It's been three weeks since we launched Sitegeist and the response has greatly exceeded (my) expectations! There have been over 27,000 downloads of the iOS and Android apps and a flood of feedback emails. Thanks again to the Knight Foundation and IDEO for their help in creating the app!
It's been a while since I've posted a round-up of the latest Tools for Transparency posts. Playing a bit of catch-up here, I've posted the last 15 posts going back to the beginning of the year. Take a look, in case you missed any of them -
Know Your Acronyms & Hashtags - May 26, 2011
Status Updates with PixelPipe - May 13, 2011
A Look at #TCamp11 - May 5, 2011
Leveraging Game Mechanics with DailyFeats - April 28th, 2011
Google Reader is Still Relevant, Part II - April 22nd, 2011
Google Reader is Still Relevant, Part I - April 14th, 2011
Broadcastr – What’s your OpenGov story? - April 8th, 2011
Tell Your Story with Storify - March 24th, 2011
Sharing News on Tumblr - March 18th, 2011
Stay Educated through Foursquare - March 10, 2011
Build a Transparency Search Engine - March 3rd, 2011
Opening Up Data with Socrata - February 24th, 2011
Analyzing Engagement with PostRank Part 2 - February 17th, 2011
Analyzing Engagement with PostRank Part 1 - February 10th, 2011
Guest Blogger Roundup - February 3rd, 2011 (how meta, a round-up of round-ups)
As I continue writing about Tools for Transparency, do you have any thoughts on topics I should write about?
Fousquare, a location based application for smart phones, has been growing in popularity at an exponential rate. In 2010 the service grew by 3400% with over 380,000,000 check-ins worldwide. The service uses game mechanics to entice users to check into locations, leave tips, comments and reviews and to find nearby friends.
One of the more useful features on Foursquare is that each location includes a "Tips" section. When viewing a location, either on the website or through the mobile application, you can see tips -- todos, fun facts, and other brief notes and links -- left by previous visitors. These notes can then be sorted by date or popularity, and also hold great potential as an interesting educational tool. By allowing users and organizations like Sunlight to connect certain facts relevant to politics and politicians with certain locations, Foursquare becomes an innovative way for folks to inform and say informed on transparency issues. Here's how:
As Foursquare becomes more popular, more people will begin to "check into" the offices of politicians and at political hotspots from all over the country. In fact, right now, you can check into the office of Speaker John Bohner. To tap into this tool's educational potential, after you check into Rep. Bohner's office (while visiting), you can easily take a moment to leave a tip on his Foursquare page with information about his biggest donors or related information from his OpenCongress page.
People who check in at his office after you will now have a quick link to review this data before they meet with anyone from his office. The Capitol Hill Club is a popular fundraising spot, and noting that in the tips section on their Foursquare page will alert visitors to past fundraisers held there.
These tips aren't just useful at the national level. For instance, if you happen to check into the Wisconsin State Capitol Building, you might find information on Senate Republican Leader Scott Fitzgerald useful.
Want some great resources to help you leave savvy tips? Here are a few we suggest:
Please keep in mind that the point of Tips is to make helpful information available to future visitors, so make your comments constructive. (Information (not jerkiness) is power.) Also, not all political offices and spaces have been logged into Foursquare yet. If you find that to be the case, why not add them yourself and share a useful tip while you're at it?
For the next month, we’ll be hosting special guest bloggers for our Tools for Transparency series. Today we introduce Josh Shpayher, founder of GovSM.com, a wiki website that keeps track of all the social media accounts of government, from congressional representatives to the Massachusetts Department of Transportation. GovSM believes that having a comprehensive catalogue of all the governmental use of social media will help government and the open gov community learn more about and improve their own social media practices to benefit their constituencies.
By now, we’ve all heard about the social media wave and most of us have heard about Gov2.0 and governmental use (or their feeble attempts to use) social media. Though there have been many discussions amongst “good gov” people about government officials’ best practices for using social media, what has been lacking is a clearly defined method of determining how a government office or official can use social media to benefit their constituents. If a system of rating social media use can be widely circulated (similar to Golden Mouse rankings of congressional websites), I believe that the quality of government use of social media will rise dramatically.
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