This morning, at a Future of Civic Media Conference workshop called ‘Dollars to Data: Online Financial Tools and Civic Media’, C4FCM student Charlie DeTar showed us Sunlight Foundation web sites that track political contributions. We also saw a few individual finance sites, like Mint.com, that can aggregate private financial data for third parties. Others, like Blippy, allow people to tweet their purchases.

Most sites can tell you where you spend your money and some sell this information to big companies. They aren’t looking at the serious political and social uses for the information yet. A project called Red Ink by Ryan O’Toole, who led the workshop with DeTar, can track the impact of individual purchases on big businesses like BP.

Video Volunteers’ Jessica Mayberry noticed that these sites aren’t working together. It is difficult just to correlate the different names of the businesses being tracked, let alone understand their finances. O’Toole noted that a company could outlay $30,000 and count that as creating a new job.

Many of the attendees were most interested in new business models for news, so we looked at hyper-local advertising for hyper-local news, using the Sacramento Press as an example. O’Toole said Perez Hilton’s web site is a form of information journalism that reaches out to a community of people with similar interests, but the attendees looked skeptical.

Some video from the workshop is here: http://www.flickr.com/photos/fungibleconvictions/4706262033/ http://www.flickr.com/photos/fungibleconvictions/4706901172/

Follow the conference on twitter at #fncm and check out this list of online financial tools.