Fedtastic!

When's the last time you saw an infovis application so innovative and easy-to-understand that you said to yourself, "That's fedtastic." Yes, I know, Followthemoney.org is pretty cool. Maplight.org is also a great way to track money and influence in government. But the government information resource I'm highlighting today truly is Fedtastic. No, really. That's what it's called.

Fedtastic received honorable mention in Sunlight Lab's Apps for America 2009 contest. Fedtastic takes difficult-to-find government information and makes it available to browers in an easy-to-use table format. The site is organized into four main categories: Data, Agencies, States and Congress. The Data category is separated into four sections: Money, Earth and People. Each of these divisions contains sortable data tables based on government information.

The Agencies section contains information about each federal agency and its recovery page and spending information, as well as links to each agency's own summary and budget pages.

Each state page displays budgetary information, as well as links to state representatives, home pages, the Wolfram Alpha and Wikipedia pages for each state, as well as recovery, census and OpenSecrets information.

The Congress pages list comprehensive voting information for each current Congressperson, as well as links to further information and analysis on each one's political attitudes and behavior, sources of campaign finance, and spending patterns. Which is totally fedtastic.

Govfresh.com

Keeping in yesterday's spirit of participatory democracy, today I'm sharing another site that makes keeping track of government initiatives and information that much easier and more transparant.

The first site is Govfresh.com. Govfresh is the one-stop-shop for live feeds from the White House, Congress and Federal agencies, including Twitter, Flickr, and RSS feeds.

While the site itself is not an official government site (it's run by two social media entrepreneurs), all feeds are official with the exception of the House and Senate Twitter feeds (I'm not sure where they are from; the site doesn't say) and the Supreme Court RSS feed, which is provided by Cornell Law School.