MAYDAY.US

Transparency

Lessig — 2014-07-24

Our blog is migrating. This blog post will now live here: http://blog.mayday.us/post/98259994120/

As you know, when we launched MAYDAY, we made a strong commitment to transparency. I promised that we would accept no (effectively) anonymized contributions (the so called “dark money” that constituted more than 30% of Super PAC money in 2012), that we would release the names of all contributors who give more than $200, and that we would be completely transparent about where and how we spend our money.

The only complication in that commitment was when. Transparency is critical. But it is also costly. To know whether someone has contributed more than $200, we need to aggregate contributions under $200. For us, that’s a tough task (already we’ve had more than 50,000 contributions less than $200). So the challenge for me was whether to spend the money we raise for campaigns to accelerate the disclosures, or to follow the disclosure calendar set by the FEC.

I’m extremely happy to announce that we’ve found a way to accelerate disclosure without adding significantly to our costs. Using a new technology for matching contributors, we will be able to identify contributors who have given $200 or more, almost for free. (Almost, since we need to do some hand-verification, etc., but nothing very burdensome.) We’re still testing the data flow, but here now is our commitment:

On August 5th, we will release a data file with all contributions to MAYDAY through July 31st. For contributors who we’ve determined have given less than $200, we will anonymize their names. But for the balance of our contributors, we will release the same data we would be releasing to the FEC, removing only address data (to avoid bulk mail spam). In addition, for all anonymized contributors, we will release the preference about whether their contribution should be used to support Democrats or Republicans only. For the balance, we will release aggregate data about the choices made.

And here’s the really good news: once we make the August 5th disclosure, we will make similar disclosures every two weeks until the election.

I’m grateful for the volunteers who have helped us see how we could do this cheaply. And I’m incredibly excited to see what the data mavens of the Net can do with the data we release to show what they can about the more than 50k who have carried MAYDAY as far as they have.

If you’d like to be notified when the postings go up, please click here.

And if you’d like to get one last (small) contribution in before July 31st, I certainly wouldn’t object. We need a cool way to thank our volunteer innovators and a bump in small contributions would be a great way to thank them.

We’re incredibly excited about the races we will be announcing next week (and I’m sorry for the delay, but polling has taken longer than we planned and you gave us many new ideas to explore). But if I’ve realized one thing since we crossed our $5M mark, it is that this fight will be MUCH MORE expensive than it seemed it would be 4 months ago.

Thank you again for all you have done. And stay tuned, because this is getting really interesting.

– Lessig



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