Elena's Inbox is a thought-provoking project that could inspire future efforts to facilitate citizen evaluation of public records, and the Sunlight Foundation has open-sourced the code used to build it. As it stands, the microsite is a fun and interesting peek inside the Clinton administration's day-to-day operations. It's hard to imagine any previous political nominee facing this degree of public transparency.

Full Text Search is a Start

Some of the emails are amusing, others enlightening, others still are both. This is a fun interface for looking through these texts, but the limitations are quickly evident as well. Full text search works well when it's your own email you're searching through, but when you don't know what language someone else uses to discuss certain topics, full text search feels inadequate. If a site like this incorporated collaborative user tagging of emails into topical buckets, that would make it all the more interesting. It would also be in character for the Sunlight Foundation.

It's interesting, for example, to read that the policy focus Kagan recommended the President consider regarding race and crime was "systematic underprotection of minorities (segregation of safety)." That does sound more politically palatable than focusing on inequities in sentencing.

As a public service, Elena's Inbox is quite helpful. As Kagan faces debate and questioning over her nomination, the site will offer a very easy way to see what she said about topics 10 years ago, and how she said it, while in a position of substantial political power. That's certainly a historically unprecedented degree of transparency around a Supreme Court nominee.

Unfortunately all this information is displayed quite simply; there is as of yet no deep personalization as in Sunlight's years-old and fabulous OpenCongress project, there's no search and the app doesn't make use of the iPhone's push capabilities. It's not a bad start, but there is a lot of potential for an iPhone app to make Congressional activity a much more engaging part of peoples' day-to-day lives.

The innovative system is a pleasure to use and is being open sourced for other organizations interested in crowdsourcing similar tasks. You can honestly do something useful and important in 5 minutes or less on this site.

TransparencyCorps participants get points for every small task they do and can get themselves on a charming leader board of "transparency leaders." It's all very cute but this really is important work to be done.

We'd love to see an iPhone app to do this kind of work while waiting for the bus or in the line at the grocery store. How about a Facebook app that pushes out notifications to our friends' newsfeeds: "I just took 2 minutes and summarized a congressional earmark request to fund an environmental study of a proposed industrial park!"

Unlike Mechanical Turk, where there are scads of workers because they get paid small sums, TransparencyCorps volunteers are unpaid. Promotion will no doubt be the site's biggest challenge. If ease of use can be maximized and some effective promotion done, we think this could be a really great project.