Disclaimer: The opinions expressed by the guest blogger and those providing comments are theirs alone and do not reflect the opinions of the Sunlight Foundation or any employee thereof. Sunlight Foundation is not responsible for the accuracy of any of the information within the guest blog.

Jase Wilson is Co-founder & CEO at Neighbor.ly — a civic crowd funding platform.

On April 20, CityCamp returns to Kansas City for its second year. Based on the popular series created by Code for America alumnus Kevin Curry and inspired by the Sunlight Foundation’s own TransparencyCamp, CityCampKC is a day long unconference at the nexus of community, government and technology in Kansas City.

Last year’s event focused on open source and open data, helping to drive communication and innovation within local government in the Kansas City region. Things will be a bit different than last year, but trust us, that’s a good thing! Instead of a predefined speaker list, sessions will be programmed by attendees and will emphasize the increasing diversity in government, government technology and civic engagement. Specifically, trying to balance gender, race and age cohorts involved in the conversations that shape the city. This year, discussion topics will be chosen the morning of the event and can be suggested by anyone!

Passionate about something in the KC community? Come share it and inspire others to get excited too!

Nearly 250 government officials, civic hackers, makers and doers showed up last year to meet and share ideas on how open data could have a huge impact on our community. To our delight, we’ve outgrown our previous venue as we expect upwards of 300 attendees to join us for a day of diversity focused discussion. The day’s events will take place at Kauffman Foundation on Rockhill Road. The Kauffman Foundation has been the city’s champion for entrepreneurism for years and events like CityCamp emphasize the importance of the community and draw in civic innovators, technologists and community members from around the region.

This year, we’re happy to announce that we’ve teamed up with Hack of the Sexes and are inviting all attendees to join us in a full blown hackathon the weekend following CityCampKC. During last year’s event we held a mini-hackathon to build an app for BikeWalkKC but there proved to be too few hours in the day to do the hackathon justice. Though both are stand alone events, the two complement each other so much that we’ve partnered with the Hack of the Sexes crew to offer a bundled ticket discount. Want to know more? Click the link above or join us at CityCampKC where Hack of the Sexes will present their innovative model and start to generate ideas for the hackathon.

The benefit of CityCampKC is invaluable to the region because it invites community members and civic leaders from across the Midwest to collaborate and share ideas and tools that can be replicated in various cities and at various scales. We’re thrilled to put on an event like this for the second year in a row to bring together some of the brightest minds in the Midwest. Though, everything seems to be falling into place to make this year’s CityCampKC better than the last, we’re still looking for sponsors. To learn more about what it means to be a CityCampKC sponsor, check out the CityCamp2013 Sponsorship Prospectus. Or, jump right in and sponsor CityCampKC using our online form!

We’d like to thank Sunlight Foundation for the continued support they so generously provide. We appreciate the work they do in providing useful tools and creating a more open government.

Full Disclosure: Sunlight Foundation is one of the sponsors of CityCamp Kansas City.

Interested in writing a guest blog for Sunlight? Email us at guestblog@sunlightfoundation.com