Sunlight’s Politiwidgets

The hard-working transparency advocates at the Sunlight Foundation have released a new suite of tools called Politiwidgets. Each tool in the 10-widget set is as easily customizable and embeddable by bloggers as searching for, resizing, and generating code for embedding a YouTube video.

The suite includes some interesting tools that haven’t really surfaced on the web in such customizable fashion, even if the data behind the tools have become available over the past couple of years through other projects like, for example, OpenSecrets.org. The list includes (with examples given for my representative in the U.S. House, Rep. Jim Cooper, D-TN 5th):

• Business Card. “Biographical and contact information for any lawmaker in Congress.” The tool also includes buttons that launch Cooper’s YouTube channel and OpenCongress.org profile. The code can be customized to display the representative or senator in the site visitor’s district or state, and you can freeze the widget from updating (so it doesn’t change if a seat changes hands):
  
• Vote Report. “See what a lawmaker voted on a particular bill, and how the vote went down.” When generating code here, all you need is a bill number:
  
• Top Contractors. “The top 5 federal contractors in a congressional district.” You can freeze the widget from updating, to represent results contextualized to a certain date:
  
• Sponsorships. “Some statistics on the bills a legislator has sponsored or cosponsored, relative to their colleagues.” Find out the number of bills the Member has sponsored and/or cosponsored, relative to the chamber average, and how many of those were enacted. You can also freeze the widget from updating:
  
• Campaign Contributions. “How much a particular person or organization contributed to a lawmaker, in the current election cycle.” The code can be customized to display the representative or senator in the site visitor’s district or state:
  
• Top Contributors. “The top 5 contributors to a lawmaker, in the current election cycle.” This includes corporate and individual donors:
  
• Earmarks.

“How many earmarks a lawmaker has received, relative to their colleagues.” Shows the number of earmarks received, including total dollar amounts, relative to the chamber average:


• Interest Group Ratings. “Rating received from a specific interest group.” Select from a drop-down list of 40 alphabetized, nationally-recognized interest groups, and then generate the code to see how the legislator fared (National Education Association shown here):
  
• District Map. “See a map of a legislator’s district.” This one is pretty self-explanatory, but is a neat feature all the same. Powered by Google Maps, you can zoom in almost to street level to really see where the boundaries of the district lie exactly:
  
• Party Time. “Past and upcoming fundraisers, courtesy of Party Time.” I suppose this one is for one’s inner-Salahi:
  

The release of the tools comes a bit late in the current campaign cycle, and here I am blogging about them on Election Day 2010. But this kind of technology will no doubt impact the policy making process just as much as the electoral process, and could be very important as we continue to learn more about Tea Party-backed candidates/new Members with very little national experience, exposure, or public personae. It will be very interesting to see how tools like this, particularly as political blogs continue to exert the kind of influence they now have relative to the early part of the century, continue to shape public discourse.