 Welcome to our, I think, 45th webinar of the series. And today I'm very excited to have the National Institute on Money and State Politics to give this little presentation on their work. And we have specifically Edwin Bender, who is the Executive Director of the National Institute on Money and State Politics. He's been connecting the dots between campaign finance and public policy for more than a decade. He promotes the free use of the Institute's comprehensive, highly credentialed political donor information by investigative journalists, scholars examining state elections and public policy processes, and attorneys involved in campaign finance litigation, and is now focused on empowering librarians across the country. So very excited to have him, especially because it's Sunshine Week, which was one of the reasons why we chose this week. And looking forward to this. So I will hand it over to you. So thanks for joining us this morning. And it's a pleasure to be here and talking to librarians who I think are going to be saving the world very quickly with their skills in massive data collection, as well as indexing and helping people understand it. Let me introduce you quickly to the Institute and what we do. And then I will show you some of our tools that help you get into the data. I'm going to very here go to about our data and what's on the website just so you can kind of get an idea as I'm talking. We've been collecting state-level political donor information, as you can see from this page, for almost 20 years. We started in the eight Northwest States as a regional organization. And in 1999, 2000 election cycle, we're able to get data from all 50 states. So what does this mean? What it means is that we go to the disclosure agencies in each of the 50 states, and we compile the contribution and expenditure reports that are required to be filed by candidates, political party committees, ballot measure committees with the disclosure agencies. Now this is, you know, each state has a different set of reports, the different set of reporting requirements, a different set of reporting dates. So you can imagine it is a massive undertaking for us to do this. But since 2000, we've been able to do it in all 50 states and expand the data we're collecting. It seems like each time we collect a new set of data, someone's saying, well, why aren't you collecting this data? What this means is that each election cycle, there are something like 16,000 committees that have signed in with the disclosure agencies in the 50 states. They file over 100,000 reports. Those reports, some of them are electronic, some of them show up to the public on PDFs, and there are even some paper reports still out there that we compile. We bring all that data in, and some of it we have keyed in. We have a very good process that we designed and implemented for keyed in data with high levels of accuracy. It comes into our database, and we normalize it. The value that we add to that data, and I'll show you just a second. The coding system we use is that we go through the process of standardizing names where we can. We add an industry code, and we make that available all on our website for you and others to use. We did have a question, you know, why aren't we collecting federal data recently? And we began, we went back and began collecting the contribution reports for federal candidates starting at 2010, as you can see there. We developed along the way a new data architecture, this 21st century data architecture that allows us to bring in even more data. So you see where it says local elections. This is data where we have, it comes in some of the electronic files that we get, and instead of we used to throw it away because it wasn't part of our state elections data. But now we're keeping it, and we will be actually growing this data. There are over 300,000 elected jurisdictions in this country and at the local level, and we can't possibly imagine to do all of those, but where we can get data we will. Places like New York, New York City, Washington, D.C., California, we can get quite a bit of data. New Mexico has a lot of electronic data, so any place we can get electronic data we will. We will hopefully in the next couple of years start a process where we're asking people to find electronic data and upload it to our website. So that's kind of an overview. You can see we do the contributors to statewide office. That's Governor, AG, Attorney General, legislative offices, House and Senate, the High Court, the political parties. We also do the caucus committees. We do the ballot measures where they are, where they happen in the states. And we collect registered lobbyists. We've been doing this since 2006. And so what we're collecting is the lobbyist reports and their clients, and then we're correlating their clients with their campaign donations. So you can see where a client has given campaign contributions and also given hire to lobbyists. We let you see that. One piece that's coming at us just for your information is trying to collect what lobbyists are paid. We got that information in about six states for some previous cycles. It is some of the most difficult data that we could ever undertake to build in about half the states. It's not even required to be disclosed. So that's a big piece for us to work on in the future, but we are trying to raise money around that right now. So other than about the data, we will go back to about our data and about our data. And I said we added a coding system, a designated industry code. And you can see that here are the general, the 19 general economic codes. So as you're going through our data, you'll see these plus signs. And the plus sign simply means that you click on it. It will expand so you can see even more specific donations. And if you click on it, you can get down into over 400 different categories that are very specifically assigned to specific donors. So as we get into the data, you will be able to do that sort of clicking and get down to the very specific piece of information that you want to get to. I'd also like you to understand that we go to, we are a primary source repository. So we go to, here's the list of the campaign finance, election and lobbyist disclosure agencies that we work with to gather our information. So we want you to know, we want all of our users to know that our data is verifiable. We go in and we take great pains to make sure we get every report from each one of these commissions or divisions and put it in our database. And we let you know that in a couple of different ways. And I will show you that in just a minute. The other piece you should know about is how our data is being used. And you can look at institute reports. And if you wanted to do that, you would simply go over here and say, show me all the reports on, let's say, prisons. And you'd say, go. And this will take you then to the reports that we have on prison privatizations. Click any of those. And if up at the top, you sign into the My Follow the Money, sign up for My Follow the Money. This allows you to receive reports that we write. You get to pick the subject matter as well as updates on the state data. This also allows you to download data when you get to a place where we'll be looking at some tables here in a little bit. This allows you to download data or to save the queries that you're running. So I would encourage you all to sign up for My Follow the Money. It's free. I keep very little information about you just enough so that you can have an efficient running web page. So under research, we also work with scholars a lot. And this, of course, is your audience out there. So this lets you look at some of the, there are scholars down here who have used their data for some fairly in-depth analysis of both the public policy process, the electoral process. One, scholars are one of our key audiences, primary audiences, and that's one reason I'm talking to you guys. Besides the fact you're going to save the world is the fact that you do, can't explain to these people about our data and help them understand what a valuable resource it is. So I would encourage you to explore those two pieces. And finally, in the news you can see the, here's our news releases. But you can also find out in the news the list of newspapers that have used and news, not just newspapers but radio and TV too. The organizations that have used their data in their reporting, the different ideas and topics they're reporting on as well as some of the Atlanta Journal Constitution is using our data in an API for its legislature that's a very interesting use of our data. In mentioning APIs, that's application program interface for those of you that don't know. And that's simply a way of streaming our data to your web pages or to your computer and under about our data. You can click on APIs and you can see our documentation. And for those of you who have either programming skills or have teenagers who have programming skills, this is a place they might want to dig into the documentation and look at what we do. Again, all the data that we do, everything we do is open to the public. We want you to use it. We encourage collaborations. And finally, about us, if you want to see where we get our money, go to about us. You can find our funding sources as well as our 990s. So we are blessed with being supported by some of the largest foundations in the country. They understand we're doing a fairly thankless job in compiling this information and are very happy we're making it available to the public in lowering the barriers to access to this information. So with that background, let me take you, I'm going to jump ahead. The Ask Anything is simply a way of building a query to ask for a very specific set of information. I will come back to this in a minute to kind of really help you understand the scope, the scale at which you can access the over, I think we're at 60 million records now. And you should know you are actually querying a database of over 60 million records when you access this. But I'm going to take you over here to the My Legislature Tool. This is something new. We launched it the last couple of weeks. And this is a place where we have taken our campaign finance data and we've grouped it with lawmakers, elected officials, and their committee assignments. And we have an API stream of legislation coming in so you can see the legislation that's coming into a state and see who sponsors it, see which committees it's gone to, and do a little analysis of the donors. So let me take you, you're in North Carolina or at least that's where our host is. So let me take you to North Carolina and we can just do a quick overview so you can see the kind of information we're making available. And here it is. If you were to want to just dig into this data as if you did ask anything query, you'd click here and this would take you to all the records. But what we've done is grouped this data by lawmakers, the legislative committees, and the bills and the sponsors so that you can kind of go back and forth between them. So if you click on important things to know here, top contributors to lawmakers, this is all the donors. No surprise that the parties are right up at the top. But if you wanted to click on why Joe Sam Green gave contributions, you would click on the magnifying glass to go into that data and look at his 46 records. But if you right click on this, you will say, so full details. This gives you an understanding of who Joe Sam Queen is. It's donated almost a million dollars to 22 different filers. That's candidates, party committees, or about committees. And we can say, okay, who is he? Let's look at his occupation. Well, he's an architect. So you can see we take primary source information. This is what he put down or what the candidate or committee put down in the report as his occupation. So he's a former legislator. It looks like, no, he's a current legislator. He's an architect. There are his employers. He's a self-employed, of course. Giving trends gave mostly Democrats probably to himself. He did give to the Democrat Party as well as a couple others, no ballot measures. There's your party committee. He supported himself and a handful of other candidates. So that's as a contributor, as a candidate. This shows you as a lawmaker and then the relationships that he has. But that opens up a whole separate window. When you click on a candidate's name, right-click, or a donor's name, if you were to click on the magnifying glass, it would actually open up a new browser tab for you when you run through the query. So that's the lawmakers. Let's go to recent giving by party. Let's do an overview of how much Democrats received, how much Republicans received. Basically, this tells you who's in control of the legislature. So the next piece, that is, this is where the value starts really showing up, is we give you an opportunity to say, show me who's on the aging committee. And so here you have the members of the aging committee. You get to look at how much they raised. And there's Sam Joe Queen. I didn't plan that. I mean, that he just showed up. And then you can see the contributors to this particular committee. And there again, nothing too interesting here, all the citizens for higher education. This is the specific interest to this committee. This is all their donations, I should say. Not their specific interest. But where this starts to get interesting is when you go down and look at a piece of legislation. And again, I haven't looked at this, but there's correctional enterprises. So let's go look at that particular bill. And this says, here's the bill, House 10 Correctional Enterprises Medicaid Sales. Let's look at who the sponsors are. There are your sponsors to this particular bill and the top donors to those sponsors. And again, these guys are going to have contributions from a lot of different interests. So this may or may not be of interest, but here is the Medical Society. And there may be some others here who have that kind of an interest. We're looking maybe, since the corrections was in the title, for a correctional interest. If you hit House Bill Events, you now see that this has been passed on to the Committee on Health. So let's go back up and find the Committee on Health. And this appropriation is probably not education. There's the Health Committee. So now we have the members of the Health Committee. How much money they raise to their position within the Committee as well as their party. And we can say it contributes to Committee members. And this may or may not be of a lot of interest, although you do see now a grouping of North Carolina Medical Society and North Carolina Hospital Association that may or may not, the dental, have an interest in this. You can drill down into that. Or, Rich says, click here to explore contributions to this Committee. Now, when we click here, we're going to say, show me all the records for these particular lawmakers who sit on this Committee. We just opened up another tab. So these guys have over 20,000 contributions for $9.5 million. Now, the question is, okay, so what? Now, the plus sign next to the one here, this is some functionality that you need to know. You can open as many of these tabs as you want. You're going to look at this data in a couple of different ways. So let's just say, okay, let's look at them using your table viewer. Here is the table viewer, the way to analyze, begin analyzing this data. Click the table viewer. Now, let's look at the broad general industries who gave. So there's health. Now, we were looking at health as a, you know, there were top donors there, but as a group, the health industry, was a pretty big donor to this particular Committee. Now, whether they knew this bill was coming or not is a question. So let's look at, let's go back over to this one and go to the table viewer and say, show me the contributors. Who were those contributors? Say, okay, we can say, let's go to a little bit more specifically, the specific business. And this is where we might get into some other questions about if this is corrections, then do we have corrections people showing up here? And again, we start out at general with the broad sector, go to more specific with the general industry, or very specific with the specific business. And I'm not seeing any correctional contributions here, which is a little surprising. But anyway, hopefully this is, you can see how this particular tool would be of value to you. Here we'll go one more time and hit the filer. Now, this is the recipient of those dollars. So these are the Committee members, how much they received from the, from all donors. Let's go back here to health and say, now show me the health donations to members of this Committee. So we've narrowed this search down. I hope I haven't lost anyone. We've narrowed this search down to now we're just looking at the health contributions. And again, we're going to keep that for a place marker and say show me the candidates who received this. We're going to go to filer again. So this shows you that Committee member Joseph Nelson-Dollar received over $244,000 from an interest that had, from a person who sponsored or had, excuse me, was sitting on the Committee that's considering this piece of legislation, H10. So that's the Committee analysis tool. Let me take you to another one. Let me close these just so maybe I can resonate a little bit more clearly. Pennsylvania is a state that we've looked at a lot. It is a state that has no contribution limits. So the dollars you see here will be a lot higher than North Carolina's. But here if we go down and say, OK, show me then the, who are the donors to ethics financial disclosure. I'm looking here, water wells. So here are HB48 in conservation and natural resource providing for water well and construction standards. Now, you all know that Pennsylvania is a state. Marcellus shale formation is there and fracking oil and gas. This is huge. Here are the sponsors of that piece of legislation. And here are then the top donors to Committee members. And you can start seeing here's PPL and PICO Energy showing up on the list. If we go to House Bill events, this has been moved to Consumer Affairs. So if we go up to Consumer Affairs Committee, we see that, again, big donations. The donors to Consumer Affairs, pretty standard stuff except here's Exxalon, PPL, giving quite a bit of money, PICO Energy 82. So this is getting a little more specific. Now if we go back and open up another tab with just contributions to lawmakers on this particular committee, then we go to our table viewer and we say, show us the broad sector. And we see that energy and natural resources are among the top donors. Party is always there. So, okay, for your information, the uncoded, you'll see that's a large number. We're processing hundreds of thousands, millions of records every election cycle. What happens, our algorithms go through and recognize the interest that we've been looking at for the last 20 years. We're able to standardize and code those. In the millions of records, we get a lot that are not either the first-time donors. They don't give a lot. They do not have an occupation employer. Or for some reason, their name doesn't fit our standardized algorithms. And we have to have a research team that goes in and looks at those. But at the end of the day, we're able to code to an industry more than 90% of the money that lawmakers raise. So the uncoded will always be at the top. This is us telling you this is where we need to work. But what you know from our data is that we've shown you. We've documented, I should say, the finance insurance and real estate donors, the natural resource. The other piece that you might question is the unidimized contributions right there. Unidimized contributions are those that are below a reporting threshold. So in Montana, the reporting threshold is $35. So if you give 35 or less, your name will show up as a lump sum on the report. The reporting thresholds range from $20 in about six states to $200 in the handful of states. So there's a range, but that is just lump sum. It's basically fundraisers, house parties, that sort of thing. But let's look right now at the energy and natural resource dollars to this particular committee. So I'm going to click on the magnifying glass. And again, this takes us to a place where we have the natural resources donors to the Pennsylvania Consumer Affairs Committee. And so we're going to open that other table. We're going to click on Table Viewer and say, show us who these contributors are. And now you can see, excellent PPL. They're giving almost $100,000 to committee members who are discussing right now this particular piece of legislation, the HB48. So if you're a reporter, at some point you're going to start asking questions. What does this bill do? How does it either protect my water or protect the companies that are looking at fracking? So this is hopefully a very valuable tool. I skipped ahead to this tool simply because it is something we just launched. We're very excited about it. And we've already had some really good reporting go on with this. And we're happy to, at any time, take your further questions you can call. And we're happy to do one-on-one and help you understand how to use these tools. So now let's go back a little bit. I'm about halfway into my time. So I want to make sure that I am getting back to some of the other bigger pieces of our tools. You can see my district here is a place you simply enter an address. And if I do mine, this then will show you basically a ballot. Here are my districts. We take you to my district. This is a place you get to see who ran in my district, how much they raised. And you keep scrolling down. Here's my Senate district. And here is the U.S. House. And here's the U.S. Senate. So this is a way to get people and you can have the top donors to each of these sets of candidates simply by clicking on top contributors, top industries, or giving trends. These are easy access places to, we think, some value. If you're a voter and you want to see who is the lawmaker in my district and who gave to them, that's where you would go. If you then want to see the election overview, and this is a place that's, I think, let's again go to North Carolina, where you can see the total amount raised, $87 million. And a piece to understand here, when I said you can track us, this is verifiable data, the 86% here means that we have gone in and we've compiled. This was updated 318. We've compiled 86% of the reports that are required to be filed, and only 86% have to be filed at this particular date. If you click on that 86%, it will take you to a listing that shows the reports that were required to be filed. And let's go down to 2014 and click on this. So this then shows you the candidates and committees, how many reports we have in. And here we have at North Carolina Senate, Alexander for North Carolina Senate, we have all eight of his reports. Kelly Alexander, we have six of his eight reports. So Kelly hasn't filed all of them. In the case of a congressional candidate, we have 15 of 16 reports. So this is a way for you to understand how much data we have, how good it is, where we are in the process of compiling that information. That's something we show reporters right up front so they know what they're reporting about. So this shows you then who the candidates are. You scroll down here are the party committees, and again here are the ballot measure committees. So this is an overview of the election. If you wanted to go in and look at a specific Senate race, we'll click on the plus sign. Here's the State Supreme Court, and there are two candidates. Let's go to this one where there are three candidates. This shows you who those candidates are. And again, if you click on the magnifying glass, you'd open up this set of data, be able to look at the 1,954 committees for over $660,000. You can look at top contributors to all candidates. But where this gets, I think really interesting is when you look at the giving trends. This is where you get to say, okay, Republicans got $40 million, 46,000 checks, 47,000 checks just gave Democrats just $30 million. Nonpartisan winners, of course, got a lot more than losers, although this is closer than we often see. Another thing you see here is how incumbents got $46 million, and the winners got $46 million. This means that your incumbents won probably 99% of the time. That's a trend we see incumbent, of course, incumbent money winning out the vast majority of time, 90% of the time. So that's the election overview. And finally, we do have an industry influence, which we're still working on. It needs some filtering. And the national overview is simply a map that you get to look at the federal dollars, the state dollars, where we have local level data. And again, you can go into tabular data. But let me take a moment for the last little bit here to let you show you how the Ask Anything works. Because this is where we're allowing you to unlock the data. We start here. We want to look at contributions too. And let's look at all the states, but let's look at a couple different years, and I'm hoping this is going to run fast. We're going to say we want to look at two election cycles. And we're going to, now, core data. Let me explain this. Our core data is our state data and the federal data. If you want to only look at state data, you'd say just show me the state data. And then we say go. So we've narrowed our search down. You have to click go. You're now looking at over 8 million records of data. And so let's do two things real quick. Let's just say show me by the election state, since we're looking at all 50 states. So here you have a list. And I said you could access this data in a number of different ways. The URL at the top is actually a hard link. And it would allow you to get to this particular view of the data if you were to cut and paste this into a story. You can also use down at the bottom. If you've signed in with my file of the money, you have access to the CSV, the XML, or the JSON to program this in. You get, with CSV, you get exactly what you see on the screen. So if you're building an analysis of the last two election cycles, you can say that in California there was over a billion dollars raised by candidates and committees in the last two election cycles. So that gives you some scale. You can then say, let's look at this by year. Since we did pick multiple years, you get to see that. There's a split here. The off year is quite a bit lower than the year of the elections. That's pretty normal. Then you start getting into the interesting stuff. Like, let's look at, I don't know, how much money went to incumbents in all 50 states. And this may take a minute, so I might jump ahead. But what we're doing, each one of these buttons allows you to, that was fast. So here's incumbents. Over two billion dollars, all 50 states incumbents raised two billion dollars compared to open races where there's 1.2 billion and challengers 600,000. We can start stacking all these. But again, because you're sorting millions of records, I'm not going to go deep into that. You could do more than one indicator. Let's go in and say, okay, in the last two cycles, what were the broad industry sectors? Who gave the most? And then you can start, this is where you get to start narrowing things down. Where are the interests that are giving? Where do they have an interest? So if you have the oil and gas, the fracking guys, you'd be able to go here and say, this lets you get into this broad sector analysis. So the cat codes that we put on here, and this is going to take a minute. So I might go back and do something else. These queries run. You can open up other windows. The query is going to keep running. And so if we were to say, now show me, and I'll come back to the other one, show me the general party. And it's going to go down just to candidates. And while that's loading, let's go back and say, that was still loading. So I'm going to, I've bitten off more than I should. But here we go. We get Republicans about the same number of checks, but the amounts, there are over 400 million more. That's an interesting piece. And if you wanted to stack up, you could run another query here that would show you the incumbent Republicans versus challenger Republicans versus open Republicans. So you can stack these up. And this again gives you an interesting analysis into the campaign finances. And that one's going to keep loading. So I'm going to try one more thing here so you can kind of see. Let's do the type of contributor. So one thing we do is we do look at the, you know, is this contributor an individual or is it a non-individual? And by that I mean an association, a PAC, or in some states even corporations can give. So looking at the type of contributor can give you an analysis. And if you clicked on type of contributor and then general party, you'd see which party had more individual donors versus association donors. If you were to click on status of candidate, this would give you winners and losers. And type of contributor would let you understand if winning candidates received more donations from non-individuals such as PACs Association than individuals. The trends there of course, or if you're running, if you're challenging an incumbent, you're going to be raising more money from the individuals. And your incumbent's going to be raising more money from the people they see every day in the halls of the legislature. And so you see that trend back and forth. Someone's trying to beat an incumbent or win an open seat. They will reach out and have more of a grassroots campaign. Once they're in office, then they go to the easy money, which is the PAC and the association. So that is then a really big jump into our data. You can. Let's go and let's show you a bar chart. And we're going to say election year. Let's say party. And by state. This is going to be a huge, huge chart. We're still working on our data visualizations. There's a tremendous amount you can do. But this is pretty interesting, I guess, if you were to break it down. Republican, Democrat, third party. So you can see Republicans getting a big spike here. Democrats, that's way too much data for a good visualization. That gives you an idea of the power that we're providing to you at our homepage. So where I would go from here then is you just need to understand here's where we are. The prominent searches, what we're making available, we do do blogging. We are a nonpartisan 501c3. So we're picking up issues of the day. And simply putting tidbits out or complimenting the data, the information that news reporters are putting out, or people doing studies putting out. We do offer help. So we have online tutorials. We have Ask Anything tours. So you should use our Q&A. You'd be surprised how many people don't know what an election cycle is, or the difference between federal races and state races. Our glossary of terms for you, you guys are interested in this sort of stuff. So we've gone through them. We've defined everything as clearly as we can under glossary of terms. And one last thing are our online tutorials. So we are doing more and more of them. Every two weeks we're doing an online tutorial. We're doing what we call 12 minute tutorials. People come in. We feature one particular piece of our website, one particular piece of data. And we do a webinar on that. And so we want people to come in if you want one for your group, or if you have a question about the data. You should, by all means, contact me or anyone here at the institute. And we will do what we can. And with that, Linda, I'm happy to entertain questions. Great. If anybody has questions, please feel free to chat in the box with us. We have a couple of people who are typing right now. And am I going to see that, or are you going to read that? If you can see it, it will be down in the bottom left corner when they do come through. Ah, there we go. OK. If there are any limits on the size of data downloads, there is. It's large. I would suggest that you try to limit the download size. Our APIs, I forget exactly. I think it's 100,000 a day. But for most of the requirements, most people don't want to download 40 million records. They can. They can do that simply by doing a search. But I don't have the number. The API download is one thing. The download from the queries is, I don't know how limited that is. But we only put limits on because we don't want to scooble up our server or pipeline. We're in Montana. We don't have that big of pipeline. If you want to email me, Jeremy, I can get you more specific information. Great. We have another person who's typing in right now, so we'll probably come in. Thank you very much for the presentation. And then I said, sure, plans for historical data. Well, I mean, our data is historical snapshot going back to the 2000 election cycle for all 50 states. I guess I don't know what you mean by historical data. But let me just fill you out. I mean, we don't plan on going backwards beyond 2000 if that's what you mean. The value that we offer is moving forward. There are certainly scholars that like having multiple cycles in multiple jurisdictions. So that was our first charge was, can we look at federal data, state data, and local level data? The example there is like public funding. There are something like 124 jurisdictions that have local level jurisdictions that have some sort of public funding mechanism in place. So you can do an analysis of public funding at the state level using our data. And of course, the federal public funding is hit and miss anymore. But if the interests that want to move that whole public funding thing want to look deep in that analysis, they will go to the local level and we are building that data. That's multi-jurisdictional and then multi-cycle data. We are with the API feed. We now have access to decades worth of legislation. So one of the things on my list, I want list and for our tech guys to deal with is to create the algorithms that allow us to create a taxonomy for understanding a decades worth of legislation. So you'd be able to click on like oil and gas and get legislation that had to do with oil and gas in some way. That's extremely difficult to do, but that is something we will be working on. One of my tech guys is finishing his PhD in artificial intelligence. And so that is a question we're going to put in front of him. And I have every reason to believe that we're going to be able to come up with something at least in a general way. Maybe it's just around a handful of issues. Healthcare, the environment, water, maybe guns that allow us to give you both a view of the donor information, how it passed through legislation, legislative bodies, and then the legislation itself. Do you plan to keep 2000 data intact moving forward? Yes, we do. We're not throwing anything away. Every time we take on a piece of data, we try to make sure we're of a scale that we can keep doing it. So when we're like right now we've done independent expenditures in about 24 states. That's just we're limited by disclosure. Disclosure in the states around some things like lobbyist expenditures or independent expenditures is awful. So we do what we can and we will continue doing those silos of data and augmenting them as we can. So we won't go backwards, but as we move forward we will keep expanding and adding value as people tell us. There's another piece we need to add here. And that said, we are working with groups like today U.S. Perg just put out a report on budget information, how accessible it is. There's a group called in the public interest that has just done a report on disclosure around government contracting. There's a group called Good Jobs First that's doing work around subsidies and contracts. We know all these people. We have good relationships and where we can add value, where they can use our data and meld it with their data, we're happy to do that. We know that we can't do everything. We just have the RAND report. One thing about us, if you were to go to, is it home or about us? No, it's home, I guess, toward the bottom. There it is, RAND evaluations. We had the RAND corporation come in and look at our data. We've had them come in twice actually, but they recently produced a report that looks at the value of our data and how we are allowing an expansion of what they call the ecology of democracy by breaking our data out and being very collaborative with it. So all those groups I mentioned and others. We are in active collaborations with and our new data technology, new APIs, will link our data to their databases. So they don't have to go back and recreate a tool. We're creating a tool that will allow them to link in via our APIs and add value to their data. So at Good Jobs First, where people got subsidies, we want to flow our data to their website so you can see if those people who got subsidies also gave campaign donations. And to whom at what time was it a critical juncture to allow the public to start making some decisions about whether it was a good use of public money and who should be held accountable for that. If you have model legislation to introduce at the state level, which would help you gather states' disclosure data, our best practices work. So over under the Institute and now where am I? Money and politics resources, no. Okay, news releases in the news. I'll get to it yet. About our data, where did I get to reports? About our reports. Anyway, the question was, we have best practices reports. And I don't know why I'm not able to get to them here. That was tough. Here are our best practices reports. These are the basis then. So you have the essential disclosure requirements for independent spending. It's just been updated. We have, again, independent spending 2013. We have lobbyist disclosure down here. We've done that with extensive. So as we move our best practice work, we are identifying what the best practice is, whether it's electronic download, whether it's employer occupation, whether or not it's a time element. And we're working with a group called COGLE, the Council on Governmental Ethics Law, COGEL. That is the umbrella group for elections and disclosure administrators across the country. And we are moving our best practices through them. There's another group called the Campaign Legal Center. They're in D.C., Campaign Legal Center, CLC, that has developed some actual legislation around disclosure requirements. Again, this is us collaborating with groups. We will be putting together a resource page that is our best practices and what we see as the next hurdles to be overcome by disclosure agencies. From the perspective of a power user, we will let CLC and the Brennan Center for Justice and others work at the legislative actual language and let them move that in. But we are complementary. We don't want to be trying to recreate the wheel or overlapping too much. And again, this is us being collaborative, trying to coordinate to have a bigger effect on transparency as well as our tomorrow. If you have questions, if I went too fast, by all means call me. We do pride ourselves on the same-day service as well as helping you get to the information that is most valuable to you. We hope that you do share with the scholars that you work with and use the data yourselves as you're teaching. I've just learned I did not know that librarians were being involved in so much lecturing and teaching. So I'm learning and I appreciate that. And if there's opportunities for us to send someone to talk to an organization, talk to one of your groups, we do quite a bit of that. I'm a former journalist and I'm at the investigative reporters and editors or society environmental journalist. We do travel to make presentations and we do training, so we're happy to do that.