Sunlight Foundation

This is days past the deadline, completely open and written by a non-profit, and has no revenue model associated with it so it isn't intended to be taken seriously as a response to the recent YCombinator Request for Startups. But RFS 3: Building Things on Twitter got me thinking about what I'd like to build on Twitter. Here's the idea:

Now that there's about 1000 of us, we think its time we got a little social-- started hanging out, getting together and solving some of the problems we're running into. There's been over 100 apps created over the past year, a lot of fun projects, and a community created. Now's the time for us to have a national hackathon

We've partnered up with Google, RedHat, Fedora, and Mozilla, Open Source for America and Code for America to get the Open Source community involved in Open Government projects on December 12-13th, what's come to be known as the Great American Hackathon. We're hoping that you'll join us. What we want to build is a set of open, distributed events across the country, all working on solving problems or building out projects that make our government more open, accountable, participatory and transparent.

Where the events happen are entirely up to you. The content of those events are entirely up to you as well. The Great American Hackathon is an open event and is what you make it. Have a great idea you've been meaning to get around to? Now's your chance to get it done. Want to meet some people in your area that are interested in opening the government with technology? Organizing an event in your area is the best way to do it.

So in getting this project off the ground, we're going to need some help-- we've only got a few weeks to get it done. This is an experiment-- what happens when like-minded developers all work together on a weekend? What it looks like is largely up to you.

What we need right now

is for you to create events across America-- hold one in your home, office, or wherever else you'd like to do it, and get developers together to work on the ideas and projects of our community. Or if there's nothing in there that you think you can contribute to, you can always add your own into the mix.

The point is, let's get together in our local communities and see what happens.

Earlier this year, I was invited to testify in front of the FEC on how they could improve their web presence. Together, we as a community built my testimony that I in turn, delivered to them. Whether it was our Redesigning the Government piece on the FEC, or the crowdsourced testimony, we delivered it fully(start on page 25 of that pdf file).

I'm pretty excited to see this note from Bob Biersack floating around the intertubes announcing the launch of fec.gov/data and fec.gov/blog -- the commission is calling their blog the "Disclosure Data Blog" where they'll be posting information and plans about the files they're producing and taking a more proactive approach towards disclosure.