Sunlight Labs Augments White House Visitor Data to Make it Easier to Use Effort to help public, reporters find useful information on individual visitors to White House Published on Jan 5, 2010 - 7:44:05 AM
WASHINGTON, DC Jan. 5, 2010 - Acting on the latest online release of visitor data provided by the White House last week, the Sunlight Labs released a mashup designed to make it easier for anyone to conduct independent research on who is visiting the White House. The new mashup links to data from the Center for Responsive Politics and the National Institute on Money in State Politics to show whether visitors have given campaign contributions on the national or state level; it also links to visitors' profiles on LittleSis.org and their Google and Wikipedia search results to provide greater context of who is conducting business with the White House.
"The White House's decision to make visitor data public is yet another positive step toward making government more accountable," said Clay Johnson, director of Sunlight Labs. "Because they released the data online in a structured format, we have an opportunity to add contextual information to gain more insight into how the White House is developing its policies."
The data released by the White House contains 25,000 records from September 16 through September 30, 2009. The White House has promised to release this data on a monthly basis, with October's data to be released sometime this month. The Obama administration is the first to release visitor data online in a format that can be parsed and analyzed.
However, as Sunlight has noted before, the White House is likely withholding some records for reasons of national security, political sensitivity, privacy or other concerns, but it's unclear how many visitors fall under those categories.
