Moving at the Speed of Creativity by Wesley Fryer

Blog widgets for political transparency

Looking for ways to advocate for political transparency in your local community or state in the United States? Check out Sunlight Media Services’ free widgets. Here are a few examples.

Capitol Tweets is embed code showing all recent tweets from U.S. Congressmen and Congresswomen who are life-blogging on Twitter:

Capitol Words:

gives you an at-a-glance view into the daily proceedings of the United States Congress through the simplest lens available-a single word.

(not very exciting at present in a recess, but wait till sessions resume…)

In-State v Out-of-State Contribution Pie Chart is:

A simple pie chart displaying the proportion of in-state v. out-of-state contributions to a lawmaker.

Here’s the graph for one of our Oklahoma Senators, Jim Inhofe, who my son, Alexander, and I met this past March:

With Jim Inhofe in his office prior to our Senate tour

Lawmaker bio:

Provides a text-based summary of the money given to and given by a specific member of Congress.

Again, here’s the result for Senator Inhofe:

Capitol Words is another Sunlight Foundation project. Here is a tag cloud showing the words used most often by Oklahoma Congressional representatives and Senators in the last year, as recorded in the Congressional record:

Tag Cloud of Words Most Used by Oklahoma Lawmakers

These are powerful tools to have at our fingertips. That seems fitting, for a blog is a terribly powerful thing to waste. 🙂

Blog OMG!
Creative Commons License photo credit: Mike Licht, NotionsCapital.com

Technorati Tags:
, , , , , , ,

If you enjoyed this post and found it useful, subscribe to Wes’ free newsletter. Check out Wes’ video tutorial library, “Playing with Media.” Information about more ways to learn with Dr. Wesley Fryer are available on wesfryer.com/after.

On this day..


Posted

in

, ,

by

Tags: