In the News

June 11, 2007

Dan Newman is tall and slender, with dark hair and a steady gaze. Imagine Ralph Nader or Harry Potter in his 30s. From a 700-square-foot office in Berkeley, California, with three colleagues and fourteen interns, he runs a nonprofit website that should give unscrupulous politicians pause. It's called MAPLight.org. The first three letters stand for "money and politics," and Newman is illuminating the connections.

May 24, 2007

The first step to solving a problem is recognizing that you have one.

That’s what I keep telling myself, anyway, to avoid becoming depressed by Maplight.org.

It’s a new Web site with a very simple mission: to correlate lawmakers’ voting records with the money they’ve accepted from special-interest groups.

April 26, 2007

Tread carefully, politicians -- concerned citizens are watching your every move on the web. Their tools? Custom data mashups that use public databases to draw correlations between every vote cast and every dollar spent in Washington.

Take this report about the widely debated and bitterly fought California SB217, which would have banned clear-cutting in ancient forests.

Generated by the nonpartisan MapLight.org website, the report clearly shows that the logging industry, which opposed the bill, gave nearly twice as much money to politicians as environmental groups did. The bill was defeated.

February 1, 2004

Note: This article profiles Advomatic Partners Aaron Welch and Adam Mordecai working together on Dean for America, only a few months prior to the founding of Advomatic.

After a full day developing Web applications for a government contractor, Michael Haggerty heads home for dinner and quality time with his young daughter. By 10 p.m., he's programming again — this time to help send Wesley Clark to the White House.

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