A significant step forward was taken today in the continuing effort to make it easier for citizens to get as much data as possible about campaign finance, lobbying and government contracting.
The Sunlight Foundation used this year’s edition of the Personal Democracy Forum gathering in New York to take the wraps off its new site, Transparencydata.com.
Transparencydata.com brings together in one place access to multiple databases covering federal and state campaign contributions, federal lobbyists registrations, and federal contracting.
Previously, it was necessary to go to multiple sites to get at such data, and those sites varied widely in terms of ease of use, scope of coverage and other factors.
As an example of what the new site can provide, check out this search result indicating political campaign contributions by BP, a company that has been very much in the news of late.
The new site is in beta form at the moment, so take advantage of the opportunity to make suggestions for improvements, enhancements, etc.
“Sunlight created TransparencyData.com as a sort of ‘Data Commons’ to help anyone keep track of who’s trying to influence politicians in Washington and in their home state,” said Ellen Miller, co-founder and executive director of the Sunlight Foundation. “We built it with the political data expert in mind, focusing on making it easy to query political donation and lobbying information and then walk away with a spreadsheet of the data you need.”
Sunlight will continue to add to TransparencyData.com, and expects federal contracts to comprise the site’s next major data set. It encourages developers to build new applications based on the TransparencyData.com Application Programming Interface (API).
The Sunlight Foundation works on a variety of fronts to increase transparency in government, campaigns and other public policy fields.
