Yesterday we sent out a request for people to tell us what they thought of TransparencyCamp. Here's a word cloud of their responses I thought we'd share:
Hackathons!
Our second big announcement of the day is that we're launching a pilot project: Sunlight Labs Live Hackathons.
The idea really came from Tim O'Reilly and O'Reilly media, who said "Hey, why don't you come out to Web 2.0 expo and see if you can get some projects done with some of the developers there." We said "Great Idea!"
At the same time, James opened up the doors for us at PyCon and they said "Great Idea!"
So now the question is: what do we do? We think that's a community decision, so we put up a feedback page where people can vote for what their favorite ideas are to work on. Go vote now!
Continue readingDid the Navy Spend ~400k on Facebook? (Why Bulk Data is Important)
In our work with government data we encourage governments to develop great looking websites with fantastic APIs. But you can't have true transparency unless you go all the way down to the source giving citizens access to the raw bulk data.
Continue readingContent Management Systems just don’t work.
Somebody asked me the other day what I thought of Recovery.gov using Drupal and it got me thinking about content management systems. In my consulting days, I watched companies and political campaigns and non-profits sometimes spend hundreds of thousands of dollars annually trying to make their content management system do what they wanted it to do for their online campaigns. As an honest developer and honest consultant, this made me apoplectic-- I knew that at the end of the day, technically what they wanted was fairly easy to build. But they had to pay hundreds of dollars an hour to get a "Drupal Specialist" at an outside consultancy to set up simple pages because they could not figure out how to get the stuff to work right.
I think if your budget for your website is $40,000/yr or more, you shouldn't be worrying about Content Management Systems at all. You should be worrying about hiring. I'll explain why after the jump.
Continue readingWhat is this Don’t Click business?
This afternoon, a friend of mine tweeted "Don't Click: "
I, being a naturally curious human being, proceeded to click the button and saw a page with another button that says "Don't Click"
I clicked on that button as well and then noticed that in my Twitter feed, I had in fact tweeted the same link even though I never consented to do so.
Huzzah! the first twitter social virus!
It seems mostly harmless, just perpetuating itself and breeding. You can check out the graph of its use here:
Here's how it works:
Continue readingI heart Bit.ly
We've been using Bit.ly a lot here at Sunlight Labs-- I've become somewhat of an evangelist of using it over many similar shortcut services. What gets me excited about bit.ly is the advanced tracking capabilities it has. Did you know....
- Bit.ly tracks friendfeed and twitter conversations?
- It tracks each individual click and tells you where they're coming from?
- It actually scrapes the page you link to with it and provides you with semantic data on the page?!
- All of this is completely "transparent?" You can view the stats of any bit.ly link
All you have to do is put /info/ in between bit.ly and the random characters it assigns to your link. So for instance, the bit.ly link to our recent "Redesigning the Government" post was http://bit.ly/LONF But if you just put that magic /info/ in it, you can see the stats: http://bit.ly/info/LONF
We've been using it to track Twitter's effectiveness at driving traffic to the Sunlight Labs website we're quite excited to see it using OpenCalais to scrape semantic data off the page as well. It is quite a unique blend of interesting information about something as simple as a link.
Also: I highly recommend the Firefox extension. It allows you to see some basic information about a bit.ly or other shortcutted link when you mouse-over it like how many clicks it has received and more importantly, what the full URL is.
Thanks Bit.ly!
Continue readingWhat are you doing with the Stimulus?
Stimulus stimulus stimulus, all we're hearing about is the stimulus packages these days. Everyone in our field is figuring out different ways to parse bills, reports and other such things while we wait on Recovery.gov to launch. Whether it is Stimulus Watch, Read the Stimulus, or even Pew's Subsidy Scope (for which we are providing technical assistance), it seems like everybody is trying to parse and find data related to either bailouts or the stimulus packages.
We've started a wiki page to track what everybody is up to. Please add your own project here so people can check it out!
A note: to limit spam on our wiki, we require you to register before you can edit pages.
Continue readingDoes your Rep have an RSS Feed?
Sunlight Labs contributor "wubbahead" comes up with an ingenious and automated way to find out whether or not your representative has an RSS feed by using the Sunlight Labs API the Google AJAX Feed API and some JavaScript. Make sure to check it out
Continue readingWhat we’re doing with the stimulus bill
Short answer: we're trying to do some interesting things with it and we may need your help. Originally, we thought "hey, let's put this into Public Markup" but unfortunately the bill's complexity actually was incompatible with Public Markup's data model. At the end of the day, the relevant parts of the bill wouldn't have fit into the commenting/displaying architecture we've used for bills in the past.
Continue readingVisualizing the Citizen’s Briefing Book
The Citizen's Briefing Book is an interesting little participatory function on change.gov, too. You can get a good read for what people are concerned about by looking at the number of ideas per category.
Just a simple little ditty thanks to IBM's ManyEyes.
Continue reading
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