PressThink: Spouse on Campaign Payroll? Sunlight's New Tool

Spouse on Campaign Payroll? Sunlight's New Tool

"It takes less than five minutes to investigate whether a given member of Congress has a wife or husband on the payroll. This is because the relevant data bases have been combined and adapted to make it extremely simple to check for spouses as payees in campaign expenditures."

Don’t miss Sunlight’s latest adventure in networked journalism: “a new distributed research and reporting project that will enable citizen journalists to find out how many members of the House of Representatives have their spouses on the payroll.” The campaign payroll, that is.

The practice is not illegal. It is questionable, but it can’t be questioned unless the public knows about it. “Members who hire spouses to work on their campaigns pay them from the campaign contributions they raise from special interests— in effect, allowing their political fundraising to add to their personal income,” said the press release from Sunlight.

Ease-of-use is the innovation. It takes less than five minutes to investigate whether a given member of Congress has a wife or husband on the payroll. This is because the relevant data bases have been combined and adapted to make it extremely simple to check for spouses as payees in campaign expenditures. I checked into my Congressman, Jerrold Nadler, and his wife, Joyce Miller. They appear clean. Thus I did my part.

Sunlight—a funder of NewAssignment.Net—is going to add a Senate spouse project soon. Bill Allison explains:

It would take a single reporter weeks to amass that kind of information, but with a distributed reporting model, if we have enough volunteers taking on a handful of members each, we can get this done in a matter of days. At the end of the process, we’ll have a sentence that reads, “Of 435 Members of the House of Representatives, 63 have hired their spouses to work their campaigns, paying them $1.5 million from campaign contributions in the 2006 campaign cycle.” We’ll be able to point to those members who pay their spouses the most money, uncovering information that right now isn’t available to the public. We might even find some outrageous excesses.

Without the combined databases and easy interfaces it would take a single reporter weeks, that’s true. But if a single reporter had the tool that Sunlight Labs developed it would take about three days (21 hours) of work. Not impossible, but perhaps unlikely. Plus journalism has never had that kind of R & D capacity.

Micah Sifrey, a consultant to Sunlight, told me that two hours after the tool launched, 77 members had been checked out. As I write this (Saturday morning) the project page shows that it’s up to 265 members of the 435. (Update: the work finished on Sunday. See “After Matter” below.)

“Future projects will investigate children of members who work for political campaigns, relatives of members who work for political action committees and for fundraising firms, and relatives of members who are registered to lobby Congress,” writes Allison. “Working together, I’m hoping we can develop a citizen journalist news room of volunteers digging into members and thinking about how to do it better—how to use the Web to bring greater accountability to members of Congress.”

A few observations of my own:

It appears from Bill Allison’s progress report that a few dedicated volunteers have done way more than their share. That fits what we know from other online projects. (See the one percent rule.)

For those people I think one key to their involvement will be the challenge of it. In most cases ease-of-use will increase participation. But for highly motivated volunteers, the work has to be more like sluething, or a game where you are overcoming obstacles and testing your skills. Highly absorbing online environments tend to have that “game” quality about them, which is something Sunlight labs should take into account.

What about the challengers to House incumbents? In fairness, shouldn’t they be investigated too? I don’t say this invalidates the project but it is something to address. The laws of practicality (“the only data we have is…”) and the rules of fairness may not coincide.

When I was checking out my Congressman I realized that if Joyce Miller had a consulting or catering firm that wasn’t in her name, Jerrold Nadler could be paying her. Thus the bottom line question I helped to answer, “Does it appear that Joyce Miller (spouse of Jerrold Nadler) works for the Jerrold Nadler campaign?” (No) is not a definitive answer. Sunlight should probably note this.

The tool that Sunlight created combines two skills that rarely go together: geekery and ease-of-use. It takes good geekery to bring databases together and make them accessible online. It takes writing skills, a certain elegance in language and a natural empathy with “ordinary” users to make a tool simple to use. Geeks, being power users themselves, often lack that last element. Good design and powerful technology are not inimical to one another—see Apple’s history—but unless you put a lot of thought into it you aren’t going to get both. Innovation in distributed reporting will depend heavily on the ergonomics.

In future projects, I would urge Sunlight to put a little extra thought and ingenuity into how the individual volunteer can see the connection between his or her small part and the progress of the “big” project. Making that connection clear and visible—and tracking it over time—helps a lot. I think people are far more likely to contribute if they can see what’s left to be done, how others are doing, etc. This is because part of my motivation to help is the hope and expectation I have that others will do the same. But how do I know I’m right?

It’s called Find out if Congress is a Family Business. Try the tool yourself and let me know what you think in the comments.

After Matter: Notes, reactions & links…

Bill Allison updates on Oct. 8, two days after launch:

Incredible!—in less than two days, a virtual investigative team dug through campaign finance records for 435 current members of Congress, trying to find out of they paid their spouses from campaign funds. There were 24 of us (myself included—I looked up six members) who left our names, and 83 members investigated by anonymous researchers. I’m not sure whether that’s actually 83 individual researchers, or one very industrious but bashful person, or some total in between, but our tech folksshould be able to give us some idea of what the actual number of participants was.
Of those who did leave their names, our huge thanks go out to KCinDC who investigated 155 House members, Beezling who looked into 116, VaAntirepublican who did 24, Cosmo with 10, Rybesh with 9, plus a bunch who chipped in with five or fewer…

Ellen Miller, executive ditrector of Sunlight: “Anyone who believes that citizens don’t want to get involved in monitoring what their representiatives do here in Washington has just been proven wrong.”

Bill Allison in the comments:

With more arduous research, maybe the solution is to split up the work: Some people could track down the names of, say, the sons- and daughters-in-law of members of Congress, while others cross check those names against lobbyist registrations, while a third group of volunteers contacts the firms and verifies the information, all of which is updated and filled in on a grid that anyone can visit to see how research is progressing. Of course there’d be overlap—people doing tasks one and two or two and three or all three—but there’d also be the opportunity for someone who just wanted to do something relatively simple, like searching for names in a lobbying database, to make an important and crucial contribution.

I think that’s the way to go. Make it easy for a lot to contribute a little, and a few to contribute a lot.

More Sunlight: A Red Letter Day for Transparency. New searchable database for all government contracts and for what members of Congress own, including what stock they own.

Janet Eden, who hangs out at Daniel Conover’s Xark site, in comments: “Look no further than World of Warcraft to be convinced that people will spend hours on activitities that overcome obstacles and test skills. Hours. That could be beneficial for both the gathering and dissemination of data.”

Dan Gillmor and I have worked with Lisa Williams to give birth to Placeblogger.com, which Lisa (author of H20Town) will operate. It was her idea. Check out her post about it here, and Poynter’s E-media blog on it here. Hasn’t launched yet, but I think it’s going to be a kick-ass site and all the placebloggers around the U.S. will love it. Lisa writes:

Placeblogs reveal a fiercely non-generic America that’s not about national big-box retailers, and they don’t feature the kind of broad, blunt coverage that results from driving by communities at highway speed, or flying overhead. There’s little Red vs. Blue America or fad coverage here. They show America at the level of detail you get at a walking pace.

Jakob Nielsen on Participation Inequality: “In most online communities, 90% of users are lurkers who never contribute, 9% of users contribute a little, and 1% of users account for almost all the action.”

Why does Wall Street hate newspapers so much? asks Doc Seals. “Simple: Because newspapers are a rusty industry. They have tail fins. They print lists of readers every day on the obituary page. Worse, as a class they are resolutely clueless about how to adapt to a world that is increasingly networked and self-informing. And Wall Street knows that.” Doc goes on to list ten things newspapers should do to get with it. They’re all dead on, in my opinion.

Sean Coon reports on my visit to the Greensboro News & Record to discuss NewAssignment.Net with bloggers and journalists in town. Part of my fall swing through North Carolina.

Aaron Barlow at Daily Kos… Journalists: Look to Your Future.

n the 1990s, when people like “Buzz” Merritt and Jay Rosen tried to develop another model for the news business, they were shot down by many of the people within, people who cried that “civic journalism” transgressed on the ethical integrity (among other things) of journalists….
Merritt and Rosen are right when they say that journalism must find a new model-or one will be found for it and the older news media entities will go the way of the dinosaur. The problem is that few people inside journalism are willing to put in the work, the study, necessary to finding a way to redesign their profession.

There are some; and I do hear from them. According to reports from Jeff Jarvis, who is at the Online News Association annual conference, they’re starting to get it.

Daniel Conover: It’s the tools, stupid. “Don’t tell me how the media needs to change: Tell me what tool you can build that will give people the power to bring order to data in credible, meaningful, real-time ways.”

Tish Grier at the Constant Observer says we should extend our sense of hyperlocal journalism. “My sense of neighborhood and of friends is one more of affinity and expertise than of geography. Therefore, I am committing an act of ‘hyperlocal’ journalism (citizen or professional) when I am writing about the places/spaces/sensibilities on the Internet that I know just as well as I know the shortest route to the Chicopee Wal-Mart and my neighbor’s first name.”

Brent Cunningham at CJR Daily: “More than ever we need the press to lead the debate.”

Posted by Jay Rosen at October 7, 2006 11:28 AM Print

The People Formerly Known as the Audience: "You don't own the eyeballs. You don't own the press, which is now divided into pro and amateur zones. You don't control production on the new platform, which isn't one-way. There's a new balance of power between you and us." More...

Migration Point for the Press Tribe: "Like reluctant migrants everywhere, the people in the news tribe have to decide what to take with them. When to leave. Where to land. They have to figure out what is essential to their way of life. They have to ask if what they know is portable." More...

Bloggers vs. Journalists is Over: "Here is one advantage bloggers have in the struggle for reputation-- for the user's trust. They are closer to the transaction where trust gets built up on the Web. There's a big difference between tapping a built-up asset, like the St. Pete Times 'brand,' and creating it from scratch." More...

"Where's the Business Model for News, People?" "It’s remarkable to me how many accomplished producers of those goods the future production of which is in doubt are still at the stage of asking other people, “How are we going to pay our reporters if you guys don’t want to pay for our news?'" More...

National Explainer: A Job for Journalists on the Demand Side of News This American Life's great mortgage crisis explainer, The Giant Pool of Money, suggests that "information" and "explanation" ought to be reversed in our order of thought. Especially as we contemplate new news systems. More...

The Beast Without a Brain: Why Horse Race Journalism Works for Journalists and Fails Us. "Just so you know, 'the media' has no mind. It cannot make decisions. Which means it does not 'get behind' candidates. It does not decide to oppose your guy… or gal. It is a beast without a brain. Most of the time, it doesn’t know what it’s doing.." More...

They're Not in Your Club but They Are in Your League: Firedoglake at the Libby Trial: "I’m just advising Newsroom Joe and Jill: make room for FDL in your own ideas about what’s coming on, news-wise. Don’t let your own formula (blog=opinion) fake you out. A conspiracy of the like minded to find out what happened when the national news media isn’t inclined to tell us might be way more practical than you think." More...

Twilight of the Curmudgeon Class: "We’re at the twilight of the curmudgeon class in newsrooms and J-schools. (Though they can still do a lot of damage.) You know they’re giving up when they no longer bother to inform themselves about what they themselves say is happening." More...

Getting the Politics of the Press Right: Walter Pincus Rips into Newsroom Neutrality "The important thing is to show integrity-- not to be a neuter, politically. And having good facts that hold up is a bigger advantage than claiming to reflect all sides equally well." More...

A Most Useful Definition of Citizen Journalism "It's mine, but it should be yours. Can we take the quote marks off now? Can we remove the 'so-called' from in front? With video!." More...

The Master Narrative in Journalism: "Were 'winning' to somehow be removed or retired as the operating system for news, campaign reporting would immediately become harder to do, not because there would be no news, but rather no common, repeatable instructions for deciding what is a key development in the story, a turning point, a surprise, a trend. Master narratives are thus harder to alter than they are to apprehend. For how do you keep the story running while a switch is made?" More...

He Said, She Said Journalism: Lame Formula in the Land of the Active User "Any good blogger, competing journalist or alert press critic can spot and publicize false balance and the lame acceptance of fact-free spin. Do users really want to be left helpless in sorting out who's faking it more? The he said, she said form says they do, but I say decline has set in." More...

Users-Know-More-than-We-Do Journalism: "It's a "put up or shut up" moment for open source methods in public interest reporting. Can we take good ideas like... distributed knowledge, social networks, collaborative editing, the wisdom of crowds, citizen journalism, pro-am reporting... and put them to work to break news?" More...

Introducing NewAssignment.Net: "Enterprise reporting goes pro-am. Assignments are open sourced. They begin online. Reporters working with smart users and blogging editors get the story the pack wouldn't, couldn't or didn't." More...

What I Learned from Assignment Zero "Here are my coordinates for the territory we need to be searching. I got them from doing a distributed trend story with Wired.com and thinking through the results." More...

If Bloggers Had No Ethics Blogging Would Have Failed, But it Didn't. So Let's Get a Clue: "Those in journalism who want to bring ethics to blogging ought to start with why people trust (some) bloggers, not with an ethics template made for a prior platform operating as a closed system in a one-to-many world." More...

The View From Nowhere: "Occupy the reasonable middle between two markers for 'vocal critic,' and critics look ridiculous charging you with bias. Their symmetrical existence feels like proof of an underlying hysteria. Their mutually incompatible charges seem to cancel each other out. The minute evidence they marshall even shows a touch of fanaticism." More...

Rollback: "This White House doesn't settle for managing the news--what used to be called 'feeding the beast'--because there is a larger aim: to roll back the press as a player within the executive branch, to make it less important in running the White House and governing the country." More...

Retreat from Empiricism: On Ron Suskind's Scoop: ""Realist, a classic term in foreign policy debates, and reality-based, which is not a classic term but more of an instant classic, are different ideas. We shouldn't fuzz them up. The press is capable of doing that because it never came to terms with what Suskind reported in 2004." More...

Karl Rove and the Religion of the Washington Press: "Savviness--that quality of being shrewd, practical, well-informed, perceptive, ironic, 'with it,' and unsentimental in all things political--is, in a sense, their professional religion. They make a cult of it. And it was this cult that Karl Rove understood and exploited for political gain." More...

Journalism Is Itself a Religion: "We're headed, I think, for schism, tumult and divide as the religion of the American press meets the upheavals in global politics and public media that are well underway. Changing around us are the terms on which authority can be established by journalists. The Net is opening things up, shifting the power to publish around. Consumers are becoming producers, readers can be writers." More...

News Turns from a Lecture to a Conversation: "Some of the pressure the blogs are putting on journalists shows up, then, in the demand for "news as conversation," more of a back-and-forth, less of a pronouncement. This is an idea with long roots in academic journalism that suddenly (as in this year) jumped the track to become part of the news industry's internal dialogue." More...

Two Washington Posts May Be Better Than One: "They're not equals, but Washington and Arlington have their own spheres. Over the newspaper and reporting beats Len Downie is king. Over the website Jim Brady is sovereign. Over the userï¿½s experience no one has total control. There's tension because there's supposed to be tension." More...

Laying the Newspaper Gently Down to Die: "An industry that won't move until it is certain of days as good as its golden past is effectively dead, from a strategic point of view. Besides, there is an alternative if you don't have the faith or will or courage needed to accept reality and deal. The alternative is to drive the property to a profitable demise." More...

Grokking Woodward: "Woodward and Bernstein of 1972-74 didn't have such access, and this probably influenced--for the better--their view of what Nixon and his men were capable of. Watergate wasn't broken by reporters who had entree to the inner corridors of power. It was two guys on the Metro Desk." More...

Maybe Media Bias Has Become a Dumb Debate: "This here is a post for practically everyone in the game of seizing on media bias and denouncing it, which is part of our popular culture, and of course a loud part of our politics. And this is especially for the 'we're fair and balanced, you're not' crowd, wherever I may have located you." More...

Bill O'Reilly and the Paranoid Style in News: "O'Reilly feeds off his own resentments--the establishment sneering at Inside Edition--and like Howard Beale, the 'mad prophet of the airwaves,' his resentments are enlarged by the medium into public grievances among a mass of Americans unfairly denied voice." More...

Thoughts on the Killing of a Young Correspondent: "Among foreign correspondents, there is a phrase: 'parachuting in.' That's when a reporter drops into foreign territory during an emergency, without much preparation, staying only as long as the story remains big. The high profile people who might parachute in are called Bigfoots in the jargon of network news. The problem with being a Bigfoot, of course, is that it's hard to walk in other people's shoes." More...

The News From Iraq is Not Too Negative. But it is Too Narrow: "The bias charges are getting more serious lately as the stakes rise in Iraq and the election. But there is something lacking in press coverage, and it may be time for wise journalists to assess it. The re-building story has gone missing. And without it, how can we judge the job Bush is doing?." More...

The Abyss of Observation Alone. "There are hidden moral hazards in the ethic of neutral observation and the belief in a professional 'role' that transcends other loyalties. I think there is an abyss to observation alone. And I feel it has something to do with why more people don't trust journalists. They don't trust that abyss." More...

"Find Some New Information and Put it Into Your Post." Standards for Pro-Am Journalism at OffTheBus: "Opinion based on information 'everyone' has is less valuable than opinion journalism based on information that you dug up, originated, or pieced together. So it’s not important to us that contributors keep opinion out. What’s important is that they put new information in. More...

Out in the Great Wide Open: Maybe you heard about the implosion of Wide Open, a political blog started by the Cleveland Plain Dealer with four "outside" voices brought in from the ranks of Ohio bloggers: two left, two right. Twelve points you may not have seen elsewhere." More...

Some Bloggers Meet the Bosses From Big Media: "What capacity for product development do news organizations show? Zip. How are they on nurturing innovation? Terrible. Is there an entreprenurial spirit in newsrooms? No. Do smart young people ever come in and overturn everything? Never." More...

Notes and Comment on BlogHer 2005 "I think the happiest conference goers at BlogHer were probably the newbies, people who want to start blogging or just did. They got a lot of good information and advice. Some of the best information was actually dispensed in response to the fears provoked by blogging, which shouldnï¿½t be avoided, the sages said, but examined, turned around, defused, and creatively shrunk.." More...

Top Ten List: What's Radical About the Weblog Form in Journalism? "The weblog comes out of the gift economy, whereas most of today's journalism comes out of the market economy." More...

A Second Top Ten List: What's Conservative About the Weblog Form in Journalism? "The quality of any weblog in journalism depends greatly on its fidelity to age old newsroom commandments like check facts, check links, spell things correctly, be accurate, be timely, quote fairly." More...

Blogging is About Making and Changing Minds: "Sure, weblogs are good for making statements, big and small. But they also force re-statement. Yes, they're opinion forming. But they are equally good at unforming opinion, breaking it down, stretching it out." More...

The Weblog: An Extremely Democratic Form in Journalism "It's pirate radio, legalized; it's public access coming closer to life. Inside the borders of Blogistan (a real place with all the problems of a real place) we're closer to a vision of 'producer democracy' than we are to any of the consumerist views that long ago took hold in the mass media, including much of the journalism presented on that platform." More...

No One Owns Journalism: "And Big Media doesn't entirely own the press, because if it did then the First Amendment, which mentions the press, would belong to Big Media. And it doesn't. These things were always true. The weblog doesn't change them. It just opens up an outlet to the sea. Which in turn extends 'the press' to the desk in the bedroom of the suburban mom, where she blogs at night." More...

Brain Food for BloggerCon: Journalism and Weblogging in Their Corrected Fullness "Blogging is one universe. Its standard unit is the post, its strengths are the link and the low costs of entry, which means lots of voices. Jounalism is another universe. Its standard unit is "the story." Its strengths are in reporting, verification and access-- as in getting your calls returned." More...

Dispatches From the Un-Journalists: "Journalists think good information leads to opinion and argument. It's a logical sequence. Bloggers think that good argument and strong opinion cause people to seek information, an equally logical sequence. What do the bloggers bring to this? My short answer to the press is: everything you have removed."More...

Political Jihad and the American Blog: Chris Satullo Raises the Stakes "Journalists, you can stop worrying about bloggers 'replacing' the traditional news media. We're grist for their mill, says Satullo, a mill that doesn't run without us. Bloggers consume and extend the shelf life of our reporting, and they scrutinize it at a new level of intensity.."More...

Raze Spin Alley, That Strange Creation of the Press: "Spin Alley, an invention of the American press and politicos, shows that the system we have is in certain ways a partnership between the press and insiders in politics. They come together to mount the ritual. An intelligent nation is entitled to ask if the partners are engaged in public service when they bring to life their invention... Alternative thesis: they are in a pact of mutual convenience that serves no intelligible public good." More...

Horse Race Now! Horse Race Tomorrow! Horse Race Forever!: "How is it you know you're the press? Because you have a pass that says PRESS, and people open the gate. The locker room doors admit you. The story must be inside that gate; that's why they give us credentials. We get closer. We tell the fans what's going on. And if this was your logic, Bill James tried to bust it. Fellahs, said he to the baseball press, you have to realize that you are the gate." More...

Psst.... The Press is a Player: "The answer, I think, involves an open secret in political journalism that has been recognized for at least 20 years. But it is never dealt with, probably because the costs of facing it head on seem larger than the light tax on honesty any open secret demands. The secret is this: pssst... the press is a player in the campaign. And even though it knows this, as everyone knows it, the professional code of the journalist contains no instructions in what the press could or should be playing for?" More...

Die, Strategy News: "I think it's a bankrupt form. It serves no clear purpose, has no sensible rationale. The journalists who offer us strategy news do not know what public service they are providing, why they are providing it, for whom it is intended, or how we are supposed to use this strange variety of news."More...

He Said, She Said, We Said: "When journalists avoid drawing open conclusions, they are more vulnerable to charges of covert bias, of having a concealed agenda, of not being up front about their perspective, of unfairly building a case (for, against) while pretending only to report 'what happened.'" More...

If Religion Writers Rode the Campaign Bus: "Maybe irony, backstage peaking and "de-mystify the process" only get you so far, and past that point they explain nothing. Puzzling through the convention story, because I'm heading right into it myself, made me to realize that journalism's contempt for ritual was deeply involved here. Ritual is newsless; therefore it must be meaningless. But is that really true?."More...

Convention Coverage is a Failed Regime and Bloggers Have Their Credentials: "No one knows what a political convention actually is, anymore, or why it takes 15,000 people to report on it. Two successive regimes for making sense of the event have collapsed; a third has not emerged. That's a good starting point for the webloggers credentialed in Boston. No investment in the old regime and its ironizing." More...

Philip Gourevitch: Campaign Reporting as Foreign Beat: "'A presidential election is a like a gigantic moving television show,' he said. It is the extreme opposite of an overlooked event. The show takes place inside a bubble, which is a security perimeter overseen by the Secret Service. If you go outside the bubble for any reason, you become a security risk until you are screened again by hand."More...

What Time is it in Political Journalism? "Adam Gopnik argued ten years ago that the press did not know who it was within politics, or what it stood for. There was a vacuum in journalism where political argument and imagination should be. Now there are signs that this absence of thought is ending." More...

Off the Grid Journalism: “The assignment was straightforward enough,” writes Marjie Lundstrom of the Sacramento Bee, “talk to people.” When a writer dissents from it or departs from it, the master narrative is a very real thing. Here are two examples: one from politics, one from music. More...

Questions and Answers About PressThink "The Web is good for many opposite things. For quick hitting information. For clicking across a field. For talk and interaction. It's also a depth finder, a memory device, a library, an editor. Not to use a weblog for extended analysis (because most users won't pick that option) is Web dumb but media smart. What's strange is that I try to write short, snappy things, but they turn into long ones." More...

"Making that connection clear and visible - and tracking it over time - helps a lot. I think people are far more likely to contribute if they can see what's left to be done, how others are doing, etc."

Yes.

I haven't got around to writing up what I found because it wasn't clear that anyone would actually see the info (this didn't make it not worth doing, but made it lower priority)

I have other ideas/suggestions, but the site's not 'friendly' at present and there's no single obvious place to post suggestions and have others chime in. Any chance PressThink could dragoon someone (Barrett? Williams? Teachout?) into doing a "feedback on Sunlight Foundation" post, akin to the one for BackFence?

Another entry in the "posts for PressThink" suggestion box - There's a whole lot of talk and writing about citizen journalists but, AFAIK, exactly zero institutional experienced-journalist support that they can turn to, when faced with a difficult situation.

Why?

Any chance that this state of affairs could change, and if so, how?

Posted by: Anna Haynes at October 8, 2006 1:12 AM | Permalink

Anna: you could post suggestions and comments here and Zephyr would address them. She has before.

The idea of a help line for citizen journalists when faced with a difficult situation is a good one.

Posted by: Jay Rosen at October 8, 2006 11:32 PM | Permalink

Jay,

Thanks so much for you thoughtful suggestions and ideas. Let me re-emphasize that this was an experiment, something we hope we will evolve and that a lot of us interested in the potentials of distributed journalism will learn a lot from. (And in that spirit, Anna, we would love to have a broader discussion and get as much feedback on what we're doing, what works and doesn't work, and where to we go from here).

To respond to your observations first: Yes, the first round required simple and repetitive tasks; it was really the Web design that made it, as our top researcher KCinDC noted, like eating potato chips--hard to stop at one. I think as we go forward, though, and the tasks get more difficult, that will change (or rather, the interface will still be as clean and elegant and compelling, but the tasks will become more involved). For example, tracking a Julie Doolittle situation (that is, a spouse whose company is paid by campaigns of multiple members) will involve more involved research, and hopefully will do more to engage those top one percenters.

At the same time, we'd like to continue to give casual users the opportunity to make a contribution. With more arduous research, maybe the solution is to split up the work: Some people could track down the names of, say, the sons- and daughters-in-law of members of Congress, while others cross check those names against lobbyist registrations, while a third group of volunteers contacts the firms and verifies the information, all of which is updated and filled in on a grid that anyone can visit to see how research is progressing. Of course there'd be overlap--people doing tasks one and two or two and three or all three--but there'd also be the opportunity for someone who just wanted to do something relatively simple, like searching for names in a lobbying database, to make an important and crucial contribution.

But you're right--it's important to let users (actually doers, in this case) understand how looking up Joyce Miller and not finding her name in a database of expenditures contributes to the overall project. We did have a running total of members investigated and how many spouses were paid how much, but that might not have been enough to reinforce the idea that even doing just one person, and not finding anything, gets all of us closer to the goal. Also, on each of the state pages, doers could see who had been done and how many people were left, but maybe we could have done something more prominent--a pie chart or some other graphic element that brought that home.

But I think the headline for us is that this has been a fairly successful test so far, and now we're hoping for feedback to help us decide what to do next and how best to go about it.

I'm anxious to hear what others think.

Posted by: Bill Allison at October 9, 2006 4:44 PM | Permalink

This moves us up a level in the conversation about citizen media. It's not only what we get, it's how we deliver it.

Three brilliant observations to take to heart:

1. ... the work has to be more like sluething, or a game where you are overcoming obstacles and testing your skills. Look no further than World of Warcraft to be convinced that people will spend hours on activitities that overcome obstacles and test skills. Hours. That could be beneficial for both the gathering and dissemination of data.

2. Good design and powerful technology are not inimical to one another. Bravo. User interface can make or break you. Presentation directly affects everything from the audience's perception of your credibility to people's ability to accurately recall your message. Whatever we do with all the information we gather, it must be presented in a clear, usuable and easy-to-digest format. Otherwise we might as well just link to a PDF of the entire GAO report.

3. ... put a little extra thought and ingenuity into how the individual volunteer can see the connection between his or her small part and the progress of the big project. What Anna said and more: Everyone who volunteers wants to feel as though his contribution is valuable. If a project wants to harness people's work and enthusiasm more than once, it must respect that work and demonstrate its value in the projects' success.

Posted by: Janet Edens at October 9, 2006 5:09 PM | Permalink

> "you could post suggestions and comments here and Zephyr would address them. She has before."

yes, and it's much appreciated.
(thanks Zephyr)

but having the discussion be localized on 1 page benefits both future readers and current readers with less than perfect recall, plus there's the potential for a critical-mass-synergy-brainstorming whole-greater-than-the-parts interaction.

> "The idea of a help line for citizen journalists when faced with a difficult situation is a good one."

(btw, haven't tried it but I think the Ethics AdviceLine ("...free service to professional journalists in need of guidance...") is open to non-professionals as well.)

Janet's
> "people will spend hours on activitities that overcome obstacles and test skills."

Yes. and it's even better if acquiring skills is part of the package too.

speaking as a (typically?) imperfect volunteer, the hurdle lies in the feeling that one needs to assemble the results into a semi-coherent whole. So (as Bill said) to the extent that one's contributions can give value without reaching the baked-iced-and-decorated stage...
(the more structured the 'reporting' process/display, the less need for the volunteer to build that structure him/herself)

> "Presentation directly affects everything"

Yes. (and trust me, I am not speaking from a one-up position on this :-(
)

BTW Janet needs to come over here more often.

re Bill's
> "we would love to have a broader discussion and get as much feedback on what we're doing, what works and doesn't work, and where to we go from here"

here? now?
With 20:20 hindsight, here's an idea - the Earmarks project as a Wiki. You'd start with a "where we are" page, a "recent changes" page, and 50 state "earmarks" pages; each earmark for which we've gotten more info goes on its own page, and (automatically, since it's a wiki) becomes a link on the "state" page.
(and in an ideal world there's also a way to expand the links on the 'state' page, to show the text for the earmarks-with-data)

In general, for site design - anything possible to increase the "active text" area. Fewer graphics. Subtler sidebars. Descriptive link text, not "brands" (e.g. on pages like this one, rename the "Navigation" left sidebar blogs' links to authorname, not blogname.)
Stuff like that.

and please understand that I very much want this to succeed.

Posted by: Anna Haynes at October 9, 2006 9:22 PM | Permalink

I would like to extend an invitation to you to join in on a collective blogging section of our upcoming winter issue of Reconstruction. The issue is the “Theories/Practices of Blogging.” In addition to the special section of posts on blogging there will be about a dozen essays on blogging.

The deadline is October 27th.

Our intent in this section of the issue will be to collect a wide range of bloggers and link up to their statements in regards to why they blog (something many of us are asked) and any statement they have on the theories/practices of blogging.

If you already have a post on this you can feel free to use it, or, if you are interested, you can submit a new one.

We will link to each statement from the issue at our site, with the intent of creating a hyperlinked list of statements on blogging that can serve as an introduction to blogging (or an expansion of knowledge for those already blogging).

If you are interested please contact me at mdbento @ gmail.com

Posted by: michael benton at October 11, 2006 4:10 PM | Permalink

At Sunlight (here to be precise: http://www.sunlightfoundation.com/node/1345), I've posted a piece requesting input on the next phase of the investigation. Please feel free to comment there or here on it--I'll keep checking both places.

Posted by: Bill Allison at October 16, 2006 5:34 PM | Permalink

off topic, but of general interest....

UC Berkeley is looking for a new Dean of Journalism. Brad DeLong is on the search committee, and has started an interesting discussion on his blog relating to it....

Posted by: p.lukasiak at October 26, 2006 2:24 AM | Permalink