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Tag Archive: datafest

Datafest project opens Uncle Sam’s daily ledger

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Michael Keller shows off Treasury.io site at Sunlight offices.

Good morning America. Your $11 trillion check book is ready for viewing. A project that got its start early this year at a bicoastal datafest cosponsored by the Sunlight Foundation now can give taxpayers a day-by-day, line item-by-line item view of what they're paying the government and how the government is spending their money. Treasury.io, set to be shown off Thursday at the New York Times open source science fair, is the brainchild of csv soundsystem, an eclectic group of journalists, data geeks, developers and even a recovering particle physicist. It provides a new perspective on the budget debate by enabling citizens to analyze the government's intake and outlay of money in real time. The idea: Take detailed data that the U.S. Treasury publishes every day and put it into a format that can easily be analyzed by computer. "If you want to see how much we spent on Medicare last Tuesday, there it is," says Cezary Podkul, a Reuters reporter and team member. "It has the power to be very granular."

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Unveiling Sunlight Open Gov Events

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If you have been to any of our TransparencyCamp unconferences, the popular Labs Open House or happy hour then you know that we organize great events. And just as much as you support our events, we equally enjoy supporting other events -- especially when they involve bringing together a bunch of geeks like us who love cracking open code and making our government more transparent and open.

In that light, we are casting the net further by reviving our events platform to get you talking about your own event and assist you with sponsorship needs. For an idea about the kind of events that we are looking to engage in, here are a few that we have been a part of, so far:

Types of events we consider for sponsorship:

  • Hackathons
  • Tech Meetups
  • Tech Bar Camps
  • Datafests
  • CityCamps
  • Small tech conferences
  • Tech Happy hours
DSC_0058 DSC00811 Top Idea

Photos credit: Paul Schreiber, Howard Dy, dtraleigh.

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Datafest: ‘Amazing things can happen in a very short time’

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The weekend's bicoastal datafest focused a dazzling array of talent on the challenge of bringing more transparency in politics. In addition to journalists, teams included PhD candidates in marketing and finance, a business professor from Iowa, a master's candidate in biostatistics, and an energy researcher from MIT. Participants were exuberant about the cross-disciplinary cooperation and the results it achieved. "I never would have found a PhD in math if I hadn't come here," exulted one.

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Looking for coders, data-visualizers, ‘someone who writes English’

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More than 50 people braved the winter cold and dark to spend Friday night on the campus of Columbia University brainstorming for a bicoastal datafest that gets underway there and on the campus of Stanford University today.

Participants came from as nearby as down the hall -- some Columbia journalism students were in the room -- and as far away as London, home of Chris Taggart, who is here to show off and recruit assistance for is work at Open Corporates.  Also mingling in the crowd, Sunlight Labs director Tom Lee, Jeremy Merrill of Pro Publica, Dante Chinni, founder of Patchwork Nation ...

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Register Now for Big Money, Big Data and Datafest Hackathon Feb 2-3, 2013

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Calling all open government, journalism and data geeks. Please join Sunlight and friends in a bicoastal hackathon on the campuses of Stanford University and Columbia University on Feb 2-3, 2013. Registration is now open. Together, we will tackle how to create apps and sites that show what 2012’s political spending spree will mean for policy in 2013 and beyond. Register now. Do you write code or work with data? Do you want to learn how or enhance your skills? Join us to mine data for stories and visualizations that will help understand how money affects the issues that Congress and state legislatures will be taking up this year. Showcase your skills and knowledge and compete to win prizes.

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