Abstract
The Transparency Project is a collaborative effort to turn a variety of existing data sources about government activity into useful information for voters, legislators, lobbyists, reporters, and watchdogs. It builds analytical tools that turn mountains of discrete facts into intelligent reports and analysis. These reports reveal trends in campaign finance, connections between government employees and elected officials, relationships among 3rd party organizing activities on policy development, and other patterns. Underlying these tools is an XML schema to describe this universe of government-related data. As the Transparency Project grows, it can describe more data with its schema and its tools become wider-ranging. The Project aims to involve creators and consumers of government data in developing and standardizing on its schema. This presentation gives an overview of some tools that the Transparency Project has built, shows how interested producers or users of relevant data can become involved, and illustrates the benefits of the Transparency Project to voters as well as people at all levels of government. |
