While the Obama administration is working on making government data available on sites like Data.gov for citizens to mash up, a government watchdog group is doing the same for campaign financing information.
The nonpartisan, nonprofit Center for Responsive Politics is making 200 million data records from its archive free for anyone to download for noncommercial purposes on its site OpenSecrets.org.
The organization expects regular citizens to use the information, available in CSV (comma-separated values) format, to analyze funding for political campaigns through projects like charts, maps, and mobile applications. The following data sets are available on the OpenSecrets Action Center:
Campaign finance: 195 million records tracking campaign fundraising and spending by candidates for federal office, dating as far back as the 1989-1990 election cycle. The records also include spending from political parties and political action committees.
Lobbying: 3.5 million records from as far back as 1998 on federal lobbyists, their clients, their fees, and the issues they reported working on.
Personal finances: Reports from 2004 through 2007 detailing the personal assets, liabilities, and transactions of members of Congress and the executive branch. Reports from 2008 will be available to download after they are released to the public in June and the CRP has keyed the reports.
527 organizations: Financial records dating back to the 2004 election cycle for issue-advocacy groups called 527s, which can raise unlimited funds from individuals, corporations, or unions.
The Sunlight Foundation, a government transparency organization, is underwriting the OpenData initiative with a three-year $1.2 million grant. The data is being made available through a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike license, which allows users to remix and share the center's work noncommercially.
"Putting our data into more hands will put more eyes on Washington and, we hope, engage more Americans in their government," CRP Executive Director Sheila Krumholz said in a statement. "We hope that more people counting cash will lead to more people making change."
TechCrunch suggests that Facebook's chief privacy officer, Chris Kelly, will shortly announce his candidacy to become California's attorney general in 2010. Given how poorly Facebook has handled privacy, it's difficult to see why California voters should assume Kelly would do better in the higher matters of public office.
Specifically, California's attorney general is charged with the following responsibilities:
The attorney general represents the people of California in civil and criminal matters before trial, appellate and the supreme courts of California and the United States. The attorney general also serves as legal counsel to state officers and, with few exceptions, to state agencies, boards and commissions...
The attorney general also assists district attorneys, local law enforcement, and federal and international criminal justice agencies in the administration of justice...
In addition, the attorney general establishes and operates projects and programs to protect Californians from fraudulent, unfair, and illegal activities that victimize consumers or threaten public safety, and enforces laws that safeguard the environment and natural resources.
Kelly is an experienced and competent attorney, having worked at Baker & Mckenzie and Wilson Sonsini Goodrich & Rosatti before joining Facebook. But if he's in any way implicated in Facebook's failed foray into consumer privacy (Beacon, anyone?), and he will be by virtue of throwing his hat in the campaign ring, he needs to answer for his involvement in Facebook's privacy faux-pas before California voters should vote him their trust.
He has answered critics before, and it's possible that being on the front line of electronic privacy issues actually makes him a better candidate than most, even despite missteps. But he first needs to demonstrate that he's done more good than harm relative to protecting people from "fraudulent, unfair, and illegal activities" on Facebook before attempting to protect the broader California public as attorney general.
It's very possible that he can, but I've yet to hear that campaign speech.
(Credit:
CNET News)
Sen. Barack Obama's presidential campaign launched an iPhone application on Thursday that turns the vaunted device into a political recruiting tool.
The most notable feature "organizes and prioritizes your contacts by key battleground states, making it easy to reach out and make an impact quickly," according to the software.
On my phone, the application ranked contacts in Colorado, Michigan, and New Mexico at the top; at the bottom was a friend whose cell phone has a Texas number, though she actually lives in California.
The application anonymously reports back the number of calls made this way: "Your privacy is important: no personal data or contacts will be uploaded or stored. Only the total number of calls you make is uploaded anonymously."
The software is the latest effort by politicians to capitalize on technology, joining other examples such as ads distributed through YouTube, Web-based fund-raising, Facebook pages and fan groups, and e-mail recruitment drives.
The Obama for America iPhone application is available for download through Apple's iTunes store, said Raven Zachary, an iPhone consultant who's directing the launch effort.
A "get involved" feature uses the phone's GPS-based location sensing to find the nearest Obama campaign headquarters, and "local events" likewise pulls up a list of activities sorted by proximity.
A "media" section provides links to video and photos, but beware: YouTube showed errors following some of the links. Perhaps the newer videos hadn't been prepared for iPhone display yet.
The application also shows Obama statements to the news media and a guide to Obama's positions on various issues.
Update 8:50 a.m. PDT: The application shows how many calls have been made nationwide and how many you made. Those statistics are the kind that can motivate people--they can feel like they're part of something bigger. That may sound a bit silly as a motivational tool, but consider that Smule's Sonic Lighter application for the iPhone is popular, despite the fact that it costs 99 cents more than its free competition, likely because people can see where else on the globe people are using it and because the longer you run the application, the bigger your own spot on the map becomes. It's a kind of competition.
Update 9:28 a.m. PDT: The campaign added an Obama iPhone app Web site, too.
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