The Campaign Finance Open Data Challenge

We're asking all the candidates in this City of Austin election a number of questions on open government and open data issues. We've done this in every city election since 2011. Their responses will be posted here.

New this year, we included a Campaign Finance Open Data Challenge. We asked the candidates:

The City of Austin currently posts candidate and office holder financial statements as scanned facsimiles (PDF format) of the filed, attested documents. [...] Will you publicly post your campaign receipts and expenditures (as reported to the City on form C/OH) online, in CSV spreadsheet data format, within 30 days of filing a report with the Austin City Clerk?

We knew this would be a tough ask when we made it. There are hundreds of reasons why not to open data. It's hard, messy, and scary. There are only a few good reasons in favor of opening data. They are, however, extremely compelling reasons, such as increased transparency and public engagement.

We posed the question to the candidates as a lab experiment, to give them an opportunity to experience the process of opening public data. That process starts with a review of the viability and risks of the proposal, a consideration of the implementation, and finally execution and publication.

On our 2014 Austin City Council Candidate Questionnaire page, we tagged each candidate that responded to our questionnaire with one of the following:

• declined - The candidate indicated they would not be posting a machine readable version of campaign finance data.
• accepted - The candidate indicated that they are willing to post a machine readable version of campaign finance data.
• completed - The campaign has posted a machine readable version of their campaign finance data. Click through to the candidate page for location of their posting.

We will update the status as the campaign proceeds, and when a candidate completes the challenge we will post a link to their posting on the page with their questionnaire answers.

We appreciate the time the candidates took to respond to our questionnaire, and especially want to recognize those candidates that have elected to accept the Campaign Finance Open Data Challenge that we have posed.

We will follow up with the candidates that have accepted the challenge, to track where they post the data.