We scraped all the ideas off of the latest National Dialogue on Recovery.gov to see of we could condense what most of the ideas were about. Here's what we got:
Looks like most of the ideas were about data. People sure do want to set that data free, don't they?
Word Cloud of the National Dialogue
Over in the Labs, we scraped all the ideas off of the latest National Dialogue on Recovery.gov to see of... View Article
Continue readingOn the new NYSenate.gov
The transparency community is abuzz today with the revelation of the New York Senate website. It is shiny and pretty. There are great new features and even our website, Public Markup gets a shout out. Neat!
What's great about it is uniformity. Every Senator has a website that's the same as every other Senator's, with links to their RSS feeds and even twitter accounts. They've got blogs and interestingly enough calendars. Now, the technology for transparency is there. Sadly, it doesn't look like the Senators are using it yet -- I find it hard to believe, for example, that the Senate President has a clear schedule for the rest of the month.. But the technology is there and the NY Senate technology team ought to be commended for building that in (and making it export in iCal!).
Continue readingShameless Plug: Beautiful Data
O'Reilly is publishing a new book entitled Beautiful Data that you should buy. Why?
- The two authors of the book, Jeff Hammerbacher and Toby Segaran are really great people. It looks like a great book.
- Half the proceeds of the book go to us here at the Sunlight Foundation. The other half goes to another great organization, Creative Commons
So buy the book and give us some much needed support so that we can continue liberating data and shining light in some of the darkest corners of Washington, DC. I'll sweeten the pot, too: If you're one of the first five people to buy the book and send me a picture of you with the book in your hands, I'll send you some very rare Sunlight Foundation/Labs stickers along with a very appreciative thank-you note.
Are(“R”) You a visualizer?
Yesterday, I posted a bit about how data.gov shouldn't focus on data visualizations, but rather providing clean reliable data to citizens. But what this means is that we as a non-government community really need to start thinking about how to do visualizations when that data becomes available. Right now we're asking a lot of questions about data visualizations inside the Sunlight Offices that need to be shared with the wider Labs community:
- Should we hire somebody that does good data visualizations full time?
- Should we have a contest for best data visualization?
- What kinds of data visualizations would be successful in our field?
In order to kick off the discussion with the larger group, I want to gauge response from the wider design and visualization community and see what kind of people are out there. So I'm asking that if you're interested in working on the visualization and design side of things rather than the application and coding side of things that you fill out the form below.
Continue readingShould Data.gov visualize? Probably not.
A few people who saw our Data.gov design post asked for ways to visualize the data on Data.gov. As an organization that's such a proponent of data not only being free, but also using design to provide context to the data, why don't we advocate for data.gov to have visualizations for citizens to make sense of the data?
Continue readingThe Apps for America Judging Process
Since announcing the winners yesterday, a few people have asked for notes about how the Sunlight Foundation selected the winners. The answer is: we didn't. The Apps for America judging process went like this: we got 5 judges to agree to judge the contest-- Adrian Holovaty, Peter Corbett, Xeni Jardin, Aaron Swartz and myself. We built a very lightweight judging app (screenshot) and invited every judge to log in and rate each app according to the attributes we specified on in the contest rules.
Continue readingAnd The Winners Are…
Judging our first Apps for America contest was difficult: 40+ solid, open source applications that solidly moved the ball forward... View Article
Continue readingAnd The Winners Are…
Judging our first Apps for America contest was difficult: 45 solid, open source applications that solidly moved the ball forward in terms of opening government and providing new methods of communicating to our legislative branch.
The entries ranged from highly technical bayesian prediction tools like Words Vote, to the super simple and super useful GovPix. Every entry presented was open source and and amazing commitment on behalf of the development community to open their government. Every single entrant was amazing and I wish we could give prizes to everyone.
But we can't. The rules say there's 1 prize for first place, 1 prize for second place, 4 third place prizes and 10 honorable mentions prizes. Which gives us 16 total prizes to give away.
And the winners are...
Continue readingRedesigning the Government: Data.gov
One thing we’ve been most excited about here at the Sunlight Foundation is the concept of Data.gov. Due later this year, new federal CIO Vivek Kundra will release a new central repository for government data and research. And while in this series we traditionally re-design federal websites, we thought we’d actually take the opportunity to design data.gov right off the bat to show you all what we’d like to see happen.
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