Our Android app, "Congress", is now published in the Android Market, for free. As I said in the beta release post, Congress is a pocket Congressional directory that takes full advantage of the Sunlight Labs Congress API and the Drumbone API. You can install it by visiting the Market, or scan the QR code in this post to take you right there.
The features:
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I want to invite all of you with Android phones to try out a public beta of an Android app that I've been working on inside the Labs. It's called "Congress", and it's a pocket Congressional directory. It takes full advantage of the Sunlight Labs API to show you up-to-date info about members of Congress, and to pull in updates from members' Twitter and YouTube accounts.
Install the app from your phone by scanning the QRcode to the right.
It's a small app, really, but there are several other cool features.
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Another honorable mention in Apps for America 2 is Time Machine, a simple Flash-based map of various data around unemployment and earnings, and how they've changed over time.
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First of all, there's a new TransparencyCorps campaign up today: How Many Votes? We're trying get a database of the win percentages and vote totals for sitting members of Congress, for their last election. We'll be publishing the results in SQLite and CSV form, as usual, and we'll be integrating it into at least Congrelate, and a mysterious upcoming project.
In other awesome news, ThisWeKnow has taken the earmark data that we obtained through TransparencyCorps, and integrated it into their listings of data for cities. For example, check out the earmark requests for Pittsburgh.
Continue readingAfter the success of our earmark campaigns, I've been working with the enthusiastic folks at OpenGovernmentNYC to help them launch a campaign of their own. Recently, they obtained from the NYC government a 169-page paper copy of the 1993 NYC Data Directory, bulk scanned it into a big PDF, and asked for help in digitizing it.
Visit the campaign and read Philip Ashlock's blog post to read a little more about why OpenGovNYC wants your help:
Update the NYC Public Data Directory
And if you're around NYC, consider going to one of their meetups - these guys are for serious.
Continue readingWhen we launched TransparencyCorps at the end of June, we ran a few small earmark campaigns, to digitize little batches of earmark request letters that legislators had posted on their websites. These campaigns wrapped up very quickly, and at the same time, the House decided to release earmark request letters en masse, and we didn't have to do our campaigns per-legislator anymore.
Given the demonstrated interest in earmarks, we decided to run a much larger campaign, for all the earmarks released by the House Appropriations Committee, starting with those for the Commerce, Justice, and Science Subcommittee. These were released in a single massive PDF, which I split up into individual 1- or 2-page request letters.
This campaign involved 1,183 letters, and we had the campaign run for 5,537 completed tasks. Total volunteer time, as measured on TransparencyCorps: over 472 hours. That's nearly 20 man-days. Here are the results.
Continue readingWhile the judging for Apps for America 2 rolls on, let's do a little technology breakdown of the submissions.
Continue readingAt the beginning of this year, the New York State Senate brought in Andrew Hoppin as their CIO with a mandate to revolutionize the way the NY Senate engaged people. The NY Senate's new website is the first major tangible product of Andrew's new and talented team. On June 5th, I attended another result of this newfound momentum in New York's government, CapitolCamp. A one-day BarCamp-style conference, CapitolCamp was in Albany, at the New York State Capitol, hosted by the New York State Senate, CIO, and the New York State CIO.
Continue readingOpen government got a great spotlight at RailsConf this year, in Las Vegas. Dan Lathrop organized a panel on Government 2.0 there, and was kind enough to ask me to speak about Sunlight, and Wynn Netherland about his great work on TweetCongress. We had good turnout, and got plenty of questions. We even had a guy spontaneously write an IP address of an anonymous FTP server on a piece of paper, approach the podium to hand it to me, and promise us that there was raw legislative data on the other end.
Continue readingThis year's RailsConf is going to have a real Open Government presence. If you're attending RailsConf in Vegas this year, there are a couple of events on Tuesday that should interest you.
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