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:

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:

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

photo credit: Mike Licht, NotionsCapital.com

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