Some of the most exciting projects we (and I mean, TPM and a large group of regular readers) have done over the years would never have been possible without the Internet’s distributed communication tools and the various fee-based (Nexis) and public databases (google, fec.gov) we’d never have ready access to with the Net. Add all that social networking and information together and you get a big leap forward in what you can find out and what you can do about it.
It’s easy to forget the remarkable amount
of information on campaign money available at your fingertips through sites like fec.gov or opensecrets.org. But hard money contributions only scratch the surface of what you need to know. You could do so much more if more infromation were so easily accessible and even more if there were better ways to get the different collections of data to, shall we say, talk to each other. Some’s in VHS, other in Betamax, still others in DVD, and of course a lot is just on paper. Not literally, but you get the idea — too many ways of packaging and slicing and dicing the info and no one place or standard for accessing all of it together.
Just for example, some very interesting patterns would pop out if you could cross-tabulate campaign contributions with government contracts. Toss in travel records and lobbying expenditures and it would be even better. (It is a rarefied temptation, I grant you. But presumably more than a few of this site’s readers have the addiction.)
In one example I always come back to, all Marcus Stern did to break open the Duke Cunningham story was look at the records of his home sale and then match the buyer up with Duke’s earmarking largesse. It was sitting there in plain sight. Someone just had to know where to look.
Anyway, getting all this information out there and more, shall we say, google-able, is a task that takes a lot of resources and organizational heft. On the social networking level this is some of what we’ve been trying to do with TPM and TPMCafe’s Auction House which evolved into TPMmuckraker.com. But a whole lot more resources and organizational work and tech know-how would be necessary to really make it happen — to get the data online and query-able in an organized way.. And that’s what Ellen Miller is now doing at the Sunlight Foundation, which just launched last week.
Ellen has a post over at her Sunlight blog about what they’re trying to do. So if this sort of reformist sleuthing interests you go take a look at what Ellen and the Sunlight crew are planning, and get involved.
