Okay, so I'm weeks behind on this one, but didn't want to skip it because it's such an inspiring project.

Per the LittleSis Web site "LittleSis is an involuntary facebook of powerful Americans, collaboratively edited by people like you." The initiative was co-founded by an old friend from my Billionaires for Bush days, Matthew Skomarovsky, and he's been working on it in some capacity ever since.

The work that they're doing at LittleSis is more than impressive -- it's truly one of the more innovative uses of civic data in the US. And the foundation that LittleSis builds makes it possible for a whole community to get involved in a variety of ways. For me, that has meant having enjoyable conversations with Matthew about everything from technical challenges, to potential partnerships, to finding financial sustainability for the project. (And the funny thing is, I probably get more from those conversations than Matthew does!)

Anyway, on to the reason for this post. My own personal passion around LittleSis is the possibility to leverage LittleSis data in investigative journalism. And low-and-behold, Matthew and his team are blazing a trail in that direction:

We're Partnering with the Huffington Post Investigative Fund

We're proud to announce the undertaking of a joint research project with the Huffington Post Investigative Fund's Health Care Investigative Unit (sign up with the HCIU here). We'll be teaming up with HuffPo Investigative's citizen journalist team in order to report on the Senators and Representatives that receive the most money from health care interest groups.

Go to HuffPo Investigative's group page to learn more about the project and let us know if you want to get involved!

No doubt, this is only the tip of the iceberg.

If you haven't checked out the LittleSis project yet, please do. This is the one "civic data" project that I'll be watching keenly in 2009.

If what Tim O'Reilly says is right -- that "Data is the next Intel Inside" -- then civil society better get moving or they'll be left running last year's technology.

Online advocacy options in the US are plentiful; Democracy in Action, ActionStudio, GetActive -- the list goes on-and-on. However, in Canada, NGOs have always struggled to integrate even the most basic functionality -- like sending e-mails to an elected official -- into their campaigns.

Why is that? Well, as discussed before, Statistics Canada and other similar groups hold the "crown copyright" on the basic data needed to make online advocacy effective. Want to look up your Federal Electoral District via your Postal Code? Nuh-ah: can't do that unless you've licensed an expensive data set and signed a restrictive contract about how you can (or, in this case, can't) use it.

Well, I'm happy to announce that -- thanks to the efforts of Mike Gifford and Russell McOrmond -- a solution is not far away!

Last week Mike, Russell, and I sent out an invitation to a number of our clients, colleagues, and NGOs and unions across the country asking them to join Canada's first "Electoral Data Consortium." Over the next few weeks, as members sign-on, I'll post updates on the progress toward a new Web service that will deliver civic data to member organizations, and manage all the work of keeping it online, updated, and evolving to meet the needs of the consortium members. (Interested in joining? Just pop me a note via the contact form or comments.)

This comes right on the heels of a similar announcement that benefits organizations in the US from the fine folks at CiviCRM and The Sunlight Foundation (read their announcement past the jump):

If your blog runs on the popular content management Drupal and the community management tool CiviCRM, you'll be pleased to learn the CivicCRM development team is going to make it easier to connect your members to their elected officials with some help from the SunlightLabs API. (Sunlight Labs is a project of the Sunlight Foundation which prototypes tech ideas to improve government transparency and political influence disclosure.)

The SunlightLabs API is a tool for developers that provides handy, machine-readable information about members of Congress. Developers can use the API to more easily look up key information about representatives from different online databases and to find the representatives for a given zip code or state. Since developers have to spend less time managing clerical data around representatives, they can spend more time presenting that information in useful ways to you and I. In this case, CiviCRM developers will be incorporating the data directly into the CiviCRM interface and modules. As David Geilhufe pointed out in an email to us, "People could automatically email all the people in the database within a particular district."

There's been lots of renewed discussion recently on two important questions for Canadian civil society:

• Why are there so few Canadian online advocacy systems? (As defined by the ability to send e-mails and faxes to your MLA, MP, MPP, etc., based on your postal code)
• Why is Canada's postal code and electoral district data stuck in draconian licensing / copyright schemes?

This came up a few months ago, when some Web of Change alumni asked the first question. I struggled with this just a little over a year ago while working on the Kleercut campaign (you can read a bit about it here). Basically, as ActionWorks (a hosted advocacy system that licensed the aforementioned data) was being purchased by AdvocacyOnline (who also licenses that data), we had to find another way to provide similar tools on the site (for less than the $9000 - 12,000/year licensing fee that AdvocacyOnline wanted for its tools).

Working with Mike Gifford we managed to replace that functionality in a Drupal module known as the Lobby Module -- it was the first "port" of his legacy advocacy tool that had been in use by several Canadian NGOs, as part of the Back-End content-management system. At the time, he and Russell McOrmond had developed some screen scraping tools that would essentially go out and get the correct MLA, MP, MPP information from a publicly-available information source.

This data is a critical piece of many projects that aim to connect Canadian citizens to their public representatives and their democracy. Looking at the numerous projects of this nature in the UK that have launched in the last few years -- such as WriteToThem.com, TheyWorkForYou.com -- and then looking toward the promising, but fewer projects here, like How'd They Vote?, you get the sense that access to public data is important. So why is it that Statistics Canada has a copyright on this data? And that Canada Post wants to license it to you at a high-cost and with restrictive terms?

Seems that this issue has caught steam again via the (relatively new) CivicAccess community. With the imminent launch of a public awareness and letter writing campaign, and discussion of what options are available for a civil society group like CivicAccess to re-create a database "compilation" of postal code and electoral district data (theoretically, these are "facts" and not covered under copyright -- access to this data is freely available in other countries like the US) that could be released under more citizen-friendly terms. CivicAccess clearly has citizens in mind and they've already discovered that Elections Canada and the Parliament of Canada Web sites can often have different MP results for the same postal code. As they point out, this is clearly a waste of money, and time, and potentially confusing to Canadians.

Let's hope that engaged citizens can take back some power and get our public data in order!