Ahead of a hearing at the Senate Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations tomorrow at which its CEO, Tim Cook, is the star witness, computer, tablet and smartphone manufacturer Apple has preemptively released his prepared remarks defending the company's tax practices, which include pooling $100 billion overseas, away from the grasping hand of the Internal Revenue Service. 

The prepared testimony does not mention the more than $14.5 million Apple has spent on lobbying the federal government since 1998, nor that taxes top the list of issues the company has raised, according to data in Influence Explorer. One of the bills appearing most frequently in its lobbying reports is the Freedom to Invest Act, introduced by Rep. Kevin Brady, R-Texas, that would allow U.S. companies to bring home some of the cash they hold overseas without facing tax on it. 

The biggest recipient of contributions from Apple employees and their family members is President Barack Obama, whose campaign committess have gotten more than $514,000, a total that eclipses the second biggest recipient, Hillary Clinton, who got $46,800. Among sitting members of Congress, the top recipient is Sen. Barbara Boxer, D-Calif., whose gotten $22,625. Boxer is not a member of the committee looking into Apple, but Sen. John McCain, R-Ariz, the ranking member, is; Apple employees and their family members have contributed $10,100 to his campaigns.

The Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations released a report of its own on Apple's practices, claiming that the company exploits differences between tax law in the United States and Ireland, where the company maintains a subsidiary, to avoid taxes.

I joined Sunlight when it was less than half its current age and had fewer than half as many staff. At the time, I was the second member of the policy team, and our focus was legislative branch transparency. Since then, Sunlight's advocacy has expanded to the federal executive branch, municipal governments, and foreign nations.

All the while, we've brought our vision of technology-facilitated transparency to a global audience, and transformed a technology-focused nonprofit with a policy sideline to a policy-focused nonprofit that uses technology to change the world.

I've had a front seat to that world-wide transformation. We've cheered as the House of Representatives embraced the public's right to unfettered access to legislative information. We've applauded the White House's Open Government Directive and Open Data initiative. We've encouraged the formation of a 120-member 80-nation network of parliamentary monitoring organizations. And we've been involved as important legislation, like the DATA Act, ACMRA, the DISCLOSE Act, CRS Electronic Accessibility Resolution, POIA, Lobbying Disclosure Enhancement Act, and many others, as they have worked their way through the political system.

Our work isn't done. Our work is far from done.

My new employer, Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington (CREW), uses different tools to promote transparency, ethics, and accountability in government, even as much of the mission overlaps. I'm looking forward to working with Sunlight and all members of the transparency community to continue the good fight.

I cannot sufficiently express my gratitude to Ellen Miller, John Wonderlich, and everyone at Sunlight (past and present) for making my time here so rewarding. It has been a pleasure. I'll see you on the Hill.

The conference represents a real effort by the House of Representatives to engage the public with its efforts to become a more open and transparent institution.

The conference will take place in the Capitol Visitor Center Auditorium from 9-5. That evening, a number of organizations, including the Sunlight Foundation, will host a happy hour from 5:30-7:30. (RSVP here.)

The conference's agenda is now online. It is reproduced below:

8:30 -- Registration

9:00 -- Conference Welcome

9:15 -- Legislative Process Overview: Bill Preparation Process and Incorporation into U.S. Code

9:45 -- Legislative Branch Update: Bulk Data, Electronic Access to Legislative Information, LOC & GPO Digitization, Technical Developments

10:45 -- Morning Networking Break

11:15 -- Official Tools Demo: Operation of Committee Repository (docs.house.gov), Searchable Committee Roll Call Votes, Party Intranet

12:15 -- Lunch Break

1:30 -- International Update: 2012 XML Usage Data, International Data Standards, 21st Century Innovations

2:00 -- Electronic Legislative Archiving: Lessons on Archiving, Capabilities of GPO's FDsys, Strategies for Permanent Public Access

2:40 -- Afternoon Networking Break

3:10 -- Improving Access to XML: Extending and Normalizing XML

3:50 -- Under-Digitized Legislative Data: Increasing Publication of Digital Legislative Data to Maximize Usability

4:30 -- Conference Wrap Up

If it makes you all feel any better, campaign finance is hard for us too.

At the Sunlight Foundation Reporting Group, we make a speciality of money in politics reporting, so when the dark money groups that we often cover burst into the headlines -- on reports that the Internal Revenue Service was denying the coveted tax exempt status to Tea Party groups -- we figured it was time to put what we know about the campaign finance ecosystem out there.

The process turned out to be revealing, if painful.

You can see the final product here. But we learned a lot getting there and wanted to share some of that with you.

• Rep. Darrell Issa (R-CA) is reintroducing the Digital Accountability and Transparency Act this week. The legislation unanimously passed the House last year only to die in the Senate. (FCW)
• Bipartisan legislation has been introduced to require a court order for federal agencies before the seizure of phone records. (The Hill)
• Hearings started Friday as the House looks into why the IRS targeted certain groups for extra scrutiny. The hearing, in front of the House Ways and Means Committee, was the first of several scheduled on the topic. (Washington Post)
• Nonprofits names tend to indicate just about nothing when it comes to how politically active they'll be, according to an analysis. (Public Integrity)
• Tom Wheeler, President Obama's nominee to lead the FCC, is dumping more than a half-million dollars of stock in AT&T and Verizon to avoid a conflict of interest in the new position.  (The Hill)
• The FCC now has one less challenger to its net neutrality rules: Metro PCS, which was recently acquired by T-Mobile, dropped its lawsuit. Verizon, however, is moving ahead with its challenge. (The Hill)
• A new report questioned the potential security risks to Internet users if the FBI is allowed to intercept Internet audio and video chats. (New York Times)
• Apple CEO Tim Cook is scheduled to appear in front of the Senate this week to testify about offshore profit shifting. (ArsTechnica)
• A new crowdsourced database of social and political connections in Chile is aiming to raise awareness about potential conflicts of interest and corruption. (TechPresident)

BILLS:

• H.R. 1942. Construction Quality Assurance Act of 2013.

TODAY:

• Does the Public Need to Know? Journalistic Perspectives on Sharing Intelligence.  Bipartisan Policy Center. 11 a.m. - 12 p.m. 1225 I St. NW, Suite 1000, Washington, D.C, 20005.
• Panel to Discuss U.S. Immigration Reform. National Press Club. 6 p.m. 529 14th St. NW, 13th Floor, Washington, D.C., 20045.

TOMORROW:

• Transforming Data to Information in Service of Learning. National Press Club. 10 a.m. 529 14th St. NW, 13th Floor, Washington, D.C., 20045.

Do you want to track transparency news? You can add our feed to your Google Reader, or view it on our Netvibes page. You can  follow the progress of relevant bills on our Scout page.  You can also get 2Day in #OpenGov sent directly to your reader!

If you’d like to give the Open Knowledge Foundation a birthday gift, please consider making a regular or one-off donation to support our work opening up knowledge around the world!

Plaque to commemorate the founding of the Open Knowledge Foundation in May 2004 on Panton Street, Cambridge.

Nine years ago today the Open Knowledge Foundation was born. We’ve come a long way from our humble beginnings in Cambridge in 2004.

From government to science to culture, open knowledge is now on its way to being established as an essential part of our information environment.

Governments around the world are now putting open data at the heart of their transparency plans. Major publishers and research funding bodies are supporting and mandating open access to research publications and data. Leading cultural institutions and cultural portals are opening up their holdings.

And there are now more projects, initiatives and organisations than ever before dedicated to using open knowledge to improve the world – from civic hacking to citizen science, from data journalism to the digital humanities.

But we still have our work cut out for us: much essential information about the world is still locked up or gathering dust, and much remains to be done if we are to put this information to work to improve the world.

To mark the occasion of us entering our tenth year, we’re going to have a quick look at where we’ve come from, and some of our hopes for the future.

Where we’ve come from

Many of the Foundation’s earliest projects, principles, activities and aspirations are still with us today.

The Open Definition – our foundational text

The Open Definition – which sets out principles that define “openness” in relation to data and content – was one of the first projects that we launched, and it still underpins everything we do.

The world’s biggest open knowledge events

Early on we still ran our big annual open knowledge events, like the ones we run today. Writer and open source advocate Glyn Moody (who now sits on our Advisory Board) wrote of our first edition of the Open Knowledge Conference (OKCon), Open Knowledge 1.0 in London:

The location was atmospheric: next to Hawksmoor’s amazing St Anne’s church, which somehow manages the trick of looking bigger than its physical size, inside the old Limehouse Town Hall.

The latter had a wonderfully run-down, almost Dickensian feel to it; it seemed rather appropriate as a gathering place for a ragtag bunch of ne’er-do-wells: geeks, wonks, journos, activists and academics, all with dangerously powerful ideas on their minds, and all more dangerously powerful for coming together in this way.

Panel discussion from Open Knowledge 1.0. From left to right: Becky Hogge, then Executive Director of the Open Rights Group; Charles Arthur, Technology Editor at the Guardian and Founder of the Free Our Data campaign; Ed Parsons, then CTO of the UK’s Ordnance Survey; and Steve Coast, Founder of Open Street Map.

Our 2010 and 2011 Open Government Data Camp events helped to transform a loose knit group of public servants, hackers and advocates into a coordinated force for open data around the world. Last year saw over 1000 people gather in Helsinki for OKFestival 2012, which was the biggest open knowledge event to date. This year, OKCon 2013 in Geneva will convene governments and civil society representatives from dozens of countries to figure out how to support the growth of open knowledge internationally.

‘Raw data now’

OKF Founder Rufus Pollock’s 2007 call to ‘Give Us the Data Raw, and Give it to Us Now’ was adopted and popularised by web inventor Sir Tim Berners-Lee in a 2009 TED talk. This became one of the rallying calls of the open data movement around the world, and was widely covered up in the media (for example, see articles in the BBC, the Guardian, or Wired).

Following the money

A prototype of our Where Does My Money Go? project – which shows how UK public funds are spent – was featured on the front page of the BBC News. The Open Knowledge Foundation went on to play a leading role in securing the release of the COINS and £25k spending data, which are amongst the most detailed spending databases ever released by any government. Our Open Spending project now has over 13 million transactions, covering over 50 countries and over 80 cities and regions around the world – from Belgium to Bosnia, Portugal to Puerto Rico.

Labour MP Tom Watson on our Where Does My Money Go? project in the BBC: “We know that transparency changes individual and institutional behaviour and this new tool will have a big impact on the way the public sector is held to account by UK citizens.”

Open source tools for open data

CKAN, our open source data platform, was one of our earliest software projects. It is now being used by governments and organisations around the world, and last week saw a major new release.

From our earliest years, the Open Knowledge Foundation has attracted developers who want to work on open knowledge projects. Our OKF Labs continue to provide a place where like-minded hackers who want to develop and use open source tools for open knowledge can collaborate.

Empowering people to use data to change the world

Over the past few years, we haven’t just been working to open up the world’s knowledge: we have also helped more people than ever to use, share and benefit from it.

Our School of Data project works to help journalists and civil society organisations use data to improve their research and reportage. The Data Journalism Handbook, a free book that we created with the European Journalism Centre, shows journalists how to use data to improve the news and is now being translated into many different languages including Arabic, Chinese, French, Spanish, and Russian.

The Data Journalism Handbook, which ReadWriteWeb said offers “a resounding case for data-driven journalism … and the service that it offers the public”.

Opening up our culture

We have long been interested in the digital public domain and the cultural commons – from our early attempts to build a global registry of public domain works, to trying to model copyright law in countries around the world to determine which works are in the public domain.

The Public Domain Review started life as a relatively modest project to highlight interesting public domain works and to raise awareness of importance of having an open cultural commons. In the past few years it has received extensive praise from some of the world’s most prestigious literary publications, and has a dedicated base of regular readers which is just about to hit 10,000.

Our OpenGLAM initiative continues to liase with cultural institutions around the world to encourage them to open up their holdings – and to support people who are trying to create useful things using open cultural material, through initiatives such as the Open Humanities Awards.

Curated collections of public domain images from the Public Domain Review, which the Paris Review called “one of our favourite journals”.

Where we’re going

Since 2004, we’ve become a truly international organisation. We’ve gone from being a handful of like-minded advocates – mainly based in the UK and Europe – to becoming a global network, spanning countries and cities across the world.

We want to continue to expand and empower this network, to open up essential information about things that matter – from carbon emissions to clinical trials to our cultural past. We want to catalyse and support projects which use open knowledge to change the world for the better, whether through greater accountability, more successful data driven investigative journalism projects, or more collaborative scientific research.

We’re looking forward to many more years of open knowledge, and we have some really exciting plans for our tenth year and beyond. We hope you’ll join us.

The horrific factory collapse at Rana Plaza in Dhaka has brought the business practices of global garment brands, as well their thousands of suppliers, into the spotlight.

At School of Data we noted that corrupt and missing data were part of the story. Data on building permits in Bangladesh is largely unavailable due to lack of state inspections. However, after years of pressure on global apparel brands from labor activists, the publishing of garment factory supplier lists is becoming increasingly standardized. We’re asking you to join us in mapping the data on garment factories.

Data Expedition: Mapping the garment factories 

When: Saturday May 25 – 12:00 BST to May 26 18:00 BST - link to your timezone

We’ll be looking for projects such as:

• Mapping garment factories locally and globally

• Exploring the global supply chain of garment export and imports

• Mapping the ownership of local factories and global brands with open company data

• Finding stories and patterns in the connections between global brands and local garment factories

Sign up here for the Data Expedition!

Please note that limited space is available. For more information about the Data Expedition format, we encourage you to read this article.

Before the Data Expedition – Help us build an open garment factory supply list

Before heading out on this important expedition, we’ll need to gather as much data as possible on garment factories. Labor activists and campaigners typically articulate the data in terms of ”supplier lists.” Some brands, such as Nike, provide a list of all factories in their supplier network via Excel and JSON downloads; while others, such as Levi-Strauss, only offer lists in PDF format. In order to prepare a solid dataset for the Data Expedition, we’re asking you to help locate, clean, and merge the supplier lists from across garment brands into one comprehensive Open Garment Factory List.

Begin today by adding to the Open Garment Factory List and join us for a GoogleHangout on Thursday, 23 May at 19:00 CET, where we’ll be engaging in joint data collection.

As often is the case with systems worthy of Rube Goldberg, it's easier to draw than to describe.

The graphic above shows why its so hard to track campaign money: Those who raise it report to one (or more) of three federal agencies, depending on how they raise the money, how they spend the money and how much of it they spend and raise.

The starting point for understanding what different kinds of organizations that spend money on politics can and cannot do is the Internal Revenue Code, which contains several sections defining different types of tax exempt organizations and outlining what these organizations can and cannot do if they are organized under a certain section of the Internal Revenue Code. Section 527, for example, defines in some 3,500 words what a political committee is, what types of its income are exempt from tax (contributions, transfers from other 527 committees), what sort of expenditures it can make, and what its tax exempt purpose is ("influencing or attempting to influence the selection, nomination, election, or appointment of any individual to any Federal, State, or local public office or office in a political organization, or the election of Presidential or Vice-Presidential electors, whether or not such individual or electors are selected, nominated, elected, or appointed").

But it doesn't end there: In addition to the Internal Revenue Code's definitions, these these organizations are regulated by federal law and state laws. For example, the Internal Revenue Code does not require nonprofits organized under section 501(c)4 to disclose their donors to the public. But the Bipartisan Campaign Reform Act called for such groups to disclose their donors if they ran "issue ads" (ones that mention a candidate without saying "vote for" or "vote against him--the FEC has a fuller definition here; it's worth noting it took a 2012 court ruling to force the Federal Election Commission to apply this rule).

Further complicating the picture: Organizations under one of the categories listed above can form sub-organizations under another category. For instance, a labor union or trade association can spawn a 501(c)4, a super PAC and a traditional PAC. Many major givers operate under three or four guises, making the financial influence they exercise over elections especially difficult to track.

Understanding who reports what to whom when is complicated, but here are some general guidelines of what federal agencies are involved in overseeing these organizations, their regulatory authority and the disclosures they require:

Internal Revenue Service

• Regulates organizations for compliance with tax law
• Requires a limited number of 527s--those that do not register with the Federal Election Commission or a state election authority--to disclose information, including initial notices (form 8871), periodic reports of their fundraising and spending (form 8872), an annual information return (form 990) and a tax return if they have taxable income of more than $100 (form 1120-POL). Groups organized under section 527 that file with the Federal Election Commission or state election boards are not required to file with the IRS, unless they have more than $100 in taxable income.
• Regulates nonprofits organized under section 501(c) of the Internal Revenue Code. These include social welfare organizations like Crossroads GPS (section c4), labor unions like the AFL-CIO (section c5) and trade associations like the U.S. Chamber of Commerce (section c6). Nonprofits file an initial application for tax exempt status (form 1024) and annual information returns (form 990). They disclose information on grants they make to other organizations, their boards of directors, salaries of their five highest paid employees and amounts paid to their five biggest outside contractors. They do not disclose information on donors.
• Nonprofits that lobby to influence legislation must disclose the amount expended on lobbying on their 990 forms.

Federal Election Commission

• Administers and enforces federal election law.
• Oversees candidate committees, political party committees, political action committees and independent expenditure-only committees--also known as super PACs. All these types of committees are organized under section 527 of the Internal Revenue Code; because they disclose information to the FEC, they do not file disclosures with the IRS.
• Requires that these political committees file periodic disclosures of their donors, expenditures, loans received and outstanding debts. Committees can choose either monthly or quarterly disclosures.
• Requires disclosures of independent expenditures--that is, spending on advertising, get-out-the-vote or other activities that aim to either elect or defeat a candidate for federal office. These expenditures must be reported within 48 hours until 20 days before an election, when they must be reported within 24 hours. Anyone making an independent expenditure must file a report: 501c organizations, 527 political committees, individuals and for-profit corporations. Both 48 and 24 hour reports require disclosure of the candidate or candidates supported or opposed, the amount spent, the payee or payees, but do not disclose donations.
• Adjusts for inflation the limits on the size of donations individuals can make to candidate, party and political action committees (but not super PACs, which can take contributions in unlimited amounts from individuals, corporations--including 501c4 nonprofits that don't disclose their donors--and labor unions).
• Investigates violations of federal election law.

U.S. Department of Labor

Requires some labor unions (those that have private sector or federal employees, including U.S. Postal Service workers) to disclose information on the amount spent on political activities, including itemized spending. Labor unions that represent state and municipal employees are not required to file annual reports with DoL.

Not on the chart, but also peripherally involved in the regulation of political funding and disclosure, through the requirements it imposes on television advertisers:

Federal Communications Commission

• Requires all organizations that purchase advertising on television, radio and cable outlets to disclose to the station, in a filing available for public inspection, to disclose the name of the organization, its officers, the amount spent and other information about the ad buy. Generally, these disclosures are only available to review at the offices of the stations, though in 2012, the FCC required the four biggest broadcast outlets in the 50 largest markets to post the disclosures--known as the station's political file--online at the FCC website. Sunlight makes this records readily searchable via our Political Ad Sleuth tool.

Instead, I discovered that in 2012 there were only 8,138 award notices and 18,546 solicitation notices in FedBizzOpps, while there were 178,375 contracts reported on in USASpending.gov. At the time of writing that post I was still waiting on a definitive response from the Office of Management and Budget or the General Services Administration.

After finally having a discussion with a GSA representative, I learned two important facts that may likely account for the discrepancy:

• There are a few sweeping exemptions when it comes to publicly announcing contract awards, including exempting awards under $3.5 million.
• When the solicitation period closes for a contract, that solicitation is archived and doesn't show up in the downloadable data.

Note that anyone who bids on a contract will get notified of the award, regardless of dollar amount, just not the public. Eventually, the award should show up in USASpending, but there could be a significant time lapse before that happens (the DoD always waits until 60 days after the end of the quarter to report to USASpending/FPDS, for example). Ideally, the public oversight that could prevent bad behavior in government contracting should begin before the contract shows up in USASpending and the execution is already well underway. Many other countries around the world always report their contract awards publicly, explicitly as an oversight mechanism (Slovakia, Russia, the UK, Ukraine, Turkey and others, for instance). And if using $3.5 million as a reporting threshold eliminates 90% of awards from being reported, perhaps it's not a very good threshold.