Part-Time Policy Wonk

From Government Computer News:
Government Web managers beware: You might have some competition from advocacy groups and the general public. They might take your raw data feeds and build a site that could even be more alluring than your own.

From GoodJobsFirst.org:
While some states have created impressive websites to disseminate information about their share of the $787 billion American Recovery and Reinvestment Act (ARRA), most are failing to make effective use of online technology to educate taxpayers about the impact of economic stimulus spending. This is the finding of Show Us the Stimulus, a report [...]

From Federal Computer Week:
The federal Recovery.gov Web site now offers new mapping features that provide an overview of economic stimulus law spending by state, federal department and recipient.
The Recovery Accountability and Transparency Board on July 16 introduced a Web page on Recovery.gov with new and expanded mapping features. The maps show how much funding is [...]

From the National Journal:
The co-creator of the government accountability Web site StimulusWatch.org has launched a new project intended to make federal rulemakings easier for the public to access and offer comment. Jerry Brito, a senior research fellow at the Mercatus Center at George Mason University, recently unveiled OpenRegs.com, which takes the Federal Register’s daily XML [...]

From the Sunlight Foundation:
Sometimes you can get inspired by government. In our field it happens more than you’d think. Obviously all our new tools– new things like TransparencyCorps and Congrelate along with CapitolWords have been inspired by government to a degree, but there aren’t many ideas that we’ve actually stolen from government.
Today I’m happy to [...]

Every day, Congress relies more and more on the Internet to communicate with the world. Legistalker makes it easy for you to stay on top of what your elected officials say and how they vote.
Legistalker was created by Forum One Communications as an entry for the Apps for America competition. The ever-growing database is updated [...]

From the Sunlight Foundation:
Today, the Sunlight Foundation launched Transparency Corps, a Web service that enables citizens to help create greater government transparency by performing small, discrete tasks to analyze and enhance the usefulness of government data. Sunlight’s Transparency Corps aggregates simple actions—such as evaluating lawmakers’ earmark requests—that require human intelligence, but not specialized political knowledge.

From Sunlight Foundation:
We’ve decided to do something crazy. On Tuesday afternoon, someone handed us a copy of the Recovery.gov 2.0 RFP and we thought: what if we try something truly radical here. What if we opened up the process of government contracting by bidding on this thing? We together– not just we meaning The Sunlight [...]

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 [...]