Last Friday I coworked with tech blogger Shannon Clark and others at Citizen Space. On my way out, I found this great little postcard from the Sunlight Foundation listing the top sites in the transparency ecosystem. As the card says, the Sunlight Foundation is, "committed to helping citizens, bloggers and journalists be their own best watchdog." Here's their list, which is U.S. focused. If you know of similar resources for other countries, please share them in comments.
Capitolwords.org - A mini-site and widgets that displays the most frequently spoken words in Congress.
Congresspedia.org - An online, wiki-based citizens' encyclopedia on Congress and federal legislation (since publication, Congresspedia has moved here).
EarmarkWatch.org - Gives citizens the power to easily research and evaluate the pet projects favored and funded by lawmakers.
FedSpending.org - A free, searchable database of federal grants and contracts created by OMB Watch.
FollowTheMoney.org - The premiere source of data on money in state politics features searchable databases for all 50 states.
Fortune535.org - Running the numbers on congressional wealth to see how much, or how little, lawmakers' net worth has grown.
GovernmentDocs.org - A searchable, online compendium of documents acquired through the Freedom of Information Act.
LOUISdb.org - a searchable, cross-referenced collection of over 300,000 official documents from seven sets of federal documents.
MAPLight.org - Track the day by day, vote by vote, impact of political contributions at the federal level.
Metavid.org - An open source, searchable, online video archive of footage from the Senate and House floor since January 2006.
OpenCongress.org - Bringing together official government information with news and blog coverage to give you the real story behind what's happening in Congress.
OpenSecrets.org - The premiere source of data on money in national politics from the Center for Responsive Politics.
PublicMarkup.org - Sunlight's experiments in collaborating online with the public to draft legislation.
Speechology.org - Watch and evaluate the truthfulness of key political speeches, congressional testimony and campaign advertisments.
TheOpenHouseProject.com - Working to identify areas where Congress can improve access to relevant and timely information.
Thumbnail image courtesy of the Sunlight Foundation.
Comments
Neal Gorenflo wrote on 11.17.09, 2:37pm:
Thanks for the govtrack.us site, it's both an open source and open knowledge resource. Cool.
Here's a site that tracks EU agriculture subsidies: http://farmsubsidy.org. Apparently, ag subsidies are 40% of the EU's budget and outraged the public when the data was made available.
govtrack.us