GovPulse.us-- originally created as an entry for our Apps for America 2 contest, won the Apps for Innovation development contest. The app takes the arcane, hard to read Federal Register and makes it usable and beautiful. With it, you can easily monitor the regulations and notices that federal agencies release to get input from the public.
While they managed to get 2nd in our contest, we are so proud that they managed to take home the gold at CES this year. Congratulation to the GovPulse team on a job well done!
Continue readingFederal Agencies: How to Score an Easy Transparency Win by Monday.
Our "/Open" page watcher presently shows one agency, the "Department of Agriculture" having their OGD compliant /Open page launched. And while it is technically true that the Department of Agriculture has set up a /Open page and that it doesn't return a 404, the page is less than a placeholder. Someone there checked a box in the CMS that they probably shouldn't have. What's funny though is that with just a little more effort-- really just 5 minutes-- the Department of Agriculture could score itself a major transparency win. Let me explain.
Continue readingHelp Build Neighborhoods by Building Neighborly
One result of the Great American Hackathon was a new project called Neighborly. Neighborly seeks to make it easy for you to find and create community out of your neighborhood.
The project is having a follow-on hackathon on January 9th. If you're up in Minnesota, or are interested in the project at all, check out Steven Clift's page for Neighborly and let him know. This is also a Knight News Challenge contestant which has made it into the second round. The winning group would be in great company. The Knight News Challenge has created great projects like EveryBlock, DocumentCloud and Spot.us
Continue readingWhat do you think of USA.gov?
About a year ago, we posted our first Redesigning the Government results. The post-- entitled Rethinking USA.gov set off a firestorm of comments both inside and outside the Federal Government.
Now the GSA is interested in getting your ideas on what they can do with the site. They've launched a site called Your Voice Matters to get ideas from citizens. Did our feedback make sense? Do you agree with some of the comments? Now's your chance to give them your thoughts.
Continue readingWhat’s The Plan for 2010?
Tis the season to write year end or decade-end wrap-ups, and erroneous predictions of the future. But instead of making (nonsense) predictions, I'd like to discuss where we're headed as a community and the big problems we face moving forward.
Our mission is to help developers make their government more accountable and transparent through the use of technology and open data. In 2009 we focused on building infrastructure and community. In 2010, we need to start solving problems. Here are the big challenges on the horizon:
Continue readingYear 1 in Review
2009 Year in Review
On December 19th, 2008 we launched a new site with a new mission-- to build a community of developers around making government more accountable. On that day, we proclaimed our new mission:
Sunlight Labs is an open source development team dedicated to making their government accountable. And we want you to be a part of it.
People have been organizing to change government forever-- and people like John McCain in 2000, Howard Dean in 2004, and Barack Obama and Ron Paul have been raising the bar of organizing by using the Internet to move votes and raise money. Developers have been organizing to make great software, too. Projects like Mozilla and Apache have been helping developers organize to make great software for years.
Sunlight Labs is an experiment to try and blend those two things and see what happens. About a year ago, we asked the question: Can developers be organized to change their government?
Here's the data-- you be the judge:
Continue readingGreat American Hackathon Wrap-up
On the second weekend of December, Sunlight Labs held the Great American Hackathon— a nation-wide get-together of developers interested in opening up government. I’m long overdue in my wrap-up, but the end result was a success. Events popped up across the country— about 20 in all. Average attendance, from the look of it, was about 10 developers per event. Here at Sunlight, we had about 30 people show up in all, and we managed to work on several projects. Here’s some of the highlights:
Continue readingWatching the Open Government Initiative
Reporters often ask me to say something critical about the Open Government Directive because it helps balance out their story. I'm polite but sometimes think I should tell them to call the Opacity Foundation or "Americans for a Less Effective Government" -- some things are just obviously good and the Open Government Initiative falls in that category.
But we have created new ways to track success. Read more to find out how.
Continue readingHotness from Arizona
Hackathon Reports Coming From Across the Country
Code contributions and great discussions are happening across the country as developers get together. In Philadelphia, developers are translating NJ muni codes to FIPS so their maps will line up with survey data. In Minneapolis, 25 Developers have gathered. Here, at the Sunlight Foundation headquarters, we've had about 30 people working on apps like the 50 State Project and the NIH Pill API and the Voting Information Project.
Code For America is working with Stamen Design at building great apps for cities. And NASA's hackathon is getting underway too. Great work is happening this weekend.
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