Sunlight Labs

Recently and continuously, the White House has been releasing the "White House Visitor Logs," showing America who is coming in to meet with the President and his staff. At the same time, the Center for Responsive Politics releases cleaned up data on lobbyist filings. We thought it'd be interesting to find the intersect between the names in both sets of data.

After the jump, you'll find our results along relevant information from both sets of data. Now-- this is important: just because the names match doesn't mean they're the same person. Because the White House doesn't release any other form of identity information besides the name, we're unable to tell whether or not the name in one dataset actually refers to the same person in the other. John Adams in one dataset may be a different John Adams in another.

Why your non-profit stands to benefit from Open Data

Often times at Sunlight the non-profit community looks at us strangely. Here in Washington, DC we've probably made more investments in technology than any other non-profit or advocacy organization I've run across. Certainly our mission is focused around the use of technology, so that makes a lot of sense-- we're focused on getting data out of government, doing interesting things with it, and letting you see what happens in Washington better. That means technology investment.

But one question I struggle with is: why doesn't every non-profit advocate for open data from the Government? Don't ALL of them stand to benefit?

Following up on my hypothetical post on what would happen if Government had done the same thing that Google did with Google Buzz, I'd like to imagine something different: what if something like Google Buzz happened to government? What if, out of nowhere, the Executive Branch of government started exposing the most frequent contacts of each Senate Confirmed appointee based on their email inboxes? What would happen if we could, for instance, pull up Rahm Emmanuel's "Buzz" profile and see who he followed and who was following him, based not on his preferences, but based on the frequency of email contacts alone?

Despite the recent explosion of web based cartography tools, making effective maps for data visualization remains a challenge. While tools like Google Maps are great for helping navigate the world they fail terribly at data presentation tasks. Many features like roads and cities only get in the way of telling compelling stories with data. In fact, even the distance between places can be a distraction – who cares how far away Alaska is when the goal is to make a simple comparison between US states?

To overcome some of the limitations with existing mapping tools, Sunlight Lab is releasing ClearMaps, an ActionScript framework for interactive cartographic visualization. In addition to giving designers and developers total control over presentation the project aims to address some of the common technical challenges faced when building interactive, data driven maps for the web. ClearMaps is designed as a lightweight, flexible set of tools for building complex data visualizations. It is a framework not a plug-and-play component (though it could be a starting point for those wishing to make reusable tools).