New technology makes Sacramento politics more transparent

During his eight years in the Legislature, former state Sen. Sam Blakeslee learned that “the most powerful player there (to politicians) was the lobbyist.”

Now Blakeslee and a team of scientists at Cal Poly San Luis Obispo have created a way to track lobbyists, what they say, and how they influence the political process in Sacramento.

When it launches May 6, the Digital Democracy Project (www.digitaldemocracy.org) will provide a database of all legislative hearings. As a legislator, Blakeslee was frustrated that even though 5,000 bills are introduced annually, there are no transcripts or minutes produced of the hearings where the legislative sausage is being made. Those hearings are broadcast by the California Channel — a sort of C-SPAN for state government — but its video archives are difficult to search.

Funded by a $1.2 million grant from the Laura and John Arnold Foundation and $165,000 from the Rita Allen Foundation, the Digital Democracy Project uses facial recognition and natural language processing technology to weave hearing footage into searchable transcripts accompanying the videos.

The new website allows users to watch officeholders speak on screen then quickly access a search tool listing their major campaign contributors. When lobbyists speak, users can easily call up a list of their clients and issues. Users could theoretically share clips of these hearings with their social networks, creating an army of advocates who can make their voices heard without having to storm Sacramento.

Tracking patterns

The database will include only hearings from this year onward. Eventually, as more information is added, the site’s creators hope it will be easier to see patterns in how politicians vote based on who is supporting their campaigns.

Already, it has some people nervous, said Blakeslee, who founded the Institute for Advanced Technology and Public Policy at Cal Poly in 2012 after leaving office. When creators of the site previewed it this month for top legislative staffers in Sacramento, their reaction was mixed about the level of transparency the service provides.

Blakeslee, who was not at the preview for Sacramento staffers, also received strong reactions when he showed the site to former colleagues and lobbyists.

“We got some raised eyebrows and deep expressions of concerns,” Blakeslee said.

He said the website is the institute’s first big step toward showing how technology can make legislators more accountable to someone other than “an army of one or two thousand lobbyists” in Sacramento.

“We wanted to create something that would tell them that the world is watching — and the world could get them to act quickly,” said Blakeslee, a Republican who represented the Central Coast and was known for moderate stances on issues such as climate change. His bipartisan spirit is represented on the institute’s advisory board, which includes Democratic Lt. Gov. Gavin Newsom and Charles Munger Jr., one of the state’s top political donors to Republican campaigns and an advocate for redrawing the state’s political boundary lines to make them more representative.

Building trust

“This will help build trust in government and help people navigate their government,” Newsom said. “And eventually force us (in government) to be more responsive in how we operate in the world.”

Bringing together the database, facial recognition and campaign information is a technological achievement, said Edwin Bender, executive director of the National Institute on Money in State Politics.

“What these guys are trying to do is advancing the ball in a lot of ways,” said Bender, whose nonpartisan website tracks state campaign finance money. “That’s all new stuff.”

However, Bender said, the challenge with sites like his and the Digital Democracy Project isn’t what they’re offering, but getting people to actually use them. Combing through video of the Assembly Banking and Finance Committee isn’t nearly as compelling as watching a YouTube clip of Diane Sawyer interviewing Bruce Jenner.

“The hardest piece for all of us is telling people why they should care in a way that they come into the room,” said Bender, whose organization won a MacArthur Fellowship this year for its watchdog prowess. “One of the perils is that there’s just too much information. It’s great that we’re creating this great big pile of data. It doesn’t mean that they’ll take it.”

More resources

Many nonprofit groups will find the new site useful, predicted Jim Roberts, the founder and CEO of the Family Care Network, a San Luis Obispo youth advocacy organization. Even though it receives nearly all of its $15 million annual budget from government sources, Roberts said, it doesn’t have the resources to regularly monitor legislative hearings in Sacramento on youth issues. Now it can.

“One of the things that always struck me is that these kids don’t have a voice. They don’t have advocates or lobbyists,” said Roberts, who was a beta tester for the site. “Early in my career, there was legislation passed that affected us that you didn’t even know about until it was too late.”

Joe Garofoli is a San Francisco Chronicle staff writer. E-mail: jgarofoli@sfchronicle.com Twitter: @joegarofoli