I met Sandra Moscoso at TransparencyCamp last year and was immediately impressed by her work opening up D.C. public school data to improve area schools. She is an obvious choice to be this month’s OpenGov Champion.

  During the daytime, Sandra manages an open data portal at the World Bank for the bank’s financial sector, so she is familiar with the usefulness of open data. But it is her work in her local D.C. community that sets her apart. As a mom of two public school students, she is a member of the Capitol Hill Public School Parent Organization (CHPSPO), which looks to improve the local school system by organizing rallies and bake sales, restoring school buildings and talking to city officials. Sandra is often very hands-on in these activities, but her biggest personal mission with CHPSPO has been introducing the use of open government data as a basis in all they do.

As you can see in the video, she and other CHPSPO members were able to collect data to show how the schools that had a full time librarian had better test score results than those who had lost theirs due to budget cuts. The group was able to use that figure as an effective basis for their request to the city to restore funding for librarians. She also recently sent an open letter to Mayor Vincent Gray, asking for public school data she wanted use in an Open Data Day Hackathon in D.C. The city released the data, and even sent a data analyst to the hackathon, too. Who knows if Mayor Gray's administration would release this data had Sandra not publicly asked for it? Going to Sandra’s home to film the interview felt more like visiting family friends for brunch. Which, in fact, they were preparing as we arrived. Sandra and her husband have a cozy Victorian townhouse in the Capitol Hill neighborhood. We saw some very nice Lego projects and other things created by her smart and sweet kids and heard about how much they love their school.

“I have the best community here in Capitol Hill” Sandra says. She knows most of her neighbors, many of which also actively participate in neighborhood projects and politics. “I want them to stay.” Many D.C. families end up moving to the suburbs in Virginia and Maryland when their kids hit middle school age, as public middle schools in the District have a bad reputation and it’s a vulnerable age for children. She hopes to improve the situation by advocating for better schools, armed with all the open data she can get her hands on and a lot of enthusiasm. Her home was not the only place where we filmed. When I first approached Sandra about filming her for the OpenGov Champion series, she sent me a flurry of links to tons of activities she was doing around town. If you follow her on Twitter, there's barely a day goes by without her tweeting to D.C. government officials, trying to make them see the usefulness of opening their data and that there are people out there like her who really want to put said data to use.

A case in point was when in 2010 she and a group of other engaged parents drafted a proposal using open DC Public School data as well as data they collected for a new middle schools plan that the then D.C. Public School Chancellor Michelle Rhee approved and implemented (although not perfectly.) Sandra thinks that the most effective change happens at the local level, by people who truly care about what is happening in their own community. That is why having access to local government data is so important, and the more detailed and specific the better: it enables OpenGov Champions like Sandra and many others to be better advocates for their communities.

Our OpenGov Champions are remarkable ordinary people who have done extraordinary things to open up our government. Get inspired by their stories and nominate someone in your community to become an OpenGov Champion.

Meet Shea Frederick, our latest OpenGov Champion. Last September, Sunlight’s video team -- myself and Associate Video Producer Solay Howell -- spent two days in Baltimore, MD, with Shea to see how he uses city open data to build useful tools for Charm City residents.

One of those tools is baltimorevacants.org, a dynamic map that lets you search and see more than 30,000 vacant houses and vacant lots in Baltimore. To capture on video the source of that data, we drove around Baltimore filming abandoned houses, streets and even entire blocks that are just left to decay, attracting crime and rats.

Like Shea says in the video, it’s impactful to see 30,000 vacant houses or lots mapped out over the city. But it is even more powerful to see the actual places. I’m still haunted by the sight of all those vacant, rotting houses with boarded up windows and doors we saw all over Baltimore. As a visual storyteller, I could imagine how each one of these houses has a story to tell. Maybe a factory closed, people lost their jobs, packed up and moved, and after enough of their neighbors had left, the ones left behind could not bear to live on an empty street and finally they all went.

Looking at Shea’s work, I realized that data can be used tell a story too, one from real life that literally “connects the dots” and paints with broader strokes to get the full picture. That’s why Shea loves hacking on the open data the City of Baltimore started releasing in 2011: there is always a real life connection to the work he is doing and he can see it all around him.

Another one is an app called Spot Agent that uses parking citation data to warn you if a meter maid might be close by. Then there’s one that uses the city’s 311 data to show the most common problems occurring in any Baltimore neighborhood based on words that appear the most in the service requests, such as “trash,” “rat,” “illegal” or “light.”

He does a lot of this work with the help of other developers and interested citizens, connected through hackathons and other events. There is a vibrant community for this sort of work in Baltimore such that when the city started releasing its data sets through the Open Baltimore portal there already was an active bunch of people ready to go and put it to use. The city has been pleased with that, as these civic hackers can build something for fun and for free in a weekend that would take them weeks, maybe even months to complete and cost tens of thousands of dollars. Shea has been tag-teaming with the city directly, using the data it released and giving the city advice on how the data could be improved upon, mainly that it should be updated in real time instead of doing a one-time dump.

Why does Shea Frederick spend so much of his own time sorting out this data into meaningful, usable formats when he might as well be competing in a cyclocross race somewhere? Well, for one, he loves what he does. And second, he has grown to love Baltimore and wants to give back by giving others tools that can help them connect with what’s happening around the city. This is OpenGov Championship at work: taking data that’s available and putting it to use, and working together with the local government to make it even better.

Our OpenGov Champions are remarkable ordinary people who have done extraordinary things to open up our government. Get inspired by their stories and nominate someone in your community to become an OpenGov Champion.

As the director of our ongoing mini-documentary series OpenGov Champions I am pleased to see that Homicide Watch DC, one of our Champs, have met their Kickstarter fundraising goal to keep their project alive while founders Laura and Chris Amico are fulfilling academic interests in Boston. Laura has a Nieman-Berkman fellowship in journalism innovation at Harvard for the coming academic year. They reached their goal of $40,000 4 days before the deadline. As of writing this, they have exceeded it with donations from more than 1,000 individual backers.

It is such a great testimony to how much the different communities in Washington, D.C. value their efforts to open up court data on the city’s violent crime. For weeks, my Twitter feed has been filled with pleas from across town to contribute to their Kickstarter project so they can hire a reporter to keep Homicide Watch following the full cycle of every homicide in D.C. through the justice system. I saw Laura and Chris after they had just launched the Kickstarter bid, and Laura told me she felt torn about moving to Boston with the uncertain future of the project, while the community on the site was pleading her to keep going. There is a real need for the site that fills the information gap around homicide in D.C.

Sunlight supported Homicide Watch DC by donating footage I had shot for the OpenGov Champ video to be used in their Kickstarter video. We are very happy for Laura and Chris to have met their goal, and wish them much success in their future endeavors!

We’re constantly searching for innovators who are using technology to create more government transparency. Check out our latest OpenGov Champions video about Liz Barry, who along with others from Public Laboratory for Open Technology and Science, is using DIY tools to map environmental catastrophes like the BP Oil Spill and other affected urban and rural areas.

If you get inspired by Homicide Watch and Public Lab, please nominate an OpenGov Champ from your community.

As Sunlight’s Video production Director it is my delight to be producing an ongoing video series called OpenGov Champions, featuring citizens who take action in their own ways to open up, or as in this case, contribute to, government data.

I was especially excited to go to Brooklyn, NY to film this episode in which we showcase Liz Barry from Public Laboratory for Open Technology and Science (PLOTS) and their grassroots mapping efforts. Theirs is a unique way to work with and contribute to open government data. I had watched Liz’s TED talk about the mapping they did in 2010 of the BP Deepwater Horizon oil spill in the Gulf Coast. Their maps were the only high resolution images available at the onset of the spill and spread all over the world media because access to airspace was restricted and planes could not capture aerial photos using traditional methods. It all had started with Jeffrey Warren in MIT and others who were experimenting with new ways to create high resolution maps using low cost, DIY technology like kites, balloons and cheap digital cameras. When the Deepwater Horizon drilling rig exploded, they saw the opportunity to help by mapping the scope of the disaster. That’s when Liz met them and jumped right in, helping with logistics and connecting people with boats and crews. In my mind there is a rock star quality to this kind of opengov data work. And they have indeed gotten a lot of fame for their work and were a Knight News Challenge winner in 2011 among other things.

Liz has been with Public Lab (as it’s often abbreviated) as Director of Urban Environments ever since. Her goal is to empower citizens to take on their own investigations using DIY scientific methods. Anyone can -- and many people now have -- use their open source methods to make maps of all kinds of environmental, social or cultural phenomena all around the world where governments have not gathered geospatial or other data in high enough resolutions, or in some cases, like in the Czech Republic, were actively trying to hide damage done to their national forests.

Liz has worked her whole life in widely varied projects that all share the goal to enable citizens to participate in and improve upon their urban environments.  Her past projects include starting an urban youth-led farm, encouraging neighbours to talk to each other by organizing events in a Bryant Park that thousands attended, to designing new cities for a company she worked for. More recently she has been combining technology and open data with a lot of hours spent outside on foot or on bicycle, whether slugging through rough terrain or on the streets of Brooklyn.

It was more than a 100 degrees with jungle humidity the day we met with Liz and some other activists who work on the Gowanus Canal project in Brooklyn. And yet these people were out there, flying up kites, documenting the watershed around the heavily polluted canal, as they do in all seasons: through mud and rain in fall, snow and slush in the winter, the sunshine and heat in spring and summer. They do all this mapping in order to get the full picture of the life of the canal throughout the year and to find out how the rehabilitation efforts, namely building a park around the edges is going, which plants are thriving and which are not, and to find and document sources of ongoing surface pollution like trucks doing illegal oil changes. Even though the Environmental Protection Agency has declared the canal a Superfund site and have already done a survey of the deeper contamination issues on the canal, as Eymund Diegel, one of the grassroots mappers, points out, unlike the concerned residents of the neighborhood like himself, they are not there every day, documenting the smaller scale, subtler issues that all contribute to the trash and chemicals creeping into the canal. Residents who go canoeing and spend time around the canal are invested in the improvement of the watershed in a totally different level. Eymund wants his kids to be able to come to the canal and learn about different kinds of fish, birds and plants instead of the trash currently floating around in the water.

Liz has some of these maps created by Public Lab’s citizen scientists on the walls of her apartment in Williamsburg, Brooklyn. They are even more impressive online where you can zoom into the details: the ones from the Gulf Coast incident have 8000 pixels to cover the same area that would be captured in one single pixel in the daily MODIS satellite imagery provided by NASA. You can clearly see individual birds and plants and how the oil is making landfall, leaking through the barriers that were supposed to keep it out. In many areas these grassroots maps have actually been incorporated into Google Maps, giving them a real detail boost as they are a hundred times bigger in resolution.

The Gowanus Canal is just one of many examples of projects like this cropping up around the world. Public Lab conducts trainings and offers starter kits and free, open source software for people to use so that they can easily set up their own investigations and make maps in their own areas. (Our Associate Video Producer Solay Howell got to film one of those trainings in Brooklyn the day after our Gowanus adventure where they made solar balloons that require no helium.) Anyone can join, start conducting their own research, collaborate with others and add their findings to their Data Archive. Liz is particularly interested in increasing interchange between this data and open government data.

What a great example of OpenGov Championship: enabling citizens and governments to work together to gather data and put it to use to improve our own environments.

Our OpenGov Champions are remarkable ordinary people who have done extraordinary things to open up our government. Get inspired by their stories and nominate someone in your community to become an OpenGov Champion.

As a part of my job as Video Production Director here at Sunlight, I work on a short documentary video series called  OpenGov Champions. For July’s OpenGov Champion, we chose Waldo Jaquith, whom I’ve heard dubbed an “OpenGov superstar” by some in the field. We wanted to find out what he does to merit this unofficial title. A lot, we found out.

Driving down the country roads outside Charlottesville, VA where Waldo Jaquith lives, I could feel my blood pressure dropping the closer to his house we got. Virginia in May is green and beautiful: The scenery perfect with the white picket fences, red barns, horses (even mini-donkeys) and cattle grazing on the open fields. On the way to his house we saw roads with names like “Pinch ‘Em Slyly” and “Merrie Meadows.” Google Maps gave us no love and of course we took a few detours before finding our way there, which was fine as we got plenty of good footage cruising along the increasingly narrow roads, as you can see in the video. As we got out of the car by Waldo’s house at the end of a winding gravel road, I was stunned by the quietness and tranquility of the place. When some of my coworkers here at Sunlight saw the footage, they declared things like “Ooh, it’s a paradise!” and “I want to live there too.” I have to admit that finding Waldo in the midst of all these adorable farm animals in this idyllic place in the country, tending to his 5-month old baby son forced me to revisit some useless stereotypes I had about OpenGov Technologists. After spending the day in his house with his sweet and hospitable family, I could also completely understand why he had turned down an amazing post at the White House to be able to stay at this lovely place they have carved out for themselves, close to relatives and the beautiful city of Charlottesville.

Finding a good angle for the video was actually quite hard, as Waldo has done so many projects opening up local government data, most of which would deserve its own video. And so we ended up talking quite a while about different projects, and only in the editing phase, after much internal wrenching, I chose to focus on his most recent projects: developing Ethics.gov for the White House and the project he had just started with the help of a grant from the Knight Foundation, called The State Decoded. What I left out were numerous incredible projects, like when, at the age of 16, he decided to open up the city of Charlottesville’s code by manually scanning it and publishing it online, all because he was against a curfew the city had imposed on its young residents. He ultimately lost that battle, but that did not discourage him. He has been working on similar projects ever since. He was also one of the first bloggers in Virginia and continues to run several popular blogs to this day.

Even though he has recently been recognized for his work, (he was nominated “Champion of Change” by President Obama in 2011) Waldo has already been working on opening up his local governments in Virginia on his own initiative for years, working endless hours and often without pay. And now local and state governments have begun to take note. He has been invited to talk to state government officials across the country to help them open up their data. This is one of the things I would have loved to expand upon more in the video, but as any editors out there would know, you have to cut out a lot of things in the interests of time and story. After all, no one will watch a 15 minute video on YouTube. But I was very glad to hear him say that state governments are actually eager to open up their data to their citizens in a meaningful way. They often lack the expertise and capacity to do so rather than the willingness. That’s why they are seeking out people like Waldo to help them get started. And he is no longer the lone geek doing this work on his own. “It was pretty lonely doing open government work in Virginia in the nineties,” he laughs. But now, there is a whole global OpenGov community and he is able to collaborate with other developers across the country, and the world, many of whom he has connected with at TransparencyCamp and through Twitter.

To me, he is a shining example of what being an OpenGov Champion means. His only motives for doing this work have been his love of programming and his passion for transparency in government. He stands as proof that if you do what you love most, the rest follows.

Our OpenGov Champions are remarkable ordinary people who have done extraordinary things to open up our government. Get inspired by their stories and nominate someone in your community to become an OpenGov Champion.

Working on our short documentary series called OpenGov Champions I get to go and hang out with some extremely smart, creative and inspiring people. The Champions are ordinary citizens who do some extraordinary work to open up their local government data in big or small ways, not because someone asked them to, but because they are either fed up with not having access to information they need or simply because want their communities to flourish. To me, this is far more interesting as a storyteller and documentary filmmaker than interviewing seasoned politicians, spokespeople or experts. These are the kind of stories that are the fodder of classic storytelling and moviemaking. They are real life stories of the quintessential American heroes: Ones who defeat the odds by taking the matters into their own hands and create real change by strong will, passion and hard work.

Working on these mini documentaries is the favorite part of my job. The Champions open up their homes to me and I get to spend a few hours interviewing and getting to know them, and then a week or so putting the video together. As I watch the raw footage over and over again, looking for core of the story, I feel like I really get to know them quite well. And I always have a hard time with the inevitable elimination of footage, (called “killing your darlings” in editor talk.) They always say so many interesting things with insight, humor and wisdom that I would love everyone to hear. Yet I need to cut a lot out to get to the heart of the story and tell it in about three minutes.

I was first a little nervous calling Laura Amico to talk about doing a video about her. I had heard about Homicide Watch DC, and the imagery it had sprung in my mind was of some hardened-by-life, don’t-mess-with-me reporter straight from a film noir movie. You’d have to be to handle all that horror and heartbreak associated with homicide reporting, right? But I was relieved to find that she was none of that. To the contrary. When my coworker Kevin and I went to interview Laura and her husband Chris, who also works on the site, their warm and tranquil apartment smelled of something delicious cooking. They were a delight to work with. We stayed for more than three hours and yet they gracefully kept talking to us despite it getting late and their dinner delayed. In the course of the interview she explained that even though it is hard work sometimes, what makes it worth it is that they have been able to create this place where families and friends, teachers and co workers of victims -- and suspects for that matter -- can find information they need and support each other through the tough times. I find it remarkable that she can keep on doing this work without becoming the toughened reporter I imagined her to be in the process.

The story of Homicide Watch shows how open data and government transparency touch upon a wide variety of issues and affect so many different groups of people. Be it environmental, political, civil rights related, social, or any other small or big cause, it will likely at some point benefit from open and easy access to government data. In Laura’s case, it is violent crime data from the courts and police departments in DC.

I am not really a wonk. But I do care about transparency and openness in our government. Talking to the OpenGov Champions to me speaks more about the OpenGov movement than the more technological or political chatter you hear so much here in D.C. What I, and many others like me need in order to “get it” is a story, a human face that can connect the dots for us and show us what others do and that we can do that too. And I believe most of us need inspiration from others from time to time. Meeting the people who participate in the OpenGov movement in their own ways makes it real to me and makes me feel I'm part of a larger community.

It gives me hope to see that I don’t have to run for office or know the secret handshake in order to make change. Ordinary people coming together are what it takes -- sharing stories like this one and using them to build support for real change -- for transparency and openness in all our communities. That’s why we started this series, and I hope you all can gather around this modern version of the campfire and enjoy the story.