Blog widgets for political transparency

By Wesley Fryer On December 21, 2008 · · Add Comment

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:

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: