E.M.: - in the country.
R. K.: What are some of the other ways to look at the influence besides that?
E.M.: Well what Influence Explorer gives you is sort of a three hundred and sixty degree view of this so I just looked at organizations and the greatest dollar amount during the current election cycle is the National Education Association, but third on the list, interestingly enough is Las Vegas Sands so you'll see some information...
R. K.: Wow
E.M.: " on individual companies like that but what's interesting, you click on Las Vegas Sands, you can see the latest SEC data, you can see the standardized information and you can see state vs federal and how much they spent on lobbying and how much, oh I forgot to mention regulations. We have another site that monitors all the regulatory activities at the federal level and you can see, they were mentioned six times in six different dockets.
R. K.: And of course that's Sheldon Adelson
E.M.: Yes
R. K.: [laughs] ties it together in an interesting way.
E.M.: Yes, exactly. Exactly. And so then, you know if you look at the Venetian Casino Resort and you see even more interesting data and so this is an, Influence Explorer is one of these websites and data sets that you can just get lost in, in a positive way, just digging deeper and deeper in to the influence business.
R. K.: Fascinating. Just fascinating. And you've got literally dozens of these kinds of tools that are available. What is the best place to go to to find them?
E.M.: Well "sunlightfoundation.com" is our homepage and on that page what you will see is a list of all the tools and websites that we have. A lot of this information is built on top of other organizations. Numbers ; as I said our secret sauce is being able to be sophisticated enough to bring it all together so we use data from the Center for Responsive Politics, we use data from POGO, we use data from the National Institute on Money in State Politics as well as a number of other data sets. We build these and then we use them ourselves as well to power other websites.
R. K.: Okay, so I have this theory that one of the best drivers for making change happen is to identify the people who benefit from the changes. So the change you're looking for is greater transparency and open government. In terms of profit, in terms of money, who profits from increased transparency and open government?
E.M.: Well, it's a really good question. I would say, and there are lots of people working in this field, that there are many opportunities for business, new businesses to be created but old businesses as well to be created out of open data. So there are new institutions that are focusing almost exclusively on working with businesses to understand how they can use data. A well-worn example but you might not be familiar with it is weather.com. Hugely successful commercial outfit that's based on open data. Open government data about the web, from NASA.
So, there are many businesses, Bloomberg Gov, you know which is a very elite service about information, about politics and politicians, it's all based on open data from the Federal Election Commission and many other sources of information. So, I think that's the economic incentive for people, which is to look and see, you know, what will people pay for?
But Sunlight's mission is to make this information freely available because we feel like it's not inherently democratic and I suspect you will agree, that if people want information about their, about politics and their politicians that they have to go pay somebody five thousand dollars in order to do that.
R. K.: Yeah, it apparently was between Bloomberg Gov and weather.com, and I'm guessing that already the use of the access to this open data has spawned industries in the billions of dollars.
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