As of today Android and iPhone users can see recovery.gov contract data on their phones via the Layar augmented reality application. Layar is an application that overlays your view of the real world with waypoints representing your favorite coffee place, the movie theatre you're trying to find, or in this case, where some of that $787 billion from the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act is going.
Take 5 Minutes to Help the Fifty State Project
Early this year we began our Fifty State Project, a project to scrape and organize data from all fifty state legislative websites. We have also started to run into cases where despite the best efforts of the developers on the project we can't get the full range of information we need to make this legislative data useful.
We have just posted a new TransparencyCorps task to help digitize this information, starting with the results from the Kentucky Legislature.
Continue readingSunlight Labs API One Year Later
It has been about a year since we launched the new version of the Sunlight Labs API and seeing as just recently it recieved it's 500th user and 3,000,000th api call, we thought it might be good to take a look at the changes over the last year. This chart should give some idea of what the growth has been like to get to this point:
ThisWeKnow Gets Praise in Senate
Senator Patrick Leahy has honored Vermont-born ThisWeKnow.org, our 3rd Place Winner from Apps for America 2. Their entry earned them a mention in the Congressional Record.
Continue readingAnnouncing Our Summer of Code 2009 Participants
Yesterday Google announced this years participants in Google Summer of Code <http://socghop.appspot.com/>_, Google's program that pays students a stipend to work on an open source project during their summer.
This is Sunlight Labs' first year participating and we were extremely grateful to be granted three slots for this summer. Interest definitely exceeded our expectations leaving us with the difficult job of going through a lot of excellent proposals to select our top three applicants. We wish we could have accepted more proposals and hope that some of the students that found out about us through this program will pursue their ideas even though we were not able to accept them at this time.
Continue readingFifty states Project: April 10th Status Report
Six weeks ago we announced on this blog <http://www.sunlightlabs.com/blog/2009/02/26/fifty-state-project/>_ the Fifty State Project <http://wiki.sunlightlabs.com/index.php/Fifty_State_Project>_, our ambitious project to begin building scrapers and storing data for all legislative information from all fifty states. At the time this project seemed like a longshot, but almost immediately a community rose to the challenge and there are now more than a dozen contributors and more than thirty states in progress.
Open Government Hackathon: Chicago, March 29-31
Sunlight Labs is proud to be hosting the first ever Open Government Hackathon, March 29-31 in Chicago as part of PyCon.
This will be a 48 hour sprint where developers that are interested in contributing to an open source project that will free or otherwise enhance government data can gather to brainstorm and hack on various projects related to government data.
Continue readingTaking a look at the GOP Anywhere API
The Republicans in Congress have launched a new GOP.gov which includes an API. While a commendable effort it leaves a lot to be desired but could serve to pave a path towards an official congressional API.
Continue readingLooking At The NYTimes Congress API
Earlier this week the New York Times released their Congress API second politics API (following up on the release of their Campaign Finance API late last year). Here at Sunlight Labs we are always happy to see new APIs that wrap government data and there is definitely a lot to like here, although there are some things that will hopefully change to make the API more useful to the community at large.
Continue readingFeed A Need: Donate Time to Sunlight for the Holidays
reddit.com recently unveiled FeedANeed.org, an charity drive designed to connect volunteers with worthy nonprofits in need of some form of assistance from the community.
FeedANeed allows anyone to vote for worthy nonprofits and/or sign up to volunteer some chunk of their time to top vote-getting organizations. Volunteers that complete their pledged time by February 14th, 2009 will be entered into a drawing for prizes from various sponsors (from a wide variety of organizations Wired, EFF, Baconfreak, and even Sunlight Foundation).
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