From OpenCongress.org:
The RaceTracker project on the OpenCongress wiki tracks every election for the U.S. Senate, U.S. House of Representatives and state governor. RaceTracker is a free, open-source, fully-referenced, and non-partisan public resource. It is coordinated by the crew at the SwingStateProject.
Here’s what you can find:
• Candidates for each seat and their status
• Campaign contribution information
• District maps, past [...]
Archive of entries posted on June 2009
Project:RaceTracker
Energy Secretary Chu Embraces FOIA Policy
From Secrecy News:
The controversial idea of the “unitary executive” in which all executive power is vested in the President of the United States may be a coherent legal theory. But in reality, things don’t happen within the executive branch simply because the President commands them. In practice, what we have is a “fragmentary [...]
Immigrants’ files soon available
From the Topeka Capital-Journal:
Millions of files containing detailed information about U.S. immigrants — including their spouses’ names, as well as personal photographs and letters — will soon become available to the public through a federal facility in suburban Kansas City.
Historians and others say the records, called Alien Registration files, or A-files, provide insight on immigrants [...]
Data.gov Gets an update
From Sunlight Labs:
For those of you keeping an eye on the ball, working hard on your Apps for America 2 entries, I’ve got some great news for you: Data.gov has given itself a slight upgrade, adding a bunch more feeds. To compensate, Data.gov has turned itself into three subcatalogs: A raw data catalog, a tool [...]
Public Resource’s FedFlix digitizing hundreds of hours of gov video archives at no expense to tax payer
From Boing Boing:
Rogue archivist Carl Malamud sez,
“You may remember the FedFlix program from Public.Resource.Org. We got the National Technical Information Service (NTIS), a part of the U.S. Department of Commerce, to send a couple dozen videotapes every month. We digitized the tapes, and sent them back to the government with a DVD. No cost to [...]
White House Changes the Terms of a Campaign Pledge About Posting Bills Online
From the New York Times:
During the presidential campaign, Barack Obama promised that once a bill was passed by Congress, the White House would post it online for five days before he signed it. . .
. . . Five months into his administration, Mr. Obama has signed two dozen bills, but he has almost never waited [...]
Spacebook brings secure social networking to NASA
From Federal Computer Week:
NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center has developed a homegrown social-networking application that provides all NASA employees with the types of features found in Facebook but in a secure environment.
Spacebook, which offers user profiles, group collaboration tools and social bookmarking, is available through NASA’s intranet, according to Linda Cureton, Goddard’s chief information officer, [...]
Read the Bill Legislation Introduced in House
From Sunlight Foundation:
Reps. Baird and Culberson introduced legislation today that would shine more sunlight on the most fundamental work of Congress. Their bill, H. Res. 554, would require that all non-emergency legislation be posted online, in its final form, 72 hours before consideration. The bill is not a panacea for all that ails Congress, but [...]
Enhancing Online Citizen Participation Through Policy
From the White House blog:
Last week, Vivek Kundra and Katie Stanton talked about the efforts underway to introduce more Web 2.0 technologies to the federal government sites and to open more back-and-forth communication between the American people and the government. Some of this naturally requires the adoption of new approaches and innovative technologies. But another [...]
Ohio Governor Proposes Halving State Support; Many Libraries Could Close
From Library Journal:
Trying to close a $3.2 billion gap by June 30, Ohio Governor Ted Strickland today proposed “resiz[ing] state government in line with the shrinking economy,” prioritizing “extremely limited resources toward critical health and safety service,” and—though not saying so in his speech—severely cutting library aid.
Libraries in Ohio uniquely rely on state aid, rather [...]