Certification - October 2008 - (Page 22)

raised, who contributed to the campaign and how the candidate spent those funds. “I look at information technology, here at the Federal Election Commission, to act as a facilitator and to make it easy for people to become educated on the campaign finance process,” said Alec Palmer, chief information officer and co-privacy officer. “The easier that we can make it for the individuals doing research, or for the general citizen from just a point of curiosity, the better off the democratic process.” MAPLight.org is another example of improved transparency. This particular nonprofit uses three data- The first component of the example generator is how each member of Congress votes on every bill. To get this information, MAPLight uses GovTrack.us, an automated service that polls the Library of Congress site every 15 minutes to determine whether any recent votes or changes have been made. GovTrack. us then “downloads those changes, parses it into a structured format and then MAPLight imports” that information into its MySQL database, Newman said. The second component of MAPLight’s research is the campaign money that’s given to each member of Congress, a record of which is filed with the FEC. The Center for Responsive Politics — a nonprofit research group — takes that information, processes and analyzes it, and then classifies each contribution into one of 400 industry denominations (e.g., oil company, environmental group). Once a month, after the candidates have filed their reports, MAPLight imports the data from the Center for Responsive Politics. The third and final component is collected in-house through intense manual research. MAPLight’s research team selects a bill and reads the congressional testimony about that bill. If any of the speakers came out in support or opposition of the bill, the researchers log into the back-end Web database, make a note of which organization the speaker represented, whether the speaker was a supporter or opponent and the source for that information. This process is repeated with news databases and Internet searches. “The easier that we can make it for the individuals doing research, or for the general citizen from just a point of curiosity, the better off the democratic process.” – Alec Palmer, CIO, Federal Election Commission bases of information to illustrate the connection between campaign contributions and how legislators vote. “The hundreds of millions of dollars that politicians raise to run their campaigns often comes from interest groups that have a stake in legislation,” Newman said. “Even though many people know this general concept, there was not much information out there on the specifics of how money influences legislation. So [we] set out to build what would be a continuous example generator of how money influences our political system.” In the end, these three sources work together on the site to provide information such as which organizations gave money to which politicians, how those politicians voted on specific bills and whether there’s a connection between the money given and how the politician voted. “All of this information would have taken days, if not weeks, to collect and analyze before MAPLight.org came along,” Newman said. “What [you] see that you could never see before is how money correlates with the votes.” For this upcoming presidential election, MAPLight also has downloadable, customizable widgets that can compare funds raised by Sen. Barack Obama 22 CERTIFICATION MAGAZINE October 2008 http://www.GovTrack.us http://www.MAPLight.org http://www.opensecrets.org/ http://www.MAPLight.org

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Certification - October 2008 Editor's Letter Contents Data Stream Virtual Village Tech Careers Dear Techie Troubleshooting Academic Connection What We Like Look Ahead Elect IT: Technology and the Democratic Process Managing Relationships in the Nonprofit Realm Interface VoIP Technician: Answering the Call of the Network Inside Certification Ad Index Endtag

Certification - October 2008

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