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Articles by Bob Lannon
Five charts on food industry influence
With the House set to battle First Lady Michelle Obama over school lunch nutrition regulations, as Peter Olsen-Phillips reports today, it’s a good time to put big ag influence in context. The multi-billion dollar food industry is one of the most well connected in Washington. These interests spend tens of millions on campaign contributions every election cycle, concentrating dollars on the members that serve on the agriculture committees, who make the decisions on the nation’s food policy.
One group dominates the second round of net neutrality comments | Sunlight Foundation
Editor’s note: Never in a million years would we have guessed at the response that this post would have generated. There is clearly a lot at stake about the future of the Internet. We understand the frustration of any group trying to engage the public in an arcane policymaking process, particularly when the process is flawed. Since posting our analysis, there have been reports that the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) now acknowledges that the data is incomplete.
National Day of Civic Hacking 2013 | Sunlight Foundation
This past weekend, over 11,000 individuals connected under the helm of the National Day of Civic Hacking (NDoCH) — a series of local #HackForChange hackathons, unconferences, and meeting of the minds that engaged local communities with open data, code, and tech. From what we can tell, the NDoCH events were magnetic, drawing together participation from local (and traveling) developers, government officials (including a few mayors!), community leaders, and even 21 federal agencies.
Political influence by county: A new way to look at campaign finance data
Some 30 percent of all the money raised in last year’s presidential election came from just 10 of the nation’s more than 3,000 counties, all of them in major metropolitan areas. But a high proportion of multi-millionaires placed a couple of sparsely populated Wyoming counties among the last election cycle’s highest per-capita givers.
OpenFEC API makes new itemized data available
This post is also available as an IPython notebook Not long after we released our initial how-to introducing the new OpenFEC API, the 18F team announced that they were making even more available. This made our day because they quickly ticked off two items from the wish list we published: endpoints for itemized data and per-contributor and per-recipient aggregates. This followup post introduces some of the new additions and why they're so important.
OpenFEC makes campaign finance data more accessible with new API: Here's how to get started
Big news in the campaign finance world: The Federal Election Commission (FEC) is taking a huge step forward by making data accessible through a modern API. With the help of a team of intrepid 18F developers, the FEC is rethinking both its website and its data offerings to better serve its mission of educating the public with real-time disclosure of campaign finance information.
OpenFEC makes campaign finance data more accessible with new API: Here’s how to get started
This blog post is also available as an IPython Notebook. Big news in the campaign finance world: The Federal Election Commission (FEC) is taking a huge step forward by making data accessible through a modern API. With the help of a team of intrepid 18F developers, the FEC is rethinking both its website and its data offerings to better serve its mission of educating the public with real-time disclosure of campaign finance information.
One group dominates the second round of net neutrality comments
Editor's note: Never in a million years would we have guessed at the response that this post would have generated. There is clearly a lot at stake about the future of the Internet. We understand the frustration of any group trying to engage the public in an arcane policymaking process, particularly when the process is flawed. Since posting our analysis, there have been reports that the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) now acknowledges that the data is incomplete.
Your submission is accepted: FEC’s digital gatekeeper bars few
The Federal Election Commission (FEC) has recently enlisted the help of an outside agency, the General Services Administration and its elite squad of civic techies called 18F, to overhaul its website and push the boundaries of open disclosure to new heights.
What can we learn from 800,000 public comments on the FCC's net neutrality plan?
On Aug. 5, the Federal Communications Commission announced the bulk release of the comments from its largest-ever public comment collection. We've spent the last three weeks cleaning and preparing the data and leveraging our experience in machine learning and natural language processing to try and make sense of the hundreds-of-thousands of comments in the docket.
What can we learn from 800,000 public comments on the FCC’s net neutrality plan?
Dig into the data If you’re interested in doing your own analysis with this data, you can download our cleaned-up versions below. On Aug. 5, the Federal Communications Commission [announced](http://sunlightfoundation.com/blog/2014/08/05/fcc-releases-open-internet-comments-in-bulk/) the bulk release of the comments from its largest-ever public comment collection.
Five charts on food industry influence
With the House set to battle First Lady Michelle Obama over school lunch nutrition regulations, as Peter Olsen-Phillips reports today, it's a good time to put big ag influence in context. The multi-billion dollar food industry is one of the most well connected in Washington. These interests spend tens of millions on campaign contributions every election cycle, concentrating dollars on the members that serve on the agriculture committees, who make the decisions on the nation’s food policy.
Explore gun influence state by state
As Nancy Watzman has detailed elsewhere in this series today, much of the activity in the gun debate happens at the state level, rather than in Congress. That's why the Sunlight Foundation created the chart below. It provides a state-by-state breakdown of contributions that interest groups on both sides have given to candidates for federal and state office.
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