vote on unrelated proposal that would, if enacted, actually decrease transparency by posing burdens on groups filing ethics complaints against any sitting senator.

By offering the electronic filing bill as an amendment to the STOCK Act, there is a real opportunity to make this piece of legislation law. We hope it comes up for a vote and that every senator supports it. There is no reason not to.

Letter to the Senate on Electornic Filing Amendment 2012-02-01-1

Sunlight Foundation: STOCK Act Update

Thu, 02 Feb 2012 15:32:22 +0000

As the STOCK Act keeps marching through the Senate, on the heels of a State of the Union push from the President, and after a CBS news expose ignited interest in a longstanding proposal from Rep. Slaughter in the House, that Sunlight has supported.

We've been very involved in reviewing and suggesting changes to the draft bills, and here's a summary of our advice:

First, Sunlight is very supportive of the STOCK Act. This fall's expose made a convincing case that insider trading is a real problem, and that Members sometimes put personal financial profit over their official responsibilities.
Perhaps even more significant is the threat to public confidence in government posed by this phenomenon -- the public loathes insider trading, especially from Members of Congress.
Whether insider trading was technically illegal, recent hearings have made clear that no one was capable (or willing) to fully oversee the issue.
The Personal Financial Disclosure system, resulting from the post-Watergate 1978 Ethics in Government Act, is long, long overdue for serious examination and oversight. It may be the envy of much of the rest of the world, and serves as a model for accountable disclosure in other governments, but still suffers from a sort of inter-branch detente, where no one wants to legislatively reopen the complex issues involved in requiring personal finances to be disclosed. If the US is to lead on accountability systems, we should lead on maintaining and strengthening them, too. GAO and others should review the pfd system more broadly, and outside the narrow view of an insider trading scandal.(More on this from GAO to come soon.)

On to the bill text

We had significant concerns about earlier drafts of the bill, since overbroad language ran the risk of criminalizing leaks. Those concerns have been dealt with in more recent drafts. Either the Rules changing language has been watered down and turned into a requirement that the Ethics committee create appropriate prohibitions, or the language has been modified by adding "intent" to the kind of information sharing that is prohibited. In either case, sharing information is very unlikely to get accidentally criminalized.
On enforcing information sharing restrictions, though, the later drafts have significantly weakened the text of the bill, where "personal gain" is a pretty narrow standard, and the Ethics committee is unlikely to be the most reliable source of strong public interest standards. There's a difficult balance to strike here, between Speech or Debate clause issues (where the Executive is Constitutionally barred from meddling in inherently legislative tasks) and potential unintended consequences, the bill's enforcement mechanisms are tricky. We have a strong preference towards Rules changes over executive branch enforcement, but have little experience in financial investigations, so have little advice on crafting the final shape of the mechanisms.
Sunlight has been pushing for stronger disclosure of both the a) personal financial disclosure forms and b) the new financial transaction reports (to be reported when Members move their money). Both categories of information should be required to be public, should be shared as soon as they are filed, and should be filed electronically. Additionally, we have detailed advice about how such electronic filings systems should be designed, to capture as much information as possible, and to add useful structured data at the time of information collection. (Daniel will have more on this topic soon.) The information should be available in bulk, and no login should be required at all to dowload the data. (That's a ridiculous requirement contained in the most recent Senate draft.)
None of these forms should be destroyed after 6 years. The House and Senate can afford to preserve a two foot tall stack of paper (in the worst case), and can certainly afford to make a digital copy of information perpetually available, especially when it's as politically and historically significant as these disclosures will be. This information should be maintained online in perpituity, and also regularly transferred to NARA's Center for Legislative Archives for safekeeping.
Sunlight supported the LDA reforms aimed at political intelligence firms, and also understands why the recent drafts suggest a GAO report on their function -- they're somewhat poorly understood. For our thoughts on elite, commercial services that republish congressional information, see this post. The key point: insofar as these services are worth the price of admission, they reinforce disparities in privilege and access.

Those are our main points on the STOCK Act. We've got other technical corrections and suggestions, and would be happy to talk to anyone looking for help or thoughts as the legislation moves. We're also happy to see this one piece of legislation pulling along other important reform issues that have languished -- from e-filing in the Senate (more on that soon) to honest services, and even a 72 hour rule in the Senate (where did that come from, Senator Coburn?). Maybe the Senate should have an open amendment process on a reform oriented bill once a quarter.

Update: There's one more provision we've strongly opposed that I should make note of: there's no justification for requiring logins in order to access dowloads of Senate data, as the latest draft requires. That provision should be removed. It's wasteful, and discourages reuse. If Data.gov can offer bulk downloads with no login requirement, so can the US Senate.

Open Knowledge Foundation Blog: Diving into Data: The School of Data Journalism at the International Journalism Festival in Perugia

Thu, 02 Feb 2012 11:00:01 +0000

This post is by Liliana Bounegru, Project Coordinator at the European Journalism Centre, and Lucy Chambers, Community Coordinator at the Open Knowledge Foundation. It is cross posted on DataDrivenJournalism.net and journalismfestival.com.

In the past investigative reporters would suffer from a scarcity of information relating to questions they were trying to answer. While this is still the case, today journalists are also faced with an overwhelming abundance of data. In an age of information overload, to stay relevant to society journalists need to learn to separate signal from noise in order to provide valuable insights. Journalists need to be equipped with knowledge of the tools, techniques and tactics of working with data in order to derive maximum value from for their readers.

The European Journalism Centre and the Open Knowledge Foundation are pleased to invite you to the School of Data Journalism hosted at the sixth edition of Italy’s leading journalism event, the International Journalism Festival. The 2012 edition takes place in the beautiful city of Perugia between 25-29 April. Entry to the School of Data Journalism panels and workshops is free. Each workshop has a limited number of places and therefore registration will be necessary. Please note that not all requests to participate in the workshops will be accepted.

What is the School of Data Journalism and who is it for?

The School consists of three panel discussions and five workshops.

The panels attempt to provide answers to crucial questions for aspiring data journalists, editors and decision-makers in newsrooms:

What can aspiring data journalists learn from the successes of the past?
How can data journalism save your newsroom?
How do you start a data journalism operation?
How can you become a data journalist and what do you need to do?

In the workshops journalists who are interested to get started with reporting with data and budding data journalists will learn from experienced data journalists and open data experts essential skills related to how to get the data you need, how to analyse it, how to get stories from data and how to present your stories.

Panels

Panel 1: News and numbers: from CAR to data journalism (Thursday, 26 April)

Journalists have always used data and numbers to produce stories…and win Pulitzers. From Philip Meyer’s coverage of the Detroit riots in 1967 to Steve Doig’s ‘What Went Wrong’ analysis of the damage patterns from Hurricane Andrew, data-driven reporting has brought valuable public service and won journalists recognition and prizes.

Whereas there may be distinguishing aspects about the data journalism of today and the computer-assisted reporting of the past, it is crucial to learn from successful examples, techniques and approaches of the past.

How can we bring the data journalism community and the CAR community closer together?
What can aspiring data journalists learn from the successes of the past?
What is the future of data journalism?

Panel 2: How can data journalism save your newsroom? (Friday, 27 April)

Journalism is under siege. Traditional models are collapsing. Developing the know-how to use the available data more effectively, to understand it, communicate and generate stories based on it, could be a huge opportunity to breathe new life into journalism.

What is the potential of data journalism?
How do you start a data journalism operation?
How can you start thinking about making money with data journalism?

Panel 3: You Too Can Be A Data Journalist! (Saturday, 28 April)

Where can I find data? How can I request data? What tools can I use? How can I find stories in data? How can I make money with data journalism?

Several leading data journalists, CAR specialists and journalism professors from the Guardian, the New York Times, Financial Times, Chicago Tribune, Medill School of Journalism and Cronkite School of Journalism worked together to answer these questions in the Data Journalism Handbook.

The handbook, the first comprehensive practical guide to data journalism, will be officially launched in this session. The session will provide the opportunity to meet and greet authors of the book, exchange knowledge and learn from them what you need to know to be a data journalist, as well as get a printed copy of the book.

Speakers

Caelainn Barr, EU data journalist, formerly with the Bureau of Investigative Journalism in London
Sarah Cohen, Knight Professor of the Practice of Journalism and Public Policy, DeWitt Wallace Center for Media and Democracy, Duke University (Pulitzer prize winner)
Steve Doig, Knight Chair in Journalism, Walter Cronkite School of Journalism, Arizona State University (Pulitzer prize winner)
Mirko Lorenz, data journalism trainer, Deutsche Welle
Aron Pilhofer, editor of Interactive News at The New York Times and co-founder ofDocumentCloud.org
Dan Nguyen, news application developer, ProPublica
Simon Rogers, editor of the Guardian Data Blog

Workshops

Workshop 1: Scraping data & cracking PDFs (Thursday, 26 April)

Hands up who knows what machine-readable data is? You will soon, and more importantly, how to get it and what you can do with it once you have it!

A workshop targeted at scraping from scratch, including: What PDFs and webpages look like to your computer – An introduction to machine-readable / non-machine readable data The Scraper Cookbook – an overview of the key things you need to know to write a scraper Hands on session – learning to screen-scrape. Main focus: hands on session using tools such as ScraperWiki. If sufficient interest & time, we will also touch on some of the tools & skills needed to extract data from PDFs. Error checking – how to check what you have makes sense, spotting the types of errors sometimes introduced if you don’t get it quite right!

Workshop 2: Information wants to be free – Freedom of information requests and how to use them (Friday, 27 April)

Freedom of information requests are constantly evolving. Law changes and technological advancements make it increasingly easier to file and systematise FOI requests, and importantly track their progress through the system. This workshop includes demonstrations and case studies examining the current state-of-play with FOI requests in Europe and beyond and looking into what’s next for the freedom of information movement.

Workshop 3: Making data pretty (Friday, 27 April)

Journalism is no longer just a block of prose on a page. The modern reader often demands maps, infographics and visualisations to make the story jump out at them, particularly in digital environments.

There are a vast array of free tools available on the web to allow data-journalists to quickly and easily digest, process and display the data powering their stories. This workshop aims to give a good overview of what is currently available and delve into depth on one of the most powerful: Google Fusion Tables.

Workshop 4: Getting Stories from Data (Saturday, 28 April)

Enormous datasets can often prove extremely daunting to the unfamiliar. Mistakes and crimes have historically benefited from, and triumphs and good decisions been obscured by, a mask of bewildering numbers and statistics and gone unreported.

Large datasets often hold a wealth of undiscovered stories for those willing to invest the time into exploring them. This workshop is a ‘spotters’-guide’ for things to look out for and where to look for datasets.

Workshop 5: Spending Stories (Sunday, 29 April)

To get to the bottom of a story, you need only to ‘follow the money’. The same is true of government: budgeting is where policies and priorities are broken down into figures. Financial programming has a direct influence on all political areas: while other data on health or social help us understand what challenges society faces, looking at spending data allows us to see how government reacts to all of these.

There are many spending databases available on the web, some impenetrable, some accessible for analysis. We’ll show how we enable journalists and researchers to make sense of the data and what strategies can be used to investigate stories and policies.

Overview: What datasets are out there? Where can you look for more?
Interrogating databases, how to extract the maximum amount of data out of tricky databases
Tools for spending analysis, how to slice and dice once you have your data

Workshop leaders

Caelainn Barr, formerly with the Bureau of Investigative Journalism, working on the award-winning Structural Funds investigation
Lucy Chambers, Open Knowledge Foundation, Community Coordinator for OpenSpending and the ‘Spending Stories’ project.
Steve Doig, Knight Chair in Journalism, Walter Cronkite School of Journalism, Arizona State University (Pulitzer prize winner)
Friedrich Lindenberg, Open Knowledge Foundation Deutschland, Developer on OpenSpending
Dan Nguyen, news application developer, ProPublica
Simon Rogers, editor of the Guardian Data Blog

When and where?

The Data Journalism School takes place at the International Journalism Festival in Perugia between 25 and 29 April 2012. The schedule of the Data Journalism School, with confirmed speakers for each panel and workshop, will be posted on the festival website in early February.

How to register?

Entry to the festival and the School are free. There is no registration process to attend the festival. For the workshops there is a limited number of available seats. To secure a seat in the workshops please register via this form. The deadline for workshop registration is 20 March 2012. You will be notified by email by 25 March at the latest if we were able to confirm you a seat. The workshops are entry-level. Consideration will be given to your experience, skills and motivation to attend the workshop when making the selection.

What do you need to bring?

A lot of enthusiasm and a laptop for the workshop sessions are required. Please note for hands-on workshops tablet PC’s will not be appropriate.

Questions?

If you have questions about the School of Data Journalism get in touch with the coordinators: Liliana Bounegru (bounegru [at] ejc.net) or Lucy Chambers (lucy.chambers [at] okfn.org).

Open Knowledge Foundation Blog: Annotators of the World Unite!

Thu, 02 Feb 2012 09:00:46 +0000

The following post is by Andrew Magliozzi founder of FinalsClub.org and one of the developers working on the Annotator javascript library and the AnnotateIt service.

Scholars, bring us your ancient, worn, and insightful annotations. We have the tools to help you collect and connect your knowledge of Plato, Dante, Shakespeare, Eliot and others. Together we can create a comprehensive repository of commentary on the best that has been thought and said.

Embracing a common mission of openness, our source code will always be libre, our standards compliant, and our knowledge free. Organizations from Cambridge, US & UK, California, and Vienna are working together to combine our technologies and innovation to provide you with the ability to annotate and share any text, image, PDF, map, or video online.

We are also on the verge of rereleasing 273 public domain texts with 9000+ annotations from top young scholars at Harvard, Columbia, UChicago and other top institutions. In addition to the web, we also aspire to make our best content available on mobile reading devices, so curious minds everywhere can share a common discourse anytime, anywhere. Because we believe you should always control access to your knowledge, we will ensure your data has simple permissions and measures for portability.

If you are a developer, designer, or scholar, we could use your help to create, curate, and map our global knowledge graph. Together we can transform 21st century scholarship within and without the ivory tower. If you want to get involved, please join the conversation about our software and our scholarship.

Free Government Information (FGI): Thursday: Live Webcast of House Legislative Data and Transparency Conference

Thu, 02 Feb 2012 00:40:27 +0000

There will be an all day conference on on public access to legislative information on Thursday, February 2, 2012, 9AM to 6PM EST, in Cannon Caucus Room, 345 Cannon HOB, Washington, D.C. It is hosted by the House Committee on House Administration.

agenda and live webcast

Open Congress: Liberate OpenGovData Now

Wed, 01 Feb 2012 22:54:00 +0000

Update: 5pm ET – as the #LDTC conference grinds to a close, I’m sorry to report that my (unfortunately) cynical prediction turned out to be the case – officials from the LoC & GPO (more details to come) refused to embrace serious movement on the bulk data task force that was mandated back in 2009. In other words, typical D.C. bureaucratic inertia & gridlock, complete blinders to the huge public demand on OpenCongress & across the open Web for raw legislative data & government info.

As reported brilliantly by John Wonderlich at our partners Sunlight Policy (quite emphatic recommendations to read the whole thing & share it w/ a sense of contextual outrage):

Part of Congress’s job should be to empower third party developers who are are permanent part of the infrastructure that brings legislative data to a huge slice of the public. By ignoring the public’s and Congress’s calls for bulk legislative data, administrators are ignoring part of what it means to be a responsible steward of public data. [Full post – please share.]

As a professional Congressional watchdog since ’07, one who is extremely cyncial about systemic corruption & gridlock in Congress already, it is a lightly bizarre experience to find myself flush with visceral populist (i.e., public-benefit Web booster) anger about the unaccountable bureaucrats on the panel who refused to recognize the urgency of liberating #opengovdata for OC users & the public. I arrived with every expectation that the conference would not make significant strides towards the Principles of OpenGovData, and unfortunately that turned out to be the case.

Daniel Schuman of Sunlight pressed the gov’t officials to drag their feet to accept a (long-overdue) meeting (!!) with some of the most knowledgeable #opengov developers, e.g. Josh Tauberer & Eric Mill of Sunlight Labs, so that’s the next immediate step – although in their excruciating slow-walk bureaucrat turf-defending jargon, they agreed only to be “in dialogue” and to “seek input” – literally refusing to acknowledge that they were in violation of a clear Congressional directive, one that is also extremely popular around the Web and has wide-ranging social & economic benefits (well-documented – I mean, this is ridiculous). Take a look at Reddit Politics or TPM or HuffPo or RedState or Congress Matters – there’s a massive audience & demand for Congressional information. It is shocking that the officials today (names forthcoming) refuse to move with real determination towards bulk data access for the public. More grassroots efforts to come from PPF on demanding liberation of legislative data as a bare minimum first step towards #opengov & #deliberativedemocracy. For more info & context, follow Alex Howard, Jim Harper, Harlan Yu, and the #ldtc hashtag. Despite some good incremental steps, ultimately another disappointing D.C. event for the open data cause & OpenCongress mission – I know we know, as one would expect. Onwards from this letdown.

It’s 2012 – we don’t have hover skateboards, and we don’t have #opengov. We could have the latter, at least, in the here & now, benefiting every American, if the systemically corrupt U.S. Congress was capable of reforming itself (which it is currently, unfortunately, not).

I’m writing this on the train from NYC to D.C., en route to the Conference on Legislative Data & Transparency to be held Thursday, Feb. 2nd – agenda here, webcast live here reportedly. As usual with these types of events, I’m here to rep for radical transparency & deliberative democracy.

House staffers (currently under GOP majority) will seek to gather warm plaudits from the #opengov community, but it’s less clear whether the LoC & Committee on Rules will move determinedly towards liberating raw legislative data that projects like OpenCongress could use. Of course, the primary reason that the legislative process remains closed-off – whether under Democratic or Republican House leadership – is that the arcane, inscrutable process benefits the majority party currently in power, which in turn accrues leverage & benefits in campaign contributions. (Right, “Escape From New York” art, w/ evocations of forceful liberation, you know… it’s past time, come on everyone. We have the technology.)

We’ll keep hammering this until we achieve real-world electoral reforms & Rules Committee staffers & others openly acknowledge why Congress is fundamentally broken: the systemic corruption of campaign donations and lack of full public financing of elections. We’re facing major empirical social ills in the form of a lack of consumer demand, as-yet-unpunished fraud in the banking & housing industries, catastrophic climate degradation, and more – and the U.S. Congress is incapable of bipartisan action towards enacting ameliorating bills. More recent evidence of Congressional helplessness includes the farcical rush-to-vote, refusal-of-expert tech testimony of the SOPA/PIPA push (thankfully slowed – for now – by the American Censorship coalition, of which PPF is a founding member) and recently the bipartisan rush on the STOCK Act (a just-fine common-sense bill on individual investments that purposely does nothing to address the systemic corruption of how bills move through Congress or serious campaign finance reform).

Towards some balance in the judgement here, pro’s and con’s, carrots & sticks, you know how it shakes out: my compliments to the Congressional staff & government employees & civil servants & leading members of Congress who convened this meeting for their interest in this issue. It appears to be in good faith and as such represents a step forward. There’s also been some slight but notable progress in legislative XML under 112th Congress’ House GOP leadership, as summarized below, as well as ongoing positive consultation with the Open House Project (coordinated by our partners the Sunligh t Foundation), the more-or-less-unsuccessful-and-now-defunct Bulk Data Task Force, plus shout-out to Jim Harper of the Cato Institute, who has been doing admirable toiling with the heavy-lifting of tech specs - get at him for more info on that effort. Unlike those who live & work in the Beltway, however, I don’t feel obliged to see real progress on legislative transparency in the usual D.C. context. I can demand, on behalf of the OpenCongress user community, immediate bulk-data access to primary source data on legislation, and then aggressive steps towards constructing a robust open API for THOMAS (and as a potential nearer-term step, full legislation in XML data formats). Anything short of that (and realistically, there’s not a punching chance of sufficient progress) means this conference, like others before it, would fail to reach the Principles of Open Government Data. Full compliance w/ these community-generated principles is a necessary (but not even sufficient) condition of #opengov, in my view.

Under the U.S. Constitution, the work of the federal legislative branch has (as designed, in theory, if not nec. in practice) the most significant outcome on the laws & public policy that shape our daily lives (cit. E-Klein). And yet, the U.S. Congress refuses to release legislative data to the public on the open Web in ways that are compliant with the ever-evolving Principles of Open Government Data. To be reductive (more detail available upon request and – to be fair – to be discussed at this conference, certainly, see agenda), official bill info lives on closed-off gov’t servers to which #opengov developers & the public do not have (read-only file permissions, to be sure) access until it’s posted on various head-scratchingly-poorly-designed websites, e.g. the GPO & THOMAS & CRS & LIMS & LIS & LLOC et al. This has been and continues to be indefensible stonewalling, and anyone who claims to have an understanding of open-source technology and also claims to support open-gov for transparency & accountability must support the immediate liberation of open data.

PPF’s fundamental premise (in OpenCongress, OpenGovernment and other software for civic engagement) is that public data should be fully public. Full stop. Transparency is a basic virtue of any sane, modern system of representative democracy in our constitutional republic. It increases public accountability, mitigates systemic corruption, reveals government waste, and encourages public trust & civic engagement with the political process. All these factors contribute to improved public policy outcomes and a greater national happiness – for evidence supporting these claims, see Prof. Beth Noveck’s Wiki Government, Open Government & Alex Howard‘s #opengov coverage & blogging by O’Reilly, research by @participatory, David Eaves, Robert Richards, and many others (see aliied orgs. in footer of our homepage). Open data is widely accepted now as #opengov best practice, but it’s sorely lacking in robust practice.

If government at the federal, state, county, municipal level around the country were even a tad forward-thinking, they’d be rushing to embrace the suites of new open technology:

bulk data access & an API for #opengovdata;
Open311 integration, for constituents to report non-emergency community issues;
legislative tracking & constituent feedback through web apps like PPF’s OpenGovernment.org;
documents published in DocumentCloud;
more tools, as published in the Civic Commons Marketplace,
even, dare we dream, an API for constituent communication, resulting in a more deliberative democratic process that’s now possible with tech tools we’re developing together in the commons. (This is promising, Code For America + Chitown.)

As it is, we’re seeing a landscape of governments starved of resources for improving their own lot or investing in vital tech infrastructure, and too much slavishness towards legacy consultants & solution providers at the expense of prioritizing open data on the open Web. As we’ve seen over the past decade, with a lack of eager embracing of the Internet, governments will likely move too slowly – then pretend to be “with it” by embracing some lousy commercial social media service as an #opengov fig-leaf – then slow-walk some decent one-quarter-measures for a while (like MADISON) until the next election cycle. Come on everyone, it’s 2012, let’s get an API for Congress and then go from there to some serious cleaning-house systemic campaign-finance reform to fight back against corporate control of the political process.

Brief history of the #opengov community’s failure to compel the Library of Congress & offices like House Rules Committee to give us our data: our non-profit PPF conceived of OpenCongress as a valuable public resource during the 2004 federal elections. Simply put, it was too difficult to browse, search, track, and understand bills in Congress on THOMAS. We began building a web app that aggregated official government data (from our valued & cornerstone-important data partner GovTrack.us, which is and was obliged largely to scrape THOMAS for data updates) with news & blog coverage (from Google News & Blog Search), campaign contributions (from the very-ncessary OpenSecrets), a daily Blog covering Congress in plain language, and public comment forums (in the style of Slashdot & other p2p communities). (Left: political caricature by Thomas Nast against systemic corruption.)

In 2006, PPF obtained funding from the Sunlight Foundation to begin building OpenCongress, and launched publicly in February 2007. In November 2007, a working group of #opengov advocates gathered in Sebastopol, CA w/ O’Reilly Media to draft the Principles of OpenGovData - participants at bottom of page here, including Donny & me from PPF, as well as Prof. Lessig & Carl Malamud & Josh Tauberer & many others – four and a half years later, we’re still waiting & working

As PPF developed OC as a free, libre, and open-source not-for-profit web app, we added engagement features, as well as new data sources: more campaign finance analysis from MAPLight, video from Metavid, a semantic MediaWiki previously called Congresspedia, issue group ratings from VoteSmart, social media mentions, Wikipedia bios, Bing News results, streaming online video from official Congressional YouTube hubs, Contact-Congress features, and more. But data access remains stuck in the past.

Writing today in 2012, the process for obtaining bill data on OC is, sadly, status quo. Bills appear on government sites, they’re obtained by GovTrack and others, and then sent via automatic processes to OpenCongress and others – sometimes many hours after they’re first available online at some far-flung primary source. Before that, they’re often published in useless (actually, intentionally-closed-off) .PDF formats, which our small non-profit team has struggled over the years to liberate into open standards. We’ve had tools & demand for years to move without delay towards liberation.

PPF gave up some mild praise of the MADISON project around Rep. Issa‘s (R-CA) OPEN Bill – though guys, to be honest, just give us the data and let us design the site & its user interface, as this thing isn’t about to win any design compliments. Think of it like a “market solution” type of approach – let the market decide the best interface, but put it out there on the level playing field of the open Web. Last month’s long-awaited unveiling of Docs.House.Gov is a remarkable & praiseworthy step forward – big-ups to XML of upcoming legislation – but it’s not comprehensive enough for us to change the basic processes by which OpenCongress obtains data. Our demands for true legislative transparency are as follows:

I. Bulk data access – with this, OpenCongress could mash-up previous versions of bills and facilitate research of roll calls & sponsorship & other factors – and most importantly, we’d be sure we were coordinated via RSYNC network protocol (or even HTTP, golly) with the primary government publishing source. This can be arranged without delay and the Library of Congress should move aggressively towards offering this level of exhaustive read-only access.

II. Legislative XML feeds – this would be a fine middle step for bringing up-to-the-minute bill info into OC and enabling timely tracking of legislative actions. The just-launched XML feeds don’t apply, to my understanding, to any pre-2012 bills (OC has data going back to the 109th U.S. Congress via GovTrack), so significantly re-engineering OC just for this feed isn’t quite priority. We’ll certainly incorporate it into our pages though, it’s pretty cool (but, again, painfully rudimentary & insufficient given available & well-documented & elsewhere-ubiquitous technology).

III. Open API – this has been done at the state level! It can be done in D.C., if we’re capable of pulling ourselves out of the swamp. See the pioneering work by the New York State Senate’s Open Initiative – while, clearly, THOMAS would of course have different data fields and likely would need to be slightly more complex, the NY Senate’s Open Legislation API offers a starting point for development of one for the U.S. Congress. It’s actually pretty easy for a non-programmer to parse the different offerings there and get a meaningful sense of how an outside developer (civic or commercial) would pick different data fields to display on his or her website. It’s a typically American tragicomedy that we have the ability to implement this widely- and directly-useful technology, but lack the political will to do so. This development roadmap by Andrew Hoppin, former CTO, is one of the most important #opengov blog posts of the last couple years. NY Senate was able to push through these amazing reforms only b/c of a confluence of circumstances – generally speaking, NY Senate is one of the only 99 U.S. state legislative chambers (NE is unicameral yo) that practices true openness, and even that political momentum has been under attack by local changes in the political winds.

The above addresses broad data access & formats – but for a greater (yet basic) degree of #opengov transparency, how about requiring version control of legislation? That is to say, reducitvely, requiring legislative assistants & staffers & even lobbyists & members of Congress themselves have unique logins for openly writing, editing, and commenting on draft legislation. To be sure, staffers could still have off-the-record private conversations of the expected political-calculus and/or horse-trading sort – but for the public record, language or policy ideas cribbed from lobbyists could be programatically & easily identified as such. Which wouldn’t necessarily be a pejorative thing at all – but would be a basic accountability measure. To be reductive, if a member’s staffer adds funding for a bridge for her district, observers of the bill would find the individuals responsible and bring it to other parties for input. Constituents could be continually polled with ranked-choice voting about specific, significant sections of legislation. The details matter, as we know – facing down a federal election year in which the major health-care reform bill is likely to be an issue both in the Supreme Court and the Presidential campaign, wouldn’t it be helpful to know which individual staffers took responsibility for which sections of the bill, and which lobbyists & interest groups can be identified as crafting specific language? This isn’t even to address the benefits of metadata linking campaign donations to specific bill provisions, budget & spending transparency, real-time financial disclosure of senators’ campaign contributions (imagine that), and other realistic-yet-lofty ideas. (At right: OC’s custom Message Builder for Contact-Congress features, free of charge & in open-source code to contribute libre-licensed social wisdom back to the public commons.)

Congressional staff may say “we’re working with you”, but unless they’re moving determinedly towards a modern open API for THOMAS this year, we don’t share the same vision. They’ll cite expert practitioners & issues with data publishing from their end, and we can cite same from open-source community on opening up – e.g., CivicCommons, Sunlight Policy Dep’t (shouts Daniel & John), our own team & others.

The art-deco atmosphere of the conference tomorrow – and assurances that more data is coming, it’s coming, maybe after the election – will be nice enough today, but I call on the #opengov community to become more vociferous and use the word “demand” – as in “demand for our users, demand for the public interest” – in calling for full & immediate #opengovdata. But with the House GOP leadership is pursuing an explicit strategy of gridlock & hyper-partisan symbolic bills until after the Nov. 2012 elections, real data liberation is unlikely. Here’s to looking forward to comprehensive electoral reforms such as the following: score voting, non-partisan re-districting, right-to-vote laws, real-time financial disclosure of campaign contributions & lobbyist meetings, strong ethics reforms to prevent D.C.‘s endemic revolving door problem, and full public financing of elections to elect a Congress that will finally give the public access to its data. Maybe even a discussion about the undemocratic nature of the U.S. Senate and the increasingly abused filibuster process. This may seem ambitious or impatient, but this isn’t a negotiation with our public servants & elected officials – this is about liberating public legislative data via an open API and proceeding to enhancements for constituent communication (coupled with fair elections & ethics rules with teeth) for a living, breathing deliberative democracy. The public interest needs more persuasive, creative, aggressive defenders.

Questions, thoughts, comments welcome: david at opencongress.org. PPF is a 501c3 non-profit organization – we incorporated as a public charity because we believe it is the best possible foundation for reforming our contemporary representative democracy – organizations with the highest level of public-mission written into their charters just behave differently & more positively, we’ve found – public donations (tax-exempt, by the way) go directly towards paying our (considerable) server costs and keeping OpenCongress on the Web: donate, or become a recurring donor of $10 month to support our work on OC. We’re building user-friendly Web interfaces for civic engagement and we foresee a heartening surge of demand in a saner future – help us grow.

Update 12pm ET: support true #opengov legislation, like the Public = Online Act (HR 1348) from the Sunlight Foundation & allies. Email your members of Congress on OC to support it. More info on the rich public resource Transparency Hub on the OC Wiki. In the previous 111th Congress, per John Wonderlich of Sunlight Policy, there was a great bulk data access bill, H.R. 6289 (111th) – it needs a new sponsor in the 112th, though as per the above, not much is going to happen (unfort.) until after the elections, with the House in gridlock mode. Surf along w/ my updates on the popular micro-publishing service.

Open Secrets: 16 Lobbyists Hauled in $2 Million for Mitt Romney in 2011

Wed, 01 Feb 2012 22:08:35 +0000

Sixteen lobbyists raised nearly $2.2 million to aid the presidential campaign of former Massachusetts Gov. Mitt Romney in 2011, according to a Center for Responsive Politics review of documents filed with the Federal Election Commission.

Patrick J. Durkin, Sr., of commercial bank Barclays, alone was responsible for $774,750 of that sum.

Meanwhile, Romney also benefited from two lobbyist-bundlers who work for D.C. lobbying powerhouse Ogilvy Government Relations and two who work for K Street giant DLA Piper.

Eight of Romney's 16 lobbyist-bundlers were disclosed for the first time in Romney's fourth-quarter filings with the FEC, including Austin Barbour, the nephew of former Mississippi Gov. Haley Barbour, who collected $210,700; Joseph C. Wall of Goldman Sachs, who bundled $30,399 for Romney; and Edward Ingle of Microsoft, who raised $30,260.

Under federal law, only bundlers who are lobbyists are required to be disclosed by campaigns -- and even then there are some loopholes.

For instance, lobbyists who collect less than $16,000 in a quarter are not required to be disclosed. Additionally, hosting a fundraiser for a federal candidate in and of itself isn't enough to warrant disclosure; the legal requirement for disclosure of the lobbyist-bundler's identity isn't triggered unless the lobbyist is formally given credit for the fundraising by the candidate's campaign, Paul Ryan, an attorney at the Campaign Legal Center, told OpenSecrets Blog.

"The definition of 'bundled contribution' does not cover situations where the recipient committee knows a contribution was raised by a lobbyist, but does not formally credit the lobbyist" in a recordkeeping system of some sort, Ryan said in an email.

Romney has only revealed the names of lobbyists who are bundling on his behalf, unlike President Barack Obama, who has released the names of 445 bundlers who have raised money for his re-election campaign and the coffers of the Democratic National Committee. (None of these bundlers are lobbyists.)

Here is a table detailing Romney's 16 lobbyists-bundlers. (Update, 2/1: The graph has been updated to include $2,500 that was credited to Sanchez during the third quarter of 2011, which was originally missed in the Center's tally.)

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Lobbyist	Organization	$ Bundled in Q2	$ Bundled in Q3	$ Bundled in Q4	$ Bundled in All 2011
Patrick J. Durkin, Sr.	Barclays	$167,800	$187,025	$419,925	$774,750
Wayne Berman	Ogilvy Government Relations	$101,600	$15,000	$162,475	$279,075
Austin Barbour	Clearwater Group LLC	$0	$0	$210,700	$210,700
T. Martin Fiorentino, Jr.	The Fiorentino Group	$102,900	$78,575	$500	$181,975
David Beightol	Dutko Worldwide	$54,200	$35,260	$50,915	$140,375
William Mark Simmons	The Dutko Group	$0	$34,000	$100,684	$134,684
Robert T. Grand	Barnes and Thornburg	$0	$110,150	$0	$110,150
Ignacio E. Sanchez	DLA Piper	$0	$2,500	$84,200	$86,700
Judi A. Rhines	The Rath Group	$34,200	$34,650	$0	$68,850
Drew K. Maloney	Ogilvy Government Relations	$56,750	$0	$0	$56,750
Joseph C. Wall	Goldman Sachs	$0	$0	$30,399	$30,399
Edward Ingle	Microsoft Corp.	$0	$0	$30,260	$30,260
Bruce A. Gates	Altria Client Services Inc.	$0	$0	$27,500	$27,500
Tom Boyd	DLA Piper	$0	$0	$26,350	$26,350
Ralph W. Hardy, Jr.	Dow Lohnes PLLC	$0	$0	$19,000	$19,000
David Tamasi	Rasky Baerlein Strategic Communication	$0	$0	$16,910	$16,910
Total:					$2,194,428

Some, but not all, of the other GOP presidential hopefuls have been aided by lobbyist-bundlers.

Six lobbyists collectively raised $178,250 for Texas Gov. Rick Perry before he dropped out of the race. And one lobbyist-bundler raised $17,610 for former Minnesota Gov. Tim Pawlenty during his unsuccessful presidential run.

Former Sen. Rick Santorum's campaign has not reported assistance from any lobbyist-bundlers, and neither has that of former House Speaker Newt Gingrich. The campaign of Rep. Ron Paul says it does not utilize bundlers.

Open Secrets: Facebook Fires up Its Political Action Committee

Wed, 01 Feb 2012 21:12:09 +0000

Facebook continued to show off its growing political muscle Tuesday night, as its nascent political action committee disclosed an impressive six-figure haul during its inaugural fundraising quarter.

Facebook PAC raised a total of $170,000 during the final three months of 2011. And while it has yet to donate to a single politician on Capitol Hill, it revealed at least one important fact with its first fundraising report: the company is capable of tapping a friendly and powerful network of donors to come up with a serious amount of campaign cash.

Namely, its own employees.

Employees at the world's most popular social network donated $113,750 to their new PAC, or about 67 percent of all itemized donations made to Facebook PAC during the fourth quarter, according to a Center for Responsive Politics review of its recent filing with the Federal Election Commission.

The PAC additionally reported about $1,260 in unitemized donations of $200 or less. (Federal law only requires the PAC to disclose the information of donors who give more than $200 in an itemized fashion.)

Facebook PAC's list of donors includes some marquee names.

Facebook's founder and chief operating officer Mark Zuckerberg made his first-ever foray into political donations -- at least his first worth more than $200 to a federal political committee, which would be identifiable in fundraising records. He donated the legal maximum of $5,000 to the Facebook PAC.

Sheryl Sandberg, Facebook's chief operating officer, also cut a check for $5,000.

A few notable politicos are also mentioned in the groups filings: Joel Kaplan and Erskine Bowles, both of whom are former White House officials. Facebook lured both men to the company in high-profile hires last year, while it was seeking to up its political presence in Washington. Kaplan previously worked for President George W. Bush, while Bowles worked for President Bill Clinton. Each made $5,000 donations to the new PAC.

Furthermore, Peter Thiel, who is perhaps best known for his role as co-founder of the Internet pay service PayPal, can be counted as another maxed-out donor. He gave $5,000 to the PAC and is listed as a 'Director' at Facebook on the PAC's filing.

The new fundraising push comes at a time when Facebook has been investing more and more in its Washington, D.C., footprint.

In recent years, the company has steadily increased its lobbying presence, beginning with a modest near $208,000 year in 2009.

Facebook upped those expenditures in 2010, but it was nothing compared to what it spent last year, when the company's output exploded with a whopping $1.35 million spending spree.

Facebook targeted issues related to copyright, media and publishing and most notably, Internet privacy and piracy concerns, according to the Center's research. That included the controversial set of Internet piracy legislation known as SOPA and PIPA, which sparked a firestorm in the tech industry recently.

Prominent tech companies, including Facebook, as well as Google and the WikiMedia Foundation, the nonprofit organization that runs the website Wikipedia, came out strongly against the legislation. They unleashed a lobbying force the likes of which Washington had not yet seen from that industry.

Combined with a high-profile online blackout, the industry successfully got lawmakers to shelve the legislation, at least temporarily.

Open Secrets: Billionaire Harold Simmons Gave Big to Several GOP Super PACs in Fourth Quarter

Wed, 01 Feb 2012 20:56:28 +0000

(Correction 2/1: An earlier version of this story understated the contributions of Simmons and Contran Corp. in the second paragraph only. The actual figure is reflected below.)

Harold Simmons, long one of the GOP's most prolific donors, cemented his place on the speed-dial of fundraisers for conservative causes on Tuesday as several super PACs reported huge hauls from the Texas billionaire in their 2011 year-end campaign finance reports.

Simmons and his holding company, Contran Corp., gave $8.5 million to three super PACs, two of which support candidates for the GOP presidential nomination, in the last quarter of the year, according to research by the Center for Responsive Politics.

For starters, Contran made two $500,000 donations to the super PAC that was championing Texas Gov. Rick Perry's White House ambitions, Make Us Great Again. One of those came in late September and one in late October. Those gifts made Contran, and thus Simmons, the single greatest donor to Make Us Great Again, providing the group with 18 percent of its funds.

Perry dropped out of the race Jan. 19, but Simmons didn't wait 'til then to switch horses. On Dec. 15, he personally contributed $500,000 to Winning Our Future, the pro-Newt Gingrich super PAC.

In January, Winning Our Future was instrumental in helping to keep the former House speaker's presidential bid from stalling by running slashing attack ads against frontrunner Mitt Romney at a time when the Gingrich campaign was short on funds.

Still, Simmons made his biggest donations by far to a super PAC that hasn't gone to bat for a presidential candidate -- yet. Between late October and late November, Simmons gave $5 million to American Crossroads, started with help from GOP uber-operative Karl Rove, and Contran gave another $2 million.

That's a staggering 60 percent of the $11.7 million raised by American Crossroads in the last three months of 2011, according to the Center's research. American Crossroads raised nearly $18 million overall in 2011, after raising $28 million during its inaugural year in 2010.

Simmons couldn't have used Contran's corporate treasury to fund groups running ads that expressly support or oppose a candidate, nor could he have given six-figure sums of money to such organizations, before the Supreme Court's 2010 Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission decision laid the groundwork for what are now known as super PACs.

That Simmons would divide his money among more than one candidate is no surprise. In 2007, he gave the maximum individual contribution of $2,300 to Republican presidential candidates Romney, John McCain and Rudy Giuliani -- all within a month. Simmons has been a Gingrich supporter in the past, as well, supplying the Georgian's GOPAC organization with major support, so it's not surprising that Winning Our Future would find a way to his checkbook.

Simmons has also never been shy to lend a hand controversial political forays. During the 2004 election cycle, his Contran Corp. turned over $3 million to Swift Boat Veterans for Truth, the group that attacked Democratic presidential nominee John Kerry's Vietnam war record.

But Simmons has a lot more to give away, if he so chooses.

Forbes described him in December as "The U.S. Billionaire Whose Stock Increased the Most in 2011." The publication said the octogenarian's net worth "hit the $9.6 billion range" last year largely due to a surge in the value of Valhli, a specialty chemicals company Simmons controls through Contran.

Philanthropic giving, though, will likely consume more of the assets of Simmons and his wife, Annette, than political activity: Last March, they pledged to donate half their fortune to charity, a la Bill and Melinda Gates and Warren Buffett.

Center for Responsive Politics senior fellow Bob Biersack contributed to this report.

Sunlight Foundation: The presidential super PACs: five takeaways

Wed, 01 Feb 2012 20:35:17 +0000

Note: the analysis below is based on initial data pulled from the FEC's website. As more complete data become available, we will update the analysis to reflect what we learn.

The first round of super PAC annual filings came in yesterday, and we at Sunlight have been digging through them since. Our reporting team has been blogging the reports as we digest them.

Below are five takeaway points, based on a Sunlight Foundation analysis of FEC filings for nine super PACs that raised at least $500,000 in 2011 and have spent money in the presidential election. (For a complete list of super PACs, click here.)

1. It’s a few rich donors running the show

Among nine super PACs that raised at least $500,000 and have spent on the presidential election so far, almost half of the itemized contributions (47.9%) came from just 22 donors who gave more than $500,000. And 90 donors who gave more than $100,000 accounted for 78.6% of the contributions. (See Table 1). Overall, these super PACS had only 714 itemized contributions (631 individuals and 83 organizations), though more than half (405) were under $10,000 or less.

In other words, these super PACs are turning out to be vehicles for a very limited number of wealthy individuals and corporations to spend very large sums of money and take a blaring megaphone to the concept of political speech.

Table 1. Donors by contribution size

	Total Donors	Total Given	Share of total contributed	Cumulative Share
More than $1M	6	$14,723,819	23.4%	23.4%
More than $500K-$1M	16	$15,400,000	24.5%	47.9%
More than 100K-$500K	68	$19,300,674	30.7%	78.6%
More than $50K-$100K	81	$7,782,760	12.4%	91.0%
More than $10-$50K	138	$4,748,700	7.6%	98.6%
$10K or less	405	$936,856	1.5%	100.1%
Total	714	$62,892,809	100%

Table 2 provides a list of 17 individuals and organizations who gave at least $1 million in 2011. The Sunlight Reporting Group has details elsewhere on just who these big donors are, but for a quick look, see below.

Table 2. Million dollar donors

Donor	Total given	PACs given to
Harold Simmons	$5,500,000	AMERICAN CROSSROADS , WINNING OUR FUTURE
Bob Perry	$3,600,000	MAKE US GREAT AGAIN, INC , RESTORE OUR FUTURE, INC.
Contran Corporation	$3,000,000	MAKE US GREAT AGAIN, INC , AMERICAN CROSSROADS
Jerry Perenchio Living Trust	$2,000,000	AMERICAN CROSSROADS
Jon Huntsman	$1,887,040	OUR DESTINY PAC
Freedomworks	$1,336,779	FREEDOMWORKS FOR AMERICA
Whiteco Industries, Inc.	$1,000,000	AMERICAN CROSSROADS
Robert Rowling	$1,000,000	AMERICAN CROSSROADS
Eli Publishing Inc	$1,000,000	RESTORE OUR FUTURE, INC.
F8 LLC	$1,000,000	RESTORE OUR FUTURE, INC.
Melaleuca, Inc.	$1,000,000	RESTORE OUR FUTURE, INC.
Rooney Holdings, Inc.	$1,000,000	RESTORE OUR FUTURE, INC.
Edward Conard	$1,000,000	RESTORE OUR FUTURE, INC.
John Paulson	$1,000,000	RESTORE OUR FUTURE, INC.
Julian Robertson	$1,000,000	RESTORE OUR FUTURE, INC.
Paul Singer	$1,000,000	RESTORE OUR FUTURE, INC.
Robert Mercer	$1,000,000	RESTORE OUR FUTURE, INC.

2. Most of the donors are individuals, but corporations are playing a big role

In Table 2 above, we see that of the 17 contributions of $1 million or more, seven came from corporations, led by the Contran Corporation, which gave $3 million. Contran is run by the Texas billionaire Harold Simmons, who also gave $5.5 million of his own money. Both gave to the pro-Perry super PAC “Make us Great Again, Inc.”. Simmons has since moved onto the pro-Gingrich “Winning Our Future”; Contran has moved onto the anti-Obama “American Crossroads.”

Overall, of the 714 itemized contributions to the nine super PACs, organizations (mostly corporations) were responsible for only 11% (83) of the contributions, though they did give 29.7% of the total donations. Still, the giving is dominated by individuals. On average, individuals gave more ($70,024 vs $29,648), primarily because there were more really big donations from individuals.

Table 3. Individual and organizational donations.

	Number	Avg Donation	Total donations	Share of total donations
Individuals	631	$70,024	$44,185,079	70.3%
Organizations	83	$29,648	$18,707,730	29.7%

3. Super PACs vary in their reliance on the very largest donors

Figure 1 below visualizes the breakdown of super PAC donations by their reliance on different classes of donors. To see how much of each super PACs contributions have come in different sizes, read the figure vertically. To see the share of total super PAC spending coming from each super PAC, read the figure horizontally.

Figure 1. The distribution of money going to super PACs

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graphic by Ali Felski

While it’s clear that all of the super PACs are getting the majority of their donations from donors giving more than $50,000, they do vary in the extent to which they rely on donations in chunks of $500,000 or more.

Tables 4 and 5 below provide some more detail. Table 4 shows that all nine super PACs have one donor giving at least $150,000, and five of the nine have at least one $1 million donor. It’s also important to note that five of the nine rely on a single donor for at least one quarter of all that PAC’s donations, and three of the nine get the majority of their funding from a single donor.

Table 5 shows both the number of itemized donors giving to each PAC and the total number of donors giving $50,000 or more. Again, we see some variety. The pro-Paul Endorse Liberty has only five donors; the pro-Romney Restore Our Future Inc. has 258.

Four super PACs got at least 40% of their contributions in $50,000 increments, and two got at least 60% (the pro-Perry Make Us Great Again, Inc., and the pro-Paul Endorse Liberty Inc.) Meanwhile, both the pro-Tea Party, anti-Obama Freedomworks for America and Obama’s Priorities USA Action collected more than 90% of their itemized contributions in less than $50,000 increments, However, Freedomworks for America did get two-thirds of its donations from Freedomworks, a 501(c)(4). Overall, one quarter of donations came in at $50,000 or more.

Table 4. Top Donors of the Super PACs

Top Donor Share

Committee	Total Donations 2011	Top Donor	Top Donor Contribution	Top Donor Share of All PAC Contributions
RESTORE OUR FUTURE, INC.	$30,175,653	10-way tie	$1,000,000	3.3%
AMERICAN CROSSROADS	$18,185,675	Harold Simmons	$5,000,000	27.5%
MAKE US GREAT AGAIN, INC	$5,360,174	Contran Corporation	$1,000,000	18.7%
PRIORITIES USA ACTION	$3,121,625	William Little	$150,000	4.8%
OUR DESTINY PAC	$2,680,290	Jon Hunstman Sr.	$1,887,040	70.4%
FREEDOMWORKS FOR AMERICA	$2,161,567	Freedomworks	$1,336,779	61.8%
WINNING OUR FUTURE	$2,080,250	William Little	$150,000	7.2%
ENDORSE LIBERTY INC	$1,020,000	Peter Thiel	$900,000	88.2%
RED WHITE AND BLUE FUND	$764,000	Foster Friess	$331,000	43.3%

Table 5. Super PACs by reliance on $50,000+ donors

Committee	# of total itemized donors	Donors giving $50K +	Pct giving $50K+
RESTORE OUR FUTURE, INC.	258	104	40.3%
AMERICAN CROSSROADS	131	22	16.8%
MAKE US GREAT AGAIN, INC	58	35	60.3%
PRIORITIES USA ACTION	37	3	8.1%
OUR DESTINY PAC	18	8	44.4%
FREEDOMWORKS FOR AMERICA	173	3	1.7%
WINNING OUR FUTURE	37	4	10.8%
ENDORSE LIBERTY INC	5	3	60.0%
RED WHITE AND BLUE FUND	16	2	12.5%
ALL	733	184	25.1%

4. Some donors are giving to multiple Super PACs

It's also worth noting that there were 15 individuals and organizations that gave to at least two different super PACs, led by Perry Homes CEO Bob Perry, who gave to three (the pro-Perry Make us Great Again, the anti-Obama American Crossroads, and the pro-Romney Restore our Future). Bob Perry, of course, is no stranger to major political giving. In the 2010 cycle, he gave more than $7 million, making him the most generous political donor of the cycle. What this shows is that some of these rich individuals cannot limit themselves to just one super PAC, and probably will continue to spend widely.

Table 6. Individuals giving to multiple PACS

Donor	# of PACs	Total given	PACs given to
Bob Perry	3	$3,600,000	MAKE US GREAT AGAIN, INC , AMERICAN CROSSROADS, RESTORE OUR FUTURE, INC.
Harold Simmons	2	$5,500,000	AMERICAN CROSSROADS , WINNING OUR FUTURE
Contran Corporation	2	$3,000,000	MAKE US GREAT AGAIN, INC , AMERICAN CROSSROADS
Philip Geier	2	$750,000	AMERICAN CROSSROADS , RESTORE OUR FUTURE, INC.
Kenny Troutt	2	$650,000	MAKE US GREAT AGAIN, INC , AMERICAN CROSSROADS
Kenneth Griffin	2	$400,000	AMERICAN CROSSROADS , RESTORE OUR FUTURE, INC.
John Templeton	2	$350,000	RED WHITE AND BLUE FUND , AMERICAN CROSSROADS
Jim Walton	2	$200,000	OUR DESTINY PAC , RESTORE OUR FUTURE, INC.
Samuel Zell	2	$150,000	AMERICAN CROSSROADS , RESTORE OUR FUTURE, INC.
Frank Hanna	2	$35,000	RED WHITE AND BLUE FUND , WINNING OUR FUTURE
John Dowd	2	$25,000	MAKE US GREAT AGAIN, INC , AMERICAN CROSSROADS
Thomas Sudberry	2	$20,000	MAKE US GREAT AGAIN, INC , RESTORE OUR FUTURE, INC.
James Stanard	2	$7,500	AMERICAN CROSSROADS , RESTORE OUR FUTURE, INC.
William Becker	2	$7,500	AMERICAN CROSSROADS , RESTORE OUR FUTURE, INC.
Joyce Goetz	2	$1,500	WINNING OUR FUTURE , FREEDOMWORKS FOR AMERICA

5. Conclusion: It’s going to get worse

These revelations should not come as a surprise. But what’s impressive is just how concentrated the giving is. Among them, these nine presidential Super PACs have raised more than $62 million. Of that money, almost half (48%) has come from just 22 individuals.

We’ve already seen just how potent these super PACs can be in the first few Republican primary contests. As the electoral season moves on, super PACs will likely expand to House and Senate races as well. If what we’ve seen so far is any indication, more and more political fundraising will be dominated by the handful of super-wealthy individuals and corporations who can and will spend seven figures. These kinds of contributions can change the dynamics of a political campaign, which gives these individuals incredible potential power. It cannot be a good thing for our electoral process.

Sunlight is advocating for improved super PAC transparency. To see out what we recommend, click here.

OMBWatch: Latest Poll: Regulations Not Major Concern to Vast Majority of Small Business Owners

Wed, 01 Feb 2012 17:33:51 +0000

On Feb. 1, the American Sustainable Business Council, Main Street Alliance, and the Small Business Majority released the results of a new poll that shows that small business owners strongly support fair, effective public protections that safeguard all Americans.

From the Small Business Majority:

Rhetoric blaming government regulations for a lack of small business growth and our stagnant economy has reached a fever pitch. Legislators have introduced bills aimed at curbing regulations, believing this would stimulate our sluggish economy. While lawmakers are right to view small business as the key to economic recovery, small businesses don't see regulations as their No. 1 concern. Instead, the vast majority of small business owners believe weak demand is the primary problem for their business right now, not regulations.

Main Findings

Weak demand is small business owners' biggest problem: 34 percent of respondents said weak demand is their biggest problem, while 15 percent cited the cost of health coverage and other benefits. Only 14 percent said it is the level of government regulation. The level of taxes came in fourth place with 12 percent, and competition with larger companies garnered 10 percent.
Small business owners see regulations as a necessary part of a modern economy and believe they can live with them if they're fair and reasonable: 86 percent of small business owners agree some regulation of business is necessary for a modern economy, and 93 percent of them agree their business can live with some regulation if it is fair, manageable, and reasonable.

The poll was conducted on behalf of the American Sustainable Business Council, Main Street Alliance and the Small Business Majority. Graph courtesy of Small Business Majority.

Read the full poll report here.