New tools for transparency

Two things that crossed my path today:
LegiStorm, a month-old web site that lists the salaries of congressional staffers. The database, searchable by the staffer's name, the rep. or senator's name, committee, or state, lists each staffer and what they made each quarter from July 1, 2005 to March 31, 2006. (Apparently it takes a while for the people on the Hill to compile the data, and then another couple weeks for the people at LegiStorm to get it into the database). It can be a little unclear, however. For example, on Rep. Bill Delahunt's page, one Steven Clark Schwadron is listed as a chief of staff/press secretary and apparently made $12,635 on Jan. 1, 2006 and another $13,071 on Feb. 1. Either something's fishy, or something was lost in translation. Maybe a little of both. Plus, some pay periods overlap - there were a few staffers whose pay was listed from July 1 through Sept. 30, and then again for Sept. 1 through Dec. 31. But all in all, it was really interesting to see what kind of (taxpayer) money the right-hand men and women are getting, and who's under- and way over-paid.
The other is Congress's Family Business. The Sunlight Foundation asked citizens to dig up financial records on their representative to find out how many have spouses on the payroll. The citizens stepped forward, apparently, because research on all 435 reps was completed in two days, over the holiday weekend no less. Sunlight is still calculating how many people contributed and verifying the findings. As Jay Rosen points out, there are problems with the program, especially when it comes to those legislators that find ways of paying their honeys without putting their name on the payroll. That aside, this was quite the adventure in collaborative reporting to get a story a reporter couldn't have gotten on her own -- or, at least, hadn't until now.
It all comes back to the very basic fact, that we as citizens can't cause an uproar about sketchy behavior on the Hill until we know about it. Not that many people try to stir things up when they do know about wrongdoing, but that's a whole 'nother post altogether.