Picking up the pieces

I'm not even talking at all about the presidential race. Roy Nakadegawa's defeat by Bob Franklin for the BART District 3 seat is a blow for quality public transportation in Berkeley. Franklin, now certainly beholden to the unions who financed much of his campaign, will be distracted carrying their water into upcoming bargaining talks. Meanwhile, the initiative to charge for all parking at Berkeley BART stations will be fully shelved. About the best thing I can say is that the whole experience made me sit up and look around for more resources regarding disclosure of local campaign financing. Here's one I learned about this weekend at Bloggercon III. Unfortunately, it only delves down into the U.S. Congressional races -- no more local than that. (You can query the data they do have by zip code, which is fascinating.)

Now, imagine an army of bloggers, posting all the financing data for all the races in local districts everywhere, much as I did in the BART District 3 race. Chris Nolan thinks it's an interesting idea. So does Staci Kramer of the Online Journalism Review. (Both of whom I talked to at Bloggercon.)

With few newspapers publishing any campaign contribution data, and practically no one bothering to interpret the data so you know (as I attempted to communicate) what the data means, this is fertile ground for bloggers to cultivate, maybe even as a source of income.