Geeks Fighting Corruption

One of the things I’m really hopeful about is technology that can improve the transparency of government. Money is a corrupting influence in politics, but websites that track every campaign contribution, contract bid, earmark author, and the passage of every bill through its development give corrupt politicians and self-interested lobbyists nowhere to hide.  And that’s a good thing.  Sunlight, as Supreme Court Justice Louis Brandeis said, is the best disinfectant.

When Larry Lessig announced his campaign to end corruption in politics, he started encouraging hackers to attack this problem, to build websites and databases that lay bare the innerworkings of our politics. There are a few well-known projects in this area, like The Sunlight Foundation, Open Secrets, and followthemoney.org.  There’s also USASpending.gov, the website “where Americans can see where their money goes,” the product of a law co-sponsored by Barack Obama.

Recently on twitter I learned that Charlottesville provocateur and long-time friend Waldo Jaquith created and runs Richmond Sunlight, a one-man sunlight site to track Virginia state politics. On it, you can track the progress of bills and the activities of the legislators in the Virginia state congress. The site has no ads and no for-pay section and Waldo runs it purely because he believes in what he’s doing.

Running the site takes a huge amount of work, and a little money.  One of Richmond Sunlight’s most important features is the collection of videos of the Virginia General Assembly. To get these videos online, Waldo has to manually convert DVDs provided by the state into a format suitable for posting online.  It’s a lengthy process that involves OCRing parts of the video to extract bill numbers and legislator names to index and tag the videos properly.  He’s doing all this on his only computer — an aging Mac Mini.  And unbelievably, Waldo actually has to purchase these videos from the General Assembly.  And he has ambitious plans for the site.  Last night Waldo posted an appeal for resources to help him grow the project:

While hundreds of thousands of people have found the site very useful, I look at it and see unfulfilled promise. I want to rewrite Richmond Sunlight and give it away to a nonpartisan political group in every state in the union. I want to complete the API so that anybody can write software to interact with the Capital Sunlight in their own state (and let even more newspapers integrate it into their own websites). I want a Facebook application, I want daily podcasts, I want people recording secret subcommittee votes, I want to mash up the daily floor calendar with campaign finance data with minutes with video and create the most radical transparency a state legislature has ever seen.

Waldo is doing exactly what Larry Lessig is encouraging us all to do.  He’s dreaming big about open government.  But he needs help today to do the daily business of running Richmond Sunlight.  So, what do you say we pitch in to help a corruption-fighting geek in need?  If you’d like to help buy Waldo a new computer so that he can put these videos online faster without spending his whole weekend swapping discs and waiting for codecs to convert, visit his blog and drop him a line.