California Secretary of State Alex Padilla explained how his office and the public benefited from the donation of a new IT tool instead of going through a traditional procurement, in comments during a forum on open data in Santa Monica last week.
By using private foundation funding, nonprofit MapLight was able to gift to the state of California a tool it developed called Power Search that’s a search engine for state-level campaign contribution data, Padilla said.
“So think about that: In the course of months — not years — at no cost to taxpayer dollars, there’s all of a sudden an open source-based, new and improved search function for the public and the press to track those campaign dollars,” Padilla said.
Power Search scours raw data from 2001 to the present reported to the Secretary of State's CAL-ACCESS campaign finance filing and disclosure system.
Padilla called it a “huge win in bypassing the traditional IT procurement process in the state of California; others would call it the traditional IT procurement quagmire in the state of California.”
Map Light began working on Power Search in 2013. The project was funded with a $100,000 grant from the James Irvine Foundation.
“But unfortunately it’s the exception to the rule. Because if you Google ‘State of California IT project,’ and hit News, 99 times out of a hundred it’s a bad new story, not good news,” Padilla said.
Watch the open data forum, featuring Padilla, Los Angeles CIO Ted Ross and others, in this video. Padilla’s comments about Power Search begin at the 26:30 mark.
