Sunlight Foundation

Following up on yesterday's post where Opened up Change.gov I just took the titles of all the documents and ran them through Wordle, removing some of the blatantly noisy words (Recommendation, Transition, Policy). Here's what we got, which may be a pretty nice way of seeing what people "at the table" are talking about.

Here's the big version

After my post yesterday about Change.gov's Your Seat at the Table feature, it got us thinking: what if this website disappears on January 21st? What if all this data goes away?

I posted (half seriously) on our Yammer account about 3 hours ago "Big gold star to anyone who can scrape and capture every 'your seat at the table' document in a Sunlight repository. I'm getting nervous that change.gov is going to disappear in a week."

James and Jeremy independently took up the challenge. And now, three hours later we have our repository. We thought we'd share the code for you to do it too if you'd like, and also this handy csv file of all of the documents.

Early on in the Presidential Transition, Change.gov, never-before-done process: Your Seat at the Table. They announced that every document that the transition team received in a meeting where there was three or more attendees would be posted online. By anybody's standards -- much less a presidential transition this was an awesome step and the Change.gov team should be commended for taking it.

That said Change.gov team is learning as they go and looking at the implementations on Change.gov is an interesting opportunity to get some new transparency technology learning opportunities for the new administration.

We've added a significant page to the wiki: "How You Can Help"

If you are wondering how you can use your skills to help make our Government more transparent, this web page is for you. It talks through how developers, designers and activists can be a part of the Sunlight Labs community and lend a hand to our efforts. Make sure to check it out.

You may have noticed, we've redesigned our site. Our awesome new designer, Ali made it and we're excited to have her as part of our team. And we're excited about the new website too. Especially those things on the right that allow us to update what we're working on via twitter.

The website isn't the only thing we're redesigning. We're also redesigning how Sunlight Labs works. We're clearly no longer the six-month pilot project we were chartered to be 31 months ago. We're now a team of great developers using technology to change the way our Congress operates and have been for quite some time. So we're long overdue for a gear-shift in the way we think about Sunlight Labs and how we work. We see three fundamental shifts in how we think about ourselves now vs. how the Labs was conceived.

James is finishing up a tweak to the Sunlight Labs API that allows for fairly sophisticated search for members of Congress, it isn't "published" yet but it is active so if you want to experiment you're welcome to try it out, but for now it is "unofficial".

Modern baseball’s origins are something historians don’t have a good read on. If you look at the Origins of Baseball article on Wikipedia, you’ll see that we don’t know very much about where the rules came from, but it formalized somewhere around 1845 when the Knickerbocker Club of New York City began to play baseball against the New York Nine. In 1857 16 clubs finally sent delegates to a convention to standardize the rules and standardize America’s Pastime.

We launched Capitol Words just a couple weeks ago and got a really great reception from the blogs. I’m two weeks in to my new duties as Director of Sunlight Labs and while I didn’t have much (really, anything) to do with the project's success, I am really excited about it. With the CapitolWords API we can start doing some interesting analysis of overall word-usage in Congress.