JMS

I spent a cold and rainy Martin Luther King day at a daylong Berkman Center meeting organized by the Sunlight Foundation and focused on use of the Internet “to improve citizens’ access to, and use or, important political information.” The 30 or so people attending are at the leading edge of developing tools and approaches to using tech and the web to empower citizen political engagement.

If you haven’t tuned into this field in a while or ever, it’s clearly experiencing some dynamic growth and Sunlight is a center of gravity. Great to see fellow Berkmanite Zephyr Teachout leading the charge over there.

I was going to attempt some comprehensive note-taking and blogging until I arrived to find power-posters Ethan Zuckerman and Dan Gillmor and David Weinberger in attendance, rendering my services superfluous.

So for a full rundown check out Ethan’s post on the panels and the demos and Dan and David pile on. John Palfrey weighs in with some reflections on the goals of the day.

You can also browse the tag BerkmanSunlight in Technorati or del.icio.us.

One of my favorites of the day was MetaVid. Basically started as a student art project this caught my eye over a year ago when poking around for CSpan footage, and I was thrilled to meet one of the co-creators and see that the project is alive and growing – though desperately in need of some additional support and funding (and maybe some Internet Archiving). Basically Metavid captures all video of congressional proceedings and creates a searchable, downloadable and annotated digital archive for free public domain access. They do this by grabbing CSpan footage and converting it, and by asserting the right to that content as public domain government property, which it indeed is.

Also make sure to check out FedSpending.org and MapLight. Public radio was well represented with PRX and Melinda Wittstock from Capitol News Connection.

We had the opportunity to do some forward promotion of the upcoming Beyond Broadcast: From Participatory Culture to Participatory Democracy, which is shaping up to be an excellent follow up to last year’s conference, this Sunlight gathering, and the 2007 Public Media Conference organized by the Integrated Media Association.

Here’s a taste of Ethan’s rundown on the demos:

– Ed Bender with the National Institute on Money in State Politics is working on putting information about contributions to state legislative races online. He tracks money gien to party committees and ballot measures – this is an enormous amount of data: 90,000 reports issued by 18,000 committees annually, totalling $2.4 billion dollars. The data has been heavily audited and peer reviewed, and includes coding of contributors into categories (labor unions, environmental groups, etc.) There are very impressive tools that allow people to create custom SQL searches or build widgets around APIs. But the most impressive part of the presentation is a set of scatter plots Ed shows, showing the relationship between money and election results in Arizona. Some years ago, you could see a very clear relationship between money and results, with the candidates who spent the most consistently winning races – after three rounds of electoral reform, the results from well and poorly funded candidates are very similar.

- Kerry Mitchell from Sunlight is pinch-hitting for Fedspending.org. It’s a project put together from OMBWatch which lets citizens investigate how federal money is spent, both in terms of federal contracts and grants. Useful data includes a table of top 100 contractors, with the ability to drill down and see whether these contracts are no-bid or transparent.

Here’s the rest of the post