Data Mashup Resources for Washington Watchdogs

Wired Magazine's Web Mashups Turn Citizens Into Washington's Newest Watchdogs, by Michael Calore, discusses a recent phenomenon of political participation and the web resources that make it possible by "increasingly giving ordinary citizens the ability to easily document the flow of special-interest money and how it influences the legislature." Sites such as MapLight.org, Opensecrets.org and Follow the Money, along with wiki-based political reporting resources like Congresspedia, are empowering citizens to assemble "custom data mashups that use public databases to draw correlations between every vote cast and every dollar spent in Washington."