According to their announcement, you can now view the following on your mobile phone:

• presidential candidate summary data
• a calendar with dates for commission meetings, reporting deadlines, conferences, advisory opinions, and litigation
• an audio archive of recent hearings
• the FEC YouTube channel
• The FEC Twitter feed

FEC Chair Cynthia Bauerly said, “I am pleased to announce the launch of the FEC’s new mobile interface. … I greatly appreciate the efforts of the agency staff who worked on this project, which will further the FEC’s mission of disclosing campaign finance data.”

Here is the FEC’s press release about the new pages.

Even something as small as following a candidate on Twitter or liking a candidate’s Facebook page could make someone feel more connected to that candidate and sway them to cast a vote in their direction. While a large portion of voters still claim to be undecided about who they are voting for in the upcoming Republican primaries, this is what Republican candidates are hoping to accomplish by dedicating so many resources to keeping their social media outlets up to date and engaging.

As the Iowa and other early caucuses are coming ever closer, GOP presidential hopefuls are turning more and more to their Twitter, Facebook, and other social media tools to get their messages out to voters and to gather volunteers.

After the success of President Obama’s grassroots social media based campaign back in 2008, social media has been an increasingly important tool that many consider necessary for the success of a political campaign, a fact which nearly all Republican presidential hopefuls have grasped and acted upon.

Read about all the ways the Republican presidential candidates have been utilizing social media in “Republicans Shake More Hands Using Social Media” from the New York Times.

A new Facebook application called Fanitics, expected to be functioning at the start of the new year, will allow users to compete against others with their fantasy political teams in a similar way as they would compete in fantasy sports games.

Fanatic’s creator, Todd Bouldin explained,

“It’s a lot like fantasy football. You create a league and friends populate it with teams. Your team is populated with politicians who gain points based on a variety of metrics from fundraising, media mentions and public appearances.”

Once you create your team, you can switch out politicians as you wish. Your team can include presidential candidates, governors, and House and Senate members whose actions are all tracked by the game.

Although, the game will probably be utilized more by political buffs early on, this game offers a great learning experience and tool to keep up on local politicians to all participants.

To learn more, read this article.

• The rise of the digital age has transformed the meaning of open government – Open Government: A New Window on the World
• As demands for transparency and amount of data grow for government agencies, budgets shrink – What’s in Store for Government IT in 2012?
• How much is a Twitter follower worth? Man sued for $340,000 for company’s 17,000 Twitter followers – Lawsuit May Determine Who Owns a Twitter Account

Below is a video released by NASA that shows the pattern of snowfall across the globe every month for a 10 year period beginning in February of 2000 and ending last month.

The observations were collected by the Moderate Resolution Imaging Spectroradiometer (MODIS) on NASA’s Terra satellite.

To learn more, read this article by Samantha Murphy from Mashable.

“In the latest act of online political sabotage, individuals who type newtgingrich.com into their browsers will be directed to one of a number of sites that are embarrassing to Republican primary candidate Newt Gingrich” – Newt Gingrich Attacked By Digital Vandals

“The White House is taking its fight over payroll tax to Twitter with a campaign using the hashtag #40dollars that asks what you can buy with that amount” – White House Uses #40dollars Twitter Campaign to Influence Payroll Tax Debate

“Using cloud technology for elections reporting and results can also save governments money” – Elections Results Websites Heading to Cloud

“The federal government is on pace to close at least 1,200 of its 3,100 data centers by the end of 2015” – Federal CIO: 1,200 Data Centers to Close by 2015

“Proceedings in the Iowa House will be streamed live over the Internet when lawmakers begin the legislative session next month” – Iowa House Action Will be Streamed on Internet

Ron Paul, Newt Gingrich, and President Obama are especially successful at utilizing Facebook – Campaigns Capitalize on Facebook

Enjoy!

Does reading about the issues make you want to voice your opinion and take action? Boston.com and some other news organizations are testing a new feature called “Raise Your Voice” on their website that will allow readers to contact their representatives directly from news articles on political subjects.

Congressional Management Foundation research noted that seeing “a compelling news feature” was one of the top motivators for Internet users to contact Congress.

With this new tool, readers only have to enter their home address, and the tool will provide a list of federal and state elected officials as well as presidential candidates whom readers can contact to express their opinion while it is still fresh on their minds.

This feature is just one of many that have recently emerged that help to connect a large number of citizens with their political representatives and increase the chance that their opinion will be heard.

This article by Miranda Neubauer on techPresident.com offers more information on this feature.

As more and more politicians are becoming Twitter savvy, new tools are being utilized to give individual politicians the edge in the “Twitterverse”. Now presidential candidates such as Mitt Romney and Rick Perry are using promoted tweets to influence voters in real time.

Defined by Twitter, Promoted Tweets are ordinary Tweets that are purchased by advertisers who want to reach a wider group of users or to spark engagement from their existing followers. Besides being labeled as Promoted and appearing at the top of relevant search results pages on Twitter, they act like regular Tweets.

In addition to Mitt Romney and Rick Perry, Herman Cain’s team was also using them to respond to the sexual harassment charges before he removed himself from the race.

These Promoted Tweets help drive traffic to website’s that the promoter wants the public to see as well as bring their opinions and issues to the forefront of conversation on Twitter.

To learn more, read Presidential Candidates Use Promoted Tweets to Sway Voters in Real Time by Cotton Delo.

A report compiled by the General Services Administration shows that nearly one-fifth of federal Web domains are inactive and one-fourth redirect to other dot-gov sites.

The report was released as a part of the GSA’s dot-gov reform initiative which is part of President Obama’s Campaign to Cut Waste, identifying unnecessary websites that can be consolidated into other websites to reduce costs and improve the quality of service to the American public. It is a goal of the GSA to significantly cut down the number of federal websites and create a more cohesive and standardized look to the remaining federal websites which will also help improve the government’s customer service.

Although agencies have failed to maintain many of their dot-gov domains, they have announced plans to shut down 26% of dot-gov domains, and merge 4% of domains into other domains.

To learn more, read Only half of dot-gov sites are active, GSA reports by Joseph Marks.

The Massachusetts state government, like many other state governments, has launched a transparency website to provide citizens with data that they previously could not easily access.

What sets the Massachusett’s transparency website, Massachusetts Open Checkbook, apart from similar websites is their level of detail and the option to view the spending data in different ways.

Some states, such as California, have taken down their websites because after the initial creation of the website, information had not been adequately updated, and the website was not serving the purpose that it was meant to serve.

The Massachusetts Open Checkbook provides different categories and displays a detailed breakdown of their budget on pie charts, making this website possibly the most user friendly transparency website launched by a state government yet.

To learn more, read Massachusetts Puts User-Friendly Checkbook Online by Sarah Rich.

Friday morning, the Committee on House Administration unanimously adopted “Standards for the Electronic Posting of House and Committee Documents & Data.” Beginning on January 1st, this will allow anyone with access to the internet to now have access to all House bills, amendments, and resolutions for floor consideration. The documents will be formatted in XML schema maintained at http://xml.house.gov.

According to a post on the Sunlight Foundation’s blog, committees will also be encouraged to post their documents on that site in XML whenever possible — and searchable PDFs when not — with the expectation that mandatory publication requirements in XML will soon be imposed. The House will also store video of hearings and markups, and work to implement standards “that require documents to be electronically published in open data formats that are machine readable,” thereby enabling transparency and public review.

The new standards document can be read here.

Keeping up with the campaign trails of the 2012 presidential candidates will be a lot easier with the new “Campaigns Check-In” feature that Foursquare and NBC are teaming up to create.

The new feature will appear on the recently launched NBCpolitics.com and will allow visitors to see where each of the GOP candidates are making campaign stops in real-time, and where they’ve been throughout their entire election campaign.

Also, for the Foursquare users out there, you will be able to recieve unique, co-branded political badges from NBC News beginning in 2012.

Learn more in NBC Maps the 2012 Election Campaign Trail With Foursquare by Alex Fitzpatrick.

As technology advances, laws, and regulations will have to evolve with it. The concept of privacy becomes very hazy when you are trying to decide if you can track a mobile device belonging to someone who is suspected of a crime. Even today with the new scanning technology utilized by airports which effectively shows images of naked people and has always been surrounded by controversy is used to ensure the safety of airline passengers.

Where can the line be drawn between what is acceptable to ensure the safety of the citizens of the United States and what is a gross violation of personal privacy?

There are also already problems concerning disclosure for online ads on websites such as Facebook and Google. While states such as California and Maryland are among the minority to even take a step in the direction of regulating such political ads, the FEC has disallowed such campaign contributions at the federal level.

Technology is advancing at an incredible rate, and many advancements come with both positive and negative applications.

Learn more in How technology will test the Constitution by Joseph Marks. Here is a video summary from the Brookings Institution Constitution 3.0 event on December 13, 2011.

CityCampSF gathered app developers for a hackathon last weekend. The result was a series of apps that took raw government datasets and turned them into usable, searchable information. One app will allow people to receive city legislative alerts and agenda item alerts based on keywords. Another app will make ethics commission data and lobbyist filings searchable.

Don’t miss what Govtech reported in “SF Hackathon Produces Legislative Alert App Prototype” by Sarah Rich.

Here is CityCampSF’s summary of the results from the Hackathon in “CityCampSF Outcomes” on AdrielNation’s blog:

“What happened at CityCampSF Hackathon 2011 on Saturday and Sunday? Lots of great discussion about technology and open government, folks meeting for the first time over pizza, Red Bull and Peanut M&Ms, and some civic hacking on online lobbyists filings, timber harvest plans and text notifications for public meeting agenda keyword alerts.”