Using Technology To Keep Politics Clean, Sheila Krumholz Helped Build OpenSecrets.org!
The Internet may well be the last frontier in the United States, if not the world. After all, the Internet has almost singlehandedly made the word “pioneer” relevant again. Much of the pioneering spirit embodied by the Internet comes in the form of trailblazers who simply took something tedious in the real world and made it simple, cool, or relevant, in the digital universe of the Internet. Sheila Krumholz is one such Internet pioneer.
Sheila Krumholz is the Executive Director of the Center for Responsive Politics, a non-partisan political watchdog organization. Krumholz is responsible for transforming the tedious Open Secrets book of records to OpenSecrets.org, one of the most flexible, insightful and accurate political websites on the Internet. OpenSecrets.org is, by and large, an online database of campaign contribution records for every United States Federal election from 1990 until now!
At the University of Minnesota, Krumholz studied international relations and political science. What seemed to interest her most, however, was the strong relationship between money and politics. While studying politics, she began researching. This research took her to Washington, D.C. where she rapidly immersed herself in the filing cabinets of Congress. Hired by the Center for Responsive Politics, she poured through every campaign finance record she could find to trace exactly what corporations were influencing each politician at the national level. Krumholz would probably still be digging away in dusty basements had she not developed OpenSecrets.org.
As the scale of presidential and congressional elections in the United States became financially unwieldy, Krumholz saw a potential niche on the Internet that was missing. She saw that the Internet was giving everyone who had a political opinion a chance to raise their voice, but that there was a severe shortage of facts and archives for retrieving facts on campaign finance. Krumholz led the team that made the vast database of Federal Election Commission donation records available to anyone who was connected to the Internet. She conceived of OpenSecrets.org as a resource for all citizens. Krumholz wanted to make the site into more than just a simple page about the Center for Responsive Politics. With her vision, that is what the site became!
Krumholz is a patriot as much as she is a pioneer. Serving now as the Executive Director of the Center for Responsive Politics, her role is much less technical than it was for the years while she was helping to develop the award-winning website. While she remains deeply interested in the statistical analysis tools OpenSecrets.org continues to develop, her day to day concerns involve fighting for campaign finance reform. An expert on the subject, Krumholz and the Center for Responsive Politics are exceptionally careful to not endorse any specific plan for campaign finance reform while continually educating citizens and politicians on the inarguable links between campaign donations and political actions in Washington.
Sheila Krumholz effectively blazed a trail using the freedom the Internet provides to help educate every United States citizen on the inner workings of the federal government!
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