The most excellent Tumblr of the Sunlight Foundation
The 10 Best Biking Cities in America
via FastCompany:
Biking map site BikeScore has released a new ranking of the country’s best cities for biking, accounting for factors like bike lanes, hilliness, route options, and number of commuters. How does your city rank?
Why does the IRS regulate political groups? A look at the complex world of campaign finance
Policy stalls as campaign spending by fossil fuel industries and greenhouse gases rise to historic levels.
More: http://reporting.sunlightfoundation.com/2013/whats-wrong-picture-greenhouse-gas-all-time-high/
Why did four key Democrats vote no on extending gun background checks?
Back in February, we at Sunlight made some predictions about the Democrats who would be most likely to oppose some tightening of gun laws, based on three factors: being up for a vote in 2014, having a high number of gun businesses in the state, and having a low Obama vote share.
Based on the data, we thought Sens. Max Baucus, Mark Begich, Tim Johnson and Mark Pryor were most likely to vote ‘no’ on reform. We got 3/4 correct.
More here.
Shining a light on DC campaign finance
Over the last two years, money from 47 other states has poured into DC municipal contests, raising intriguing questions about what interest contributors might have in races where the debate often centers around parking restrictions, charter schools and creating dog parks. Our analysis shows that contributions from outside DC made up 30 percent of the funding used to fuel local political campaigns.
We’ve just added several years worth of D.C. campaign finance data into Influence Explorer. Dig in here.
What does tax lobbying look like in the 112th Congress?
Our visualization of the vast network of tax lobbying clearly shows clusters emerging around different sectors of the economy. We detect at least 15 distinct lobbying clusters. The densest thickets of activity center around: electricity generation; renewable energy; finance; and the high-tech industry.
While MLB players will be taking the field for Sunday’s and Monday’s opening day games in hopes of winning a World Series title in October, team owners may have their sights set on winning a different sort of Fall Classic.
According to data from Sunlight’s Influence Explorer, MLB organizations pumped in over $24 million to politicians, PACs and independent expenditure groups throughout the 2012 election cycle.
FYI, Washington: Sunlight now has a transparency drone.
As Congress inches toward major immigration legislation, a new Sunlight Foundation analysis (based on almost 8,000 lobbying reports) offers a comprehensive and interactive guide to the web of interests with something at stake.
The magnified images of several clusters display heavy lobbying interactions between related special interest groups (white circles) and the immigration issues and legislation they have frequently sought to influence (colored circles).
This graphic, researched and produced by Sunlight Foundation’s Zander Furnas and Nancy Watzman, shows a complex web of influence by financial heavy hitters whom Mary Jo White, President Obama’s designee to chair the Securities and Exchange Commission, represented in her private law practice. The green nodes represent corporate campaign donors. Other nodes represent Senate Banking Committee members who benefitted from contributions from the companies political action committees and/or their employees. Red nodes designate Republican members of the Banking Committee; blue nodes are for Democrats.
The list of donors and recipients were downloaded from the Sunlight Foundation’s Influence Explorer. You can see the complete list here.
Open States: Transparency Report Card
Today we’re making available our Transparency Report Card, a byproduct of the work we did in producing Open States.
As we started thinking about how to approach cities across the US, we had to think about where to focus our effort and attention. Should we focus on a few key, well-known cities who set the strongest examples of developing transparency and open data reforms? Should we narrow down the list to only the biggest, say, 10 cities, or break them into categories by size?
It turns out that most U.S. cities are far smaller than you might think. More than 80 percent of U.S. cities have fewer than 10,000 people. The scope and kinds of data housed in these cities might be vastly different from the data in a metropolis like Los Angeles, with its more than 3 million people in the city limits alone.
Why gun control faces an uphill battle in the Senate
As the Senate prepares to take up the first major gun control debate since last December’s shooting massacre in Connecticut, a Sunlight Foundation analysis of the political pressures on 26 key senators paints a pessimistic picture for passage.
Absent a major pressure campaign to push senators to support gun control legislation, the political calculus points against the Senate passing any reform.
Making Melodies out of Scraped Treasury Data at Datafest
At this weekend’s bicoastal Datafest hackathon, participants developed a stunning array of tools for transparency. We saw a map of Silicon Valley campaign contributions and located lawmakers skipping out on Capitol Hill votes in our Party Time database.
The FMS Symphony entry was one of the top prize winners in New York, and voted best in show by the audience at both Stanford and Columbia. Data analysts partnered with journalists from Reuters, the New York Times, the Huffington Post and the Daily Beast to scrape eight years of otherwise unparsable balance sheets that the U.S. Treasury issues every day to “create the first-ever electronically searchable database of the Federal government’s daily cash spending and borrowing.”
CSV Soundsystem, as the group puckishly dubbed itself, turned this into revealing data visualizations to illustrate its findings. The team literally made music of its work, interpreting the data in sound:
“Chords were selected based on the derivative of account balance, and a melody was composed based on the federal interest rate. We also included a contrapuntal riff driven by the distance between accumulated federal debt and the legal debt ceiling,” the team wrote.
How Sitegeist used great design to make census data cool
How can a design firm and a non-profit focusing on government transparency come together and make data look cool? The Sunlight Foundation and designers from IDEO teamed up to create Sitegeist, an app using location-based data to help you understand where you are.
