The heart of the Transparent Federal Budget will be a community-generated database containing information about budget and legislation, built upon a Wikipedia-style software platform 

In addition to actual budget and legislation text, community members will be able to contribute additional information such as:

• Who authored a particular bill
• What committees various legislators sit on
• Who contributed to legislators' campaigns
• Relationships between any of the above (e.g., Senator X invests in Company Y)
• Tagging any of the above data for easy searching
• ...and more

The result is a database that not only provides insight into upcoming legislation, but the incentives and relationships involved in the political process. Tagging and searchability will make all of this data accessible in a way that other online legislation repositories today do not.

Since it is crucial to be able to trust the information in the database, our identity and reputation tools will help insure the database's validity and credibility.

Our community-driven approach is the key to driving user interest, helping us scale, and ultimately, creating a more comprehensive and higher quality database. One reason Wikipedia works so well is because of ongoing community involvement, and we intend to adopt a similar approach by being the only governmental transparency tool that has content created and maintained by the community. Although we intend to make use of as many data channels as possible -- governmental (e.g. THOMAS), organizations, individuals -- all of the data will be open to review and validation by the community.