By Katie Liesener
acj.org

What goes on at the State House?

That not so simple question has a widely fractured answer, with many pieces of the puzzle scattered across the internet.

Openmass.org, launched in February, is tackling the problem by organizing data from the state’s website, news stories, and blogs to create a clearer, easy to navigate picture of Beacon Hill.

The site tracks newly signed and proposed laws, upcoming public hearings, and hot-button issues (such as health care and same-sex marriage), providing a short description of each along with relevant links – all in a clean, simple format.

The site was born out of James Caralis’ frustration trying to track state politics.

“Over the past few years, I started to get more civically engaged, more active in what’s going on in the state,” he said. “I found it hard to get information on what’s going on in the State House. That’s a potential obstacle for so many people. You can’t get engaged if you’re not informed.”

The official mass.gov site, though packed with information, does little to make it acessible. A click on a bill will yield its text, but not its history. A click on a legislator will give their bio but not the bills they filed.

Openmass.org solves both problems and more. The site’s legislator profiles are portals to vast spreads of information. A click on a legislator’s name reveals which bills they have sponsored, news stories and blogger crossfire they appear in, and who their campaign contributors are. On the “earmarks” page, the public can tally up how much pork that legislator is packing into the state budget.

This new level of transparency is no doubt one reason why legislators and their staff, whether curious, excited or nervous, flocked to the site in its first days of operation nearly two months ago, accounting for a large part a surge of 4,000 daily page views. The site now averages 700 to 800 page views daily, not counting RSS feeds.

Caralis modeled Openmass.org's look and function after opencongress.org, a joint project of the Sunshine Foundation and the Participatory Politics Foundation that tracks U.S. Congress. With the creation of openmass.org, Massachusetts has become the only state with a spin-off of opencongress.org.

Caralis also runs NewsBlade, his self-founded company, which gathers and analyzes relevant online data for businesses.

Like opencongress.org,
openmass.org is a nonprofit. The site is currently funded solely by Caralis himself, but he said he welcomes all user feedback in ongoing design and content, particularly in maintaining objectivity. The site lists posts from the liberal blog Blue Mass Group, and conservative blog Red Mass Group, side-by-side.

“I don’t want to inject my personal viewpoint into this site,” said Caralis, who is a Democrat. “I go to Blue Mass Group to voice my opinion. [openmass.org] is purely to provide information.”

Currently in the beta stage,
Openmass.org should be at full strength by summer, with the possible addition of user logins or RSS feeds.