For the last two years, we’ve invited a number of scholars, advocates, journalists, policymakers, developers, and others from all over the world to join us for a series of informal meetings in the days before TransparencyCamp. This year, we’re opening up the process for participants beyond the USA, and we invite you to join us.

Apply to attend the TransparencyCamp International Program, May 2 - 5 in Washington, DC. Click here for more information.

For those unfamiliar, TransparencyCamp is Sunlight’s largest community gathering, a two day event focused on bringing together folks from a number of different backgrounds with an overlapping interest in government transparency. As an “unconference,” TransparencyCamp (AKA “TCamp”) relies on the participation of attendees to set the environment and even the agenda. It’s a unique and, dare I say, fun experience, and it’s one that we’re committed to making as accessible as possible. That’s why we keep our ticket prices affordable, host an annual scholarship program to help defer costs for those traveling within the US, and why we’re kicking open the door to our international “pre-Camp” this year.

Last year, we had over 400 attendees from 27 countries and 26 US states participate in TCamp. Although some of our international guests came here on their own, many attended via our pre-Camp program, a two day series of conversations and explorations designed to gear up for the larger TCamp event and provide a way for guests from a variety of political contexts to share their experiences, ideas, expertise, and challenges in a more intimate setting. It’s a great opportunity not just to connect your work with the global open government network, but to absorb multidisciplinary learnings and creative solutions from peers working as journalists, developers, technologists, policy-makers, government officials, academics, and advocates.

We understand that international travel costs are often a barrier to participation, and that’s why our International Program offers a partial travel stipend for participants. To learn more about our TransparencyCamp International Program and to apply to participate, click here*. Applications will be accepted on a rolling basis. The first deadline for consideration is February 6th. Apply now!

* Please note: We hope to gather a diverse set of non-US participants at TransparencyCamp and encourage women and members of underrepresented groups to apply. In addition, please keep in mind that all TransparencyCamp programming is in English, so English proficiency is essential.

At the end of TransparencyCamp 2012, a bunch of us shared goals and projects that we would commit to do in the week(s), month(s), and year following TCamp. Both at Camp and in this recap blog post, I made a commitment to publish all the documentation we’ve created about how to run a transparency unconference online.

Just a few months later, we've done just that. I'm happy to report that as of today, there's a new tab up on TransparencyCamp website: Our "How-To Guide." There, you can learn more about what makes TransparencyCamp TransparencyCamp and learn from our experience in unconference organizing. Whether you're a veteran or first-time event organizer, interested in bringing TCamp to your home country or just curious to take a peek behind the curtain, this guide should prove useful to you.

Let us know what you think -- and any other insights into Camp you'd like us to share.

And, for those of you wondering, news to come about TransparencyCamp 2013 soon.

The day after TransparencyCamp, Sunlight joined the good folks at the Voting Information Project to host a hackathon. It was a perfect opportunity: Thanks to TCamp we had the space and some smart folks from out of town; and thanks to VIP, we had a store of new, important and under-utilized data.

It's worth emphasizing that last point. The work that VIP has been doing over the past couple of elections is difficult but very important. Despite being obviously fundamental to democracy, information about where and when to vote and who's on the ballot is surprisingly scattered and unstandardized. VIP works with secretaries of state and other election authorities to organize, standardize and publish this information in a way that's actually usable.

And using it was exactly what the hackathon was about. Fueled by the traditional mix of bagels, coffee and frankly disgusting quantities of soda, a number of teams came up with valuable ways to share this data. A few highlights:

• Taking an approach similar to the crowdsourced data collection of flyontime.us, one team whipped up an impressively polished mobile site to let voters report on the wait time at their polling place.

• Also in the mobile space, Google's David Sedano lent a hand to the folks behind the Cost of Freedom Project, which helps citizens navigate voter ID requirements. You can read CoF's work on an SMS interface here; David helped to lay the groundwork for a smartphone-ready webapp.

• Another team tackled an interesting real-world challenge: creating multilingual posters to help direct people to neighborhood polling places. The project combined an interesting set of GIS and internationalization challenges. They're still working on getting the project live at gotvposters.com, but, in the meanwhile, you can check out their code on GitHub here.

Above: Matt Morse, of the Pew Center on the States, addresses the crowd at the VIP Hackathon, held April 30, 2012 at George Mason University's Arlington Campus. Photo credit: Laurenellen McCann

Sunlight closed its doors today to take a rest after last weekend, but still I find myself pouring over Twitter and through Flickr, soaking in TransparencyCamp. TCamp 2012 was by and far the best Camp we’ve ever held, if your tweets and notes and contributions and photos and energy and exclamation points and vowed next steps are to be believed -- and I think they are.

Consider: The earliest TCamps brought people together who defined the leading edge of “opengov” in the US at the time, drawing together about 100 to 150 Campers. In 2011, we leapfrogged, gathering 200+ Campers together and opening the door to more local and international conversation. But this year was something else: Over April 28th and 29th, we brought together over 400 people from 27 countries and over 26 states to discuss the present and future of government transparency in the US and all over the world. At this point, the numbers no longer just reflect TransparencyCamp: They show that the movement as a whole is growing. For a good snapshot, check out this most excellent TransparencyCamp 2012 recap video:

Unconferences really are fueled by the participants, and so I don’t say lightly that it is because of each and every person who attended that the TCamp experience was so positive and promising. In our staff debrief this week, Sunlighters were enthusiastic to point out that the level of dialogue and debate at this year’s Camp was like nothing before. Many people shared with me variations of a similar story, one that exemplifies one of my favorite rules of unconferencing: “Everyone who is in the room is supposed to be there.” The story usually goes that in some mindblowing session about legislative data or crazy opengov tactics or the future of journalism and government accountability, one attendee or another begins to tell a story about what they’ve heard about the opengov situation overseas, in a country like Malaysia, only to have someone tap them on the shoulder and say, “I’m from Malaysia.” After this weekend, I think it’s safe to say that’s an authentic TransparencyCamp experience.

This is the new wave of TransparencyCamp: leveraging the power of face-to-face interaction to bust borders between countries and fields of work, overcome technical and procedural hurdles, and get into the kind of creative problem-solving that actually solves problems. We took a lens to these and other themes in our concluding session where we asked those Campers brave and caffeinated enough to last to the very end to share what they planned to do in the next week, month, and year after TCamp. Here are some gems I picked up from this session and throughout the conference:

• Based on a conversation driven by a representative from Wikimedia, several Campers are going to look at how to create a global multilingual TransparencyCamp wiki to log resources, conversation, and best practices.
• Kevin Curry, creator of CityCamp and Program Director of Code for America’s Brigade team, said that he’ll be launching a FOIA Brigade to help cities open data related to their FOI laws.
• Jeanne Holm, the evangelist for Data.gov, launched a new website at TransparencyCamp: Developer.data.gov and discussed Data.gov’s investment in exploring open sourced technology.
• mySociety.org's Tom Steinberg announced his intention to develop an open source, collaboratively built platform between now and TransparencyCamp 2013, with the hope of showing it off at next year’s unconference.
• Matthew McNaughton, a TCamp11 veteran from Jamaica, shared that he's going to explore how to bring the Open311 system to his home country.
• An army of people -- women, men, old, young, US nationals, and others -- stood up and told the crowd “I’m going to start coding.” And the folks who were already coding, like one of our lightning talk speakers, Juan-Pablo Velez, said, “I’m going to try to build the civic hacking movement at home.”
• And to underscore a point I'll make below, many folks expressed their interest in bringing TCamp itself home. Here are the various dream Camps that we might see coming into the world in the next 12 months:

TransparencyCamp Malaysia
TransparencyCamp Latin America
TransparencyCamp Georgia
TransparencyCamp Europe
TransparencyCamp Hawaii

I shared a commitment of my own, too: After this Camp, I’m going to publish all the documentation we’ve created about how to run a transparency unconference online on the TransparencyCamp website. Inspired by the participants who, like Pedro Markun and Daniela Silva, were so excited to bring TransparencyCamp home, they made a session out of it, and by the participants in my “Meta-TransparencyCamp: Unconference Organizing” session, it seems like the logical next step.

What will you do after TransparencyCamp? Let us know. From planning to implementation, we’re interested in following these projects and others. Whether or not you joined us in DC for Camp, be sure to share what you're up to by joining and posting to the TransparencyCamp Google Group.

Being exposed to all the great minds at TCamp -- representing local, state, national, international, journalistic, academic, technical, and political interests -- was an incredibly humbling and inspiring experience. Thanks for reminding me why I do the work I do. Hope to see you in 2013.

"Guess Who's Coming to TCamp12" is a mini-series we started to introduce some of the faces that you'll see at TCamp, something we hope will be useful to attendees and non-attendees alike. So far we've highlighted Beth Sebian, Matej Kurian, Michael Mulley, Maria Baron, Marko Rakar, and three awesome Transparency Camp Scholars. Today we are proud to introduce Dondon Parafina, of the Philippines, and Wong Aung, a Burmese activist.

Redempto Santander Parafina ("Dondon") is the Network Coordinator of the Affiliated Network for Social Accountability in East Asia and the Pacific (ANSA-EAP), a regional program of the Ateneo School of Government and the World Bank Institute. His work covers Cambodia, Indonesia, Mongolia, and the Philippines. His work on social accountability is advancing ideas and practices in various fields, particularly procurement, ICT, youth involvement, and the education, health, and public works sectors. He is currently spearheading an education initiative called Check My School, a blended online and offline platform for information access and citizen feedback.

Prior to joining ANSA-EAP, Dondon spent five years as the coordinator of Government Watch, or G-Watch, an anti-corruption program at the Ateneo School of Government in the Philippines. While there, he coordinated various citizen participation initiatives, including nationwide programs monitoring textbook procurement and delivery and school building construction.

Dondon has been active with the Coalition Against Corruption, the Transparency and Accountability Network, DPWH's Integrity Development Committee, the Procurement Transparency Group, and several youth groups including the Boy-scouts and Rotary Youth. He answered a few questions about his work.

Where did the idea for CheckMySchool come from? I conceptualized and designed the Check My School initiative based on my relatively long experience in monitoring the education sector in the Philippines. Many of our initiatives monitor individual items (e.g. textbooks, school buildings) and particular procedural concerns like procurement. I felt the need for Check My School to provide a more comprehensive look at the education services and hopefully link them with the higher development outcome of learning. So the initiative covers various info sets, such as enrollment, personnel (teaching and non-teaching, rooms (academic and non-academic), textbooks, seats, computers, toilets, budget, and national test results. The other trigger for introducing the Check My School is to take advantage of technology. There are now 27 million Filipino Facebook users and we also wanted to tap into the civic energies of these netizens. What kind of impact has your work had? After one year of implementation, we made some impact in issue resolution through very quick actions on practical issues that were submitted through the platform. There's a case of classroom repair worth P4.8 million (US$113k)  that was continued immediately because of CMS feedback. Textbooks were also replenished   toilets were renovated, and another toilet was donated by alumni group in direct response to CMS report.  I think the other impact is that we are now starting to replicate the initiative. We have started the south-south knowledge exchange with Indonesia for their adaptation of Check My School. Other countries also expressed interest, like Kenya, Moldova and Papua New Guinea.

Wong Aung is the International Campaign Adviser at the Shwe Gas Movement in Burma. The movement seeks to raise awareness about the social, economic, and environmental impacts of the Shwe Gas Project in and outside of Burma through first hand research and community organization. The Shwe Gas Project involves the exploitation of underwater natural gas deposits off the coast of western Burma's Arakan State. Burma's military junta and a consortium of Indian and Korean corporations made a deal to explore and develop these deposits. These fields are expected to hold one of the largest gas yields in Southeast Asia and could represent the Burmese government's largest single source of income.

What kind of communities do you work with and what does your day to day work entail? In his role as International Campaign advisor Wong Aung works in exile to bring the voices of project affected communities to the regional and international level, as well as back into Burma through advocacy to political actors and mainstream Burmese. What would you like conference attendees to understand about the Shwe Gas Project? The Shwe Gas Project is a massive resource extraction and infrastructure development which has been planned and implemented by the former military junta (and their corporate partners) with absolutely no input from or thought for the local people. The project will generate huge revenues (US$29 billion over 30 years) for the Burmese state but under the current system there is no transparency in how these revenues are spent. The Shwe Gas Movement is demanding the project to be suspended until community rights and the environment are protected, affected peoples share in benefit ,  and transparency and accountability mechanisms are in place. What's the best place to go to find out more about your work and other transparency initiatives in Burma? Visit www.shwe.org  and www.earthright.org to find out more about the work of the Shwe Gas Movement as well as Extractive sectors transparency and justice in Burma.

Join us at TransparencyCamp April 28th and 29th just outside of Washington, DC to meet Maria, Marko and other folks -- inside and out of government -- who are working to making our government more open, accountable, and transparent. Register today at http://transparencycamp.org -- and hurry! Space is limited.

"Guess Who's Coming to TCamp12" is a mini-series we started to introduce some of the faces that you'll see at TCamp, something we hope will be useful to attendees and non-attendees alike. Last week we highlighted Beth Sebian, Matej Kurian, Michael Mulley, and three awesome Transparency Camp Scholars. We're kicking this week off with Maria Baron, out of Argentina, and Marko Rakar, from Croatia.

Maria Baron is the Executive Director at Fundacion Directorio Legislativo, a nonpartisan organization in Argentina that promotes the strengthening of legislative branches of government and the consolidation of the democratic system through dialogue, transparency, and access to public information. Maria has a Master's degree in International Relations from Bologna University, Italy and is a Ph.D. candidate in Political Science at the National University of San Martin, Argentina. She is also a journalist and has worked as numerous organizations in Argentina and abroad that work to reduce corruption and enforce ethical behavior. A Fulbright-APSA Congressional Fellow, she has published seven editions of Directorio Legislativo: Who are our legislators and how they represent us, in addition to numerous other publications about legislative transparency. She took the time to answer a few questions about her work and transparency in Argentina.

 Can you tell us how you initially got involved in legislative transparency? In 1997 I interned at a Washington DC based organization called Witness for Peace that worked to promote changes in the US forign policy and the international institutions, towards some countries in Latin America. We went to Congress talk to members about the situation in the region. So they provided me with a little book with information on who's who in Congress, members' bio, staff information, and so on. When I came back to Argentina I decided to replicate that initiative in my own Congress when at the time Congress' websites only contained the list of the members. And surprisingly, one member appeared both as a representative and as a Senator! I had no organization to back me, so I started fundraising by myself. I found one potential donor that told me, "if you can get all the members to agree to give you all the information, I'll pay for half of the printing".I worked for 8 months non stop every day. And the last two months I slept one every to nights. I gathered all the information and used my savings to pay for the other half.  When the book was printed I put them in a big back pack and knocked on every door on every office in Congress. I sold all of them. That's how I started. What kind of effects has the publication of Directorio Legislativo had? * CULTURE of SECRECY: We have battled for legislators' finantial statements to become public. We created a volunteer network of 100 to call senators and in four months the president of the senate issued an internal resolution to allow for the publicity. In the lower house we litigated and the issue went up to the Supreme Court. We have litigated against Congress four other times on access to public documents and won them all. What's the best place to go to find out more about your work and other transparency initiatives in Argentina? The best place is our website www.directoriolegislativo.org. We also coordinate the Latin American Network for legislative transparency www.transparencialegislativa.org. And there are other organizations in Argentina that work on transparency and have a lot of work done: Asociación por los Derechos Civiles www.adc.org.ar Poder Ciudadano www.poderciudadano.org Cippec www.cippec.org  

Marko Rakar is one of Croatia's leading political bloggers and transparency activists. He was recently in the news for publishing a massive, easily searchable database of all public procurement data for government spending in Croatia dating back to July 1, 2009. His NGO, vjetrenjaca.org (Windmill), has been dubbed the Croation "wikileaks". He has a history of exposing fraud and abuse in the Croatian political system. In 2009 he published a searchable database of Croatian voters, shining a light on the fact that there are more registered voters than citizens in the country. He was kind enough to answer a couple of questions about his work.

What's your relationship been like with the Croatian government?  We had a change of government in late december last year and while previous one was actively harrasing me (including arresting at one point) this one actually asked for a number of inputs from me on different subjects; in the last few months I have been hired on some government data projects, I was also choosen to be one of the participants in Openg Government Partnership steering committe (for croatian "chapter" of OGP). It is far early to tell how will this develop or if we will have some results to show, but with new government it is a completely different (and so far positive) story. What work of yours do you think has had the most impact? as for the impact; we have done a number of different projects, some of those were clearly with educational value (for example visualisation of croatian state budget, or "state budget calculator" which allowed anyone to create their own version of state budget) and they were all very successfull and seen and used by hundreds of thousands of people (in a country of 4.5 mil people), we have done some actions which might be characterized as investigative journalism although they are also based on collecting and processing data - few weeks back we have published (so far secret) intinerary of governments plane which we reconstructed from (foreign) public sources. But the largest impact was voters list project simply because it affects everyone in the country and now everyone knows how the elections are manipulated and it is only a question of how to resolve this issue (which is not so simple). Our latest project with procurement was top story of the week in Croatia and we got unbeliveable press time for it, but it is too early to tell what will the true effect be in the future, but we know for a fact that journalists AND public prosecutors office use it on a daily basis.

Join us at TransparencyCamp April 28th and 29th just outside of Washington, DC to meet Maria, Marko and other folks -- inside and out of government -- who are working to making our government more open, accountable, and transparent. Register today at http://transparencycamp.org -- and hurry! Space is limited.

"Guess Who's Coming to TCamp12" is a mini-series we started to introduce some of the faces that you'll see at TCamp, something we hope will be useful to attendees and non-attendees alike. So far this week we've highlighted Ohio advocate Beth Sebian, Transparency International Slovakia's Matej Kurian, and three awesome Transparency Camp Scholars. Today, we are happy to present Michael Mulley, who is working to open up the Canadian Parliament.

Michael founded Open Parliament Canada on the premise that "Parliament's goings-on are important." The goal is to make public Parliamentary information "meaningfully public," meaning easily shareable and machine-readable. Mulley Recently moved to Montreal from New York "in search of better bagels". In New York he studied computer science and linguistics while working in tech consulting. He currently operates a web development operation called Only Connect.

Michael answered some questions on his passion for open government, challenges he faced while building Open Parliament Canada, and the response his site as received. He also shared some advice for others thinking of setting up a parliamentary monitoring site in their own country

    Has the Canadian Parliament noticed your work? Do you have any interaction with them? Parliament as an institution has certainly noticed my work, and I've had some friendly and useful conversations with IT staff. I won't pretend that I haven't encountered lots of bureaucratic delay and frustration, and I can't claim that I led to their opening data, but I since I started Open Parliament our House of Commons -- whose internal data architecture is actually surprisingly good -- has started releasing a fair of bit of data in XML. Lots of Members of Parliament use the site too. They're generally happy with it -- after all, my goal is to get people to listen to what they're saying -- and I've useful discussions with a few. You list some other websites as inspirations for OpenParliament.ca. What inspired you to be inspired by them? What made you want to get involved in open government? Honestly? An engineer's frustration at things that are more complicated than they should be. I saw TheyWorkForYou and thought it was just a self-evidently good idea. It didn't exist in Canada yet -- there was a nice vote-tracking site, but nothing with TheyWorkForYou's focus on user-friendliness and MPs' actual words -- and I thought it should, so I made it. Were there any particularly interesting challenges you faced in gathering the information you present on the website? Is it entirely automated? It's entirely automated (though that no-cell-coverage camping trip two weeks after launch was still pretty stressful!). I now have access to a bunch of XML feeds, but when I launched a couple of years ago everything was web scrapers, which are a source of constant boring challenges that make you realize that virtually every initial assumption you made was incorrect. For example, I assumed -- quite reasonably! -- that times were on a 24-hour clock. Turns out that when a session extends past midnight, the clock just keeps ticking past 24: if MPs have to work late, so does time. We had a filibuster recently which took us past 80 o'clock. More fun has been trying to find ways to analyze the information -- finding haiku hidden in the debates, using simple Bayesian stats to find out which words and phrases our different parties are fond of. You described the Canadian open data portal as having "relatively little in the way of visible results, a pale shadow of...the US and the UK". What's the best thing the Canadian government could do for its open data program? Give it resources and dedicated team with a mandate to both educate within the government and interact with the outside world. The open data program was revealed fully-formed, with a site full of PR fluff and a license that barred using data in any way that might make the government look bad. The license was fixed soon enough, and a few promising things have come out of the program. But the pattern of changes coming only via ministerial press releases has continued. I have no idea who's actually running the open data program or what their plans are, and the combination of a not-particularly-useful site and a complete lack of outreach or communication makes me worry that our government will be able to say "Nobody used our open data, so we eliminated the program for cost savings." Is there any advice you'd give to people thinking of doing a parliamentary monitoring website in their own country? Look at  similar sites elsewhere and read mySociety's brilliant guide on creating such a site. Parliamentary-monitoring sites as a genre are about eight years old now, and have reached the point where most developed countries -- and several developing ones! -- have a good, widely-used site. I think lots of us are interested in ways of reusing each others' work, and that's one of the things I'm really looking forward to discussing at TCamp. And, finally: fun and informality are powerful weapons that you can use and your government largely can't. This doesn't mean cheapening politics or introducing bias; it means making things user-friendly and enjoying yourself.

Join us at TransparencyCamp April 28th and 29th just outside of Washington, DC to meet Michael and other folks -- inside and out of government -- who are working to making our government more open, accountable, and transparent. Register today at http://transparencycamp.org -- and hurry! Space is limited.

“Guess Who’s Coming to TCamp12” is an mini-series we started to introduce some of the faces you'll see at TCamp, something we hope will be useful to attendees and non-attendees alike. This week, we’ve highlighted Ohio advocate, Beth Sebian and Transparency International Slovakia’s Matej Kurian. Today, we bring you a few of the TransparencyCamp Scholars.

The TransparencyCamp Scholarship program was started as part of our 2011 Camp. It’s an application driven process that provides partial travel stipends for folks from around the country (and the world) to come to Washington, DC to join us for Camp. This year, we accepted 10 Scholars -- a mix of long-time and first-time opengov activists, developers, journalists, and thinkers. Like last year, we’ll do a round-up of the full list of Scholars post-Camp, but first, here’s a sneak peek at these awesome peeps:

Yvette Cabrera

Berkeley, California

Currently, Yvette interns with the Oakland Food Policy Council, blogging on topics like aquaponics, food policy, interesting events, and supporting the Council’s efforts in building partnerships and identifying key regional allies and decision-makers.

Think food policy has nothing to do with transparency? Think again. From the data held by government agencies like EPA, FDA, and USDA to having access to the meetings and records of government boards charged with setting local policy, those invested in food distribution, quality, and regulation have plenty of concerns that overlap with us transparency geeks. When asked why Yvette in particular wants to come to TransparencyCamp, she answers:

I want to learn about building transparency in the government on a national and local level in order to create a food system that is healthy and just for everybody. Transparency to me means efficiency and increased citizen participation in decision-making, and I think that is the only logical way to improving the current food system that we have here in the U.S.

Nuno Moniz

Porto, Portugal

Nuno is a civic hacker whose interests in open civic data have led him to work on a variety of different projects. His first was to open up the Portuguese State Budget, making it available in JSON. Using this information and the Open Knowledge Foundation’s “Bubble Tree” (a way to display interactive visualizations of spending data), Nuno went on to create visualizations for both the Portuguese 2012 State Budget and the Azorean 2012 Autonomous Region Budget.

Currently, Nuno is sinking his teeth into the meat of Portuguese legislative data. “For the last 6 months (and for the next 6 months) I've been working on my Master's Thesis: in a nutshell, I'm transforming three years of Portuguese Legislation's .PDFs into open data.” Knowing that the TransparencyCamp community is full of civic hackers from all over the world who work on legislative data and others who can provide help insight on the use and governing of this information, Nuno hopes to lead a session at TCamp about his work:

"Opening the Portuguese Legislation: What useful information lies in the documents?" was the name of the session I proposed [on Google Moderator]. As I said before, I've been working for the last months on an open legislation project. The objective of this session, besides sharing the project, its development status, and the "bumps along the way", would be to think what more information lies in the legislation texts. Which and what entities are present in those texts? People, Organizations? What do we gain by processing, discovering and interlinking that information and not just publishing its text? How could mapping that information add more transparency in the legislative process? Questions for the debate, and at the end, I hope, new and better ideas. :)

Dan Schneiderman

Rochester, New York

Dan says that he got into the world of opengov-ery because of his “passion for playing with big data and seeing how it can be used to help people.” Building off his experience at TCamp 2011, he hopes that TCamp 2012 will be an opportunity to explore new possibilities for future projects and how he can become involved with the transparency movement after he graduates.

To kick off this exploration, Dan plans to brings to TCamp the fruits of an independent study of government data he’s been working on using the javascript library D3. His study mashes up information from Data.gov, the Open States API, and a large collection (340,000!) of tweets relating to Super Tuesday that he scraped. Want to learn more? Find Dan’s session at TransparencyCamp.

Join us at TransparencyCamp April 28th and 29th just outside of Washington, DC to meet Matej and other folks -- inside and out of government -- who are working to making our government more open, accountable, and transparent. Register today at http://transparencycamp.org -- and hurry! Space is limited.

Let the countdown to TransparencyCamp 2012 continue with another edition of "Guess Who's Coming to TCamp12". Through this mini-series we will introduce some of the faces you'll see at TCamp, something we hope will be helpful for attendees and a  provide a neat window into the festivities for those who can't make it. Yesterday, we introduced you to Beth Sebian from Cleveland, Ohio. Today we are excited to highlight one of our international attendees!

Matej Kurian is the program coordinator at Transparency International Slovakia. One of his recent projects is Open Contract Portal, developed by TI Slovakia and Fair Play Alliance, aimed at increasing transparency and accountability in public spending by empowering citizens. Matej has an MA in Political Science from the Central European University. His self-reported specialties include accountability, transparency, corruption, open government, data-driven projects, and non-democratic regimes. Before joining Transparency International Slovakia, he had internships at A.T. Kearney and the Slovak Governance Institute.

TI Slovakia's procurement and contracts websites are among the best in the world. Matej was kind enough to answer a few questions about their features, design, and impact:

 What kinds of features do your procurement and contracts sites have that others don't? Most of the procurement sites provide little more than a sophisticated list of contracts. We're trying to add an analytical layer to data, essentially empowering users to run their own tests.  Open Contract Portal is to my best knowledge first of its kind in the world, I am not aware of any other country that mandates publishing of public contracts online.   What made these sites possible, from the government and from TI Slovakia? Government did not play any role in the projects, save for the regulatory framework that mandates that original data that we scrape have to published. Open Society Foundations funded both of the projects, Siemens Integrity Initiative funded Procurement Portal.   While TI Slovakia did not have any previous experience with building and managing online portals, our expertise in procurement and data-driven analysis helped in designing the portal.    Has this had any policy impact, or has it made the impact of procurement policies clearer? While non-specialist use of the portals is still quite low, specialist groups made use of them. For example, based on the portal data Transparency argued for mandatory use of electronic reverse auctions, or had been able to compare pre-electoral spending of governments. Both of the portals contributed to debate on quality of the public data.

Join us at TransparencyCamp April 28th and 29th just outside of Washington, DC to meet Matej and other folks -- inside and out of government -- who are working to making our government more open, accountable, and transparent. Register today at http://transparencycamp.org -- and hurry! Space is limited.

The countdown is on. We’re less than two weeks away from TransparencyCamp and -- for the first time in TCamp’s young history -- we’re set to sell out! Consider what that means not just for TCamp, but for the opengov movement in general: For the first few years of its life, TransparencyCamp attracted about 100+ folks -- the major actors at the forefront of conceptualizing and paving the way for creating "open government". But the numbers are growing: Last year’s Camp had over 270 people in attendance. And this year? At the moment that I’m writing this post, we have over 324 people registered. More come in every day.

Although I think it’s significant to note the number of folks willing to travel and share and make it in person to an event like this -- because it does make a statement about the reach of the foundational ideas of TCamp -- rest assured: We won’t measure our success by the numbers, but rather, by the quality of the experience each individual has at Camp.

On that note, we’re starting the "Guess Who's Coming to TCamp12" mini-series to introduce some of the faces you'll see at TCamp, something we hope will be helpful for attendees and a neat window in the festivities for those of you who can’t make it.

Today, allow me to introduce Beth Sebian. Regular readers of our blog might be familiar with Beth’s premiere open government project: a transparency event held in Cleveland, OH last summer called the Transparency Action Plan (TAP) Summit. At this flagship event, Beth articulated her community’s interest in government reform as a desire for greater transparency and inspired local developer, Jeff Schuler, to become a “civic hacker” -- to turn his tech skills toward government data and to work with local government officials to help improve things from within. Here’s a few words from Beth about her TransparencyCamp 2011 experience and why she’s coming back this year:

Last year's TransparencyCamp was my first. Before I arrived, I did not know what to expect. I am always excited for a chance to share a room with other open gov advocates, but was not entirely sure how the Camp could be more than simply an energizing booster event that was big on feeling good but skimped on the actual details of effective advocacy. Having attended, I can safely say that TransparencyCamp is building a movement for Open Gov that will change the world. At TCamp, I connected with likeminded activists and transparency practitioners who shared their experiences of creating more open and transparent dialogue and decision-making in their communities. We shared stories, successes, tips and tricks in the spirit of helping each other be better prepared to help achieve our ambitious vision of truly transparent and accountable government. By the time I pulled into my driveway after the 6 hour ride back to Cleveland from TransparencyCamp, I already had in mind a project for helping my local government be more open and transparent. Within three months, I organized a summit in my County focused on how citizens and the government could work together better. Over 200 activists and politicians attended the event as a chance to help usher in a new era of accountability and openness in northeast Ohio. The event sparked a redesign of our government's website, the launch of two community outreach projects, a public-gov mobile app project and a non-profit group committed to sustained and constructive public dialogue. I am so excited to go back and share what I've learned in the past year and get ready for the next.

Join us at TransparencyCamp April 28th and 29th just outside of Washington, DC to meet Beth and other folks -- inside and out of government -- who are working to making our government more open, accountable, and transparent. Register today at http://transparencycamp.org -- and hurry! Space is limited.