(영어번역시험준비)The Citizen Watchdogs of Web 2.0(08.07.07)

From John Edwards' haircut to Hillary Clinton's tear, Web videos have played a well-publicized role in generating buzz about this year's presidential candidates. As influential as those viral clips may be, though, a broader role is arising for so-called voter-generated content. Civic-minded techies are increasingly bringing Web 2.0 to political activism, developing new watchdog tools that open up Congressional machinery for ordinary citizens to scrutinize and critique.

Representatives from a growing cadre of participatory democracy sites gathered last week in New York City at the Personal Democracy Forum, a national conference on the intersection of technology and politics. They demonstrated an array of new tools that enable voters to annotate and edit prospective legislation, monitor congressional speeches, and trace links between political contributions and voting patterns. Some of the still-nascent tools blend the advantages of crowd-powered sites like Digg and Reddit with Facebook and LinkedIn-like social-networking.

"Modern-day technology will reinvent democracy," says Ellen Miller, Executive Director of the Sunlight Foundation, which capitalizes on the Web to shine light on the work of Congress. "It allows people to participate in huge numbers and in ways that will fundamentally challenge power structures, that will demand accountability from their elected officials."

Web 2.0 activism has moved from just amassing info to wiki-fying that data and enabling it to go viral. Anyone interested in the factors influencing politicians' earmarks, such as their personal finances and campaign contributors, can now dig into the data, sifting, sorting and commenting on it and sharing it with others using maps, charts, and other visuals. By presenting data in widget-format, the sites are encouraging dialogue and jump-starting activism, by letting blogs spread their findings backed by live data. In so doing, the sites are helping illuminate subjects like revolving door lobbying in ways that help motivate civic participation in the political blogosphere and beyond.

The Center for Responsive Politics (CRP) and the Sunlight Foundation, both non-partisan, have been leading the charge as innovative digital watchdogs. CRP's site OpenSecrets.org relaunched recently with a new palette of offerings to let people dig up and expose links between political contributions and subsequent decision-making. "Watchdogs are most effective these days when they're not the only ones barking," says CRP Executive Director Sheila Krumholz. "Our goal is to get the data in as many hands as possible, to enlist others in making the connections between money's influence on policy."

Numerous sites are taking advantage of CRP's open spigot, including Maplight.org. Last week Maplight merged CRP info with voting data from GovTrack.us to assess the 94 House Democrats who had originally opposed immunity for wiretapping telecoms but then shifted positions to vote in support of the Bush administration. Maplight's analysis demonstrated that those who flip-flopped on immunity had received nearly double the amount in PAC contributions from AT&T, Sprint and Verizon as those who remained opposed to the legislation.

Perhaps even more significant than analyzing bills after the fact is being able to influence debate beforehand. "The holy grail of this new movement is to develop the technology for collaborative analysis of bills online," says Rafael DeGennaro, a longtime congressional staffer and former president of Taxpayers for Common Sense. An example of the impact of legislative annotation took place as far back as a year ago, when conservative blogger N.Z. Bear posted a PDF version of the 2007 Senate Immigration bill, helping opponents of the bill rally around particularly controversial details that might otherwise have escaped their attention. The text of the bill had been closely guarded prior to the leak the weekend of May 20, 2007. Were it not for the online annotation, the bill might not have been widely analyzed before the debate scheduled for May 21. DeGennaro says the immigration bill's ultimate defeat demonstrated the impact online legislative annotation can have.

DeGennaro now runs ReadtheBill.org, a nonpartisan startup trying to build consensus around the idea that bills should be posted on the Web for 72 hours before Congressional debate begins, so the public can assess and respond to pending legislation. The site is aligned with OpentheGovernment.org, which aims to reduce government secrecy. Key to reducing secrecy is exposing more and more about where $16.8 trillion in federal spending ends up, which is the aim of Fedspending.org, a site that over the past 20 months has been searched seven million times. A related project is Lawrence Lessig's Change Congress, a new grassroots effort focused on government transparency and challenging the role of money in politics.

The digitization of political data isn't new. Year after year fundraising information has been dripping out in steadily greater volume. What's new in 2008 is the usability of the info, the collaborative ways in which sites are linking data together, and the degree to which the new tools are motivating civic activism. While Obama's online fundraising may set new records, and the Obama "Baracky" video may land in a museum someday, the long-term legacy of this presidential campaign season may have more to do with the monitoring of mundane details of governance than with flashy fundraising or viral video.