June 4, 2007 - Part 2

After my break where I wrote up "June 4, 2007 - Part 1", I went back to the Denver Convention Center (a very nice facility) for my next session: Mashups and Remixes for Government Information. We had two speakers. The first was Karen Huffman from the National Geographic Society. She went over a lot of different ways that her organization is using different information from different government sources and combining them together into a new information source. I kept thinking of mashups as a collage of different information. My favorite idea that I took away from Ms. Huffman's presentation is that you can share government information and news in a wide variety of ways, including creating your own RSS news feed where you feed stories from all of your sources into one newsreader or even embed the RSS feed into your webpage. Ms Huffman also spoke about Google Gadgets, which intrigue me, but I think I need to do more reseach on them before I can truly discuss them in more depth.

Our second speaker was Dan Newman, Executive Director and Co-founder of MAPLight.org (MAP stands for Money and Politics) http://www.maplight.org/. Basically, this website gathers campaign contribution data on politicians in the US Congress and California from one source and data on the same politician's votes on the various bills in front of the legislatures, and then analyzes it. The truly cool thing about this, however, is that you can see exactly what politician received contributions from specific special interests simultaneously with how and when they voted on a particular bill relating to the special interest groups. For example, the basic results for the Medicare Prescription Drug Price Negotiation Act of 2007, showed the following results:

Vote Date:

January 12, 2007

Change...

Date	Location	Motion	Result	Yes	No
January 12, 2007	House	On Passage: H R 4…	Pass	255	170
January 12, 2007	House	On Motion to Recommit with…	Fail	196	229

Cancel

Location:

House

Motion:

On Passage: H R 4 Medicare Prescription Drug Price Negotiation Act

Result:

Pass

• 255 Yes Votes
• 170 No Votes
• 10 Not Voting
  

Interests who did want this bill to become law (such as Consumer groups and Elderly issues & Social Security) gave an average of:

• $25,098 to each legislator voting Yes
• $3,028 to each legislator voting No

Interests who did not want this bill to become law (such as Biotech products & research and Chambers of commerce) gave an average of:

• $6,964 to each legislator voting Yes
• $17,970 to each legislator voting No

http://www.maplight.org/map/us/bill/10572/default/votes/vote-294451

If you drill down, however, you can see for instance that Representative Boswell, who voted for the bill, received $68,064 from bill supporters, and nothing from the the opposition. You can even see when contributions were received.

The website contains some interesting information, and even allows you at run correlations yourself to see if specific special interest groups may have had an affect on specific issues. This is definitely a site to watch as it continues to expand and offer new features!

After this session, I took a short break and then headed out to dinner with a "Dine-around" group. Basically, a local SLA member agrees to take a group out to a local restaurant (each person pays their own way). This allows those of us who don't really know anyone to not only meet new people, but also experience local cuisine. My group, led by wonderful local Pat Wagner, went to local brewery Wynkoop. We all had a great time and some wonderful food. Pat was even nice enough to secure Free Pint coupons for all of us, so we could try some of the local brew...Very good!!!!!!! I had a great time and met some wonderful people. I even have plans to go out to dinner again with one of the group!

After dinner, I had planned on going to one or more of the open houses, but ended up heading back to the hotel and crashing...this conference is exhausting, but fantastic!