Just Give us the Earmark Data

The American people want to control earmarks, and we want to help them do that. Earmarkdata.org is where we're organizing to get the data we need, in the formats we can use, to deliver earmark transparency. To get involved read on, check out our blog, sign the petition, and if you're a developer, please help us complete the data model. We'll soon be presenting it to Congress and the White House—our way of saying "just give us the earmark data!"

Earmarks are instructions in congressional spending bills that senators and representatives use to direct federal funds to special projects in their districts. Many question the practice of putting earmarks in spending bills, and some would go as far as to ban them entirely. But there's a clear consensus that earmarks should get more public oversight. There should be more transparency around earmarks and the spending process.

During his campaign, President Obama said, "[A]bsolutely, we need earmark reform. And when I'm president, I will go line by line to make sure that we are not spending money unwisely."

To facilitate public oversight, in early 2009, the House andSenate appropriations committees required representatives and senators to disclose their earmark requests online. This was a big step forward, but it left earmark information spread out across disparate parts of congressional Web sites, and in many different formats.

So in the summer of 2009, WashingtonWatch.com (with support from the Sunlight Foundation) created a system for compiling earmark data in one place and sponsored a contest encouraging the public to crowdsource earmark data. Ordinary Americans demonstrated their desire to control earmarks, collecting more than 40,000 earmarks in the WashingtonWatch.com earmark database.

The effort caught the attention of the White House, and last August the Office of Management and Budget announced that it would begin tracking earmarks during the fiscal year 2011 budget cycle.

In his State of the Union speech, President Obama followed up on the demand for earmark transparency, saying "Tonight, I'm calling on Congress to publish all earmark requests on a single website before there's a vote so that the American people can see how their money is being spent." A fact sheet put out by the White House said: "It's time for a comprehensive, bipartisan, state-of-the-art disclosure database that allows Americans to examine the details of every proposed earmark before a vote is taken—one that is fully searchable and otherwise user-friendly."

It is time for state-of-the-art disclosure of earmarks. To advance that project we are developing the technical instructions that describe how that data should look—a data schema for earmark disclosure. The team at Dancing Mammoth, who produced the database behind the WashingtonWatch.com project, have produced a data schema that they think will capture all the information that describes the "earmark ecosystem."

Now we need your help.

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