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Documenting the Political Partying Circuit
From the early hours of the morning until late in the evening, politicians are partying. Sunlight's PARTY TIME can help you find out who is partying, where and when.

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Partytime venues of interest • POSTED - 04.16.10 BY Anupama Narayanswamy

ProPublica and Washington Post use Party Time data

At two Bruce Springsteen concerts in DC last year there were more than a dozen fundraisers held for members of Congress, according to a Washington Post article today.

Reporters at the nonprofit investigative journalism organization ProPublica and the Post wrote about these fundraisers using Party Time data and combined it with campaign finance and lobbying reports, identifying some of the organizations involved with these fundraisers.

Here’s a complete list of all the fundraiser fliers for the concerts Party Time collected last year:

Rep. Peter DeFazio, D-Ore., May 2009.

Democratic Congressional Committee/Rep. Barney Frank, D-Mass., May 2009.

Rep. Dutch Ruppersberger, D-Md., May 2009.

Rep. John Barrow, D-Ga., Nov 2009.

Rep. Ron Kind, D-Wisc., May 2009.

Rep. Patrick Murphy, D-Pa., May 2009.

Rep. Joseph Crowley, D-N.Y., May 2009.

Rep. Adrian Smith, R-Neb., Nov 2009.

Rep. Elijah Cummings, D-Md., Nov 2009.

Rep. John Carter, R-Tex., Nov 2009.

Rep. Ed Towns, D-N.Y., Nov 2009.

Rep. Tom Harkin, D-Iowa., Nov 2009.

Rep. John Hall, D-N.Y., Nov 2009.

Rep. Baron Hill, D-Ind., May 2009.

Rep. Leonard Lance, R-N.J., May 2009.

Rep. Ed Towns, D-N.Y., May 2009.

Rep. Darrell Issa, R-Calif., May 2009.

Rep. Tom Harkin D-Iowa., May 2009.

Elham contributed to this report.

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Partytime • POSTED - 04.13.09 BY Nancy Watzman

Get your raw Party Time data here!

Starting today, the Party Time website will include a new feature: this spot where you can download all the underlying, raw data that form the basis for this website.

Already you can do a lot of sleuthing through right here at Party Time. For example, you can find all the events mentioning golf, or beer, or ice cream. Or you can find all the parties featuring House Speaker Nancy Pelosi fundraising for others or House Minority Leader John Boehner doing the same for his colleagues. You can check out our handy dandy calendar. But if raw data is more your style, so you can grab it, mash it, and make something new, this is the spot to get it.

With the Center for Responsive Politics’ announcement today that that venerable institution is unleashing all of its own data, going open source with its campaign finance, lobbying, 527, and personal finance data, there’s a treasure trove of possibilities. What about matching up when candidates report their contributions with the timing of party events? How about mooshing it with new data on the first quarter of 2009 as it soon becomes available from the Federal Election Commission? Certainly there must be many fun ways to visualize this party data that we haven’t tried yet at the Sunlight Foundation.

As always, we must make a few caveats about our Party Time data. 1. We only know about the parties we know about. We collect our invitations from anonymous lobbyist sources. Because there’s no formal reporting requirement for these parties, there’s no way to know what proportion of parties we capture. However, we’ve got records here for more than 3,500 events. To our knowledge, that’s the most comprehensive resource of these events ever created. 2. We attempt to delete duplicates, but we may not catch them all. Our busy army of Party Time interns work hard to delete duplicate entries for the same party. (We often get multiple invitations for the same event.) However, there’s a few some may slip through, so it’s always worth double checking if you are attempting to do something like figure out which lawmaker has hosted the most parties. 3. We post the invitations as we get them. All the records in this database link back to the actual source invitations on this website. We don’t confirm the accuracy of what is listed in these invitations or whether these events actually occurred as planned.

All that said, dig in! And please keep us posted on what you do and find.

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PARTYFINDER™ Hints

Beneficiary: congressional candidate, lawmaker, or entity which collects funds raised at party

Host: person who is hosting party-often, but not always, a registered federal lobbyist

Venue Name: where the party is

Entertainment Type: type of gathering, such as "breakfast," "ski trip," "bowling"

Other Lawmakers Mentioned: lawmakers mentioned on invitation who are used as a draw for the event

Sunlight's Party Time is a project to track parties for members of Congress or congressional candidates that happen all year round in Washington, D.C. and beyond. (read more)

We also post information we receive about parties where members of Congress are expected to participate—such as convention or inaugural parties.

Since we don't hear about all the parties, you can also tell us if you know where the party is and we don't.