As stated in the note from the Sunlight Foundation′s Board Chair, as of September 2020 the Sunlight Foundation is no longer active. This site is maintained as a static archive only.

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Labs Olympics: Talk of the Town

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It's that time of year again...time for the 2011 Labs Olympics! This year, I was on a team with Andrew Pendleton of the Data Commons/Influence Explorer team and labs intern Matthew Gerring. Last year, I teamed up with Jeremy and Luigi to form the fierce (and winning) team, Blood Monkey. This year, we needed an equally intimidating team name and an equally creepy project to boot. So without further ado, team Baby in a Straight Jacket presents: Talk of the Town.

Talk of the Town is a corpus of closed captioning data from transcripts of municipal meetings from around the country. You can type in any word and see which cities or counties are talking about it, and how often. The size of the circle over each municipality corresponds to how frequently it was mentioned. Additionally, there's a sparkline underneath the word you searched for that shows the week-by-week change in frequency.

Talk of the Town is powered by data from the nice folks at Granicus. Granicus is a vendor that provides a streaming video and document publishing suite to governments who want to increase their transparency by making public meetings more accessible to citizens. They were kind enough to let us use the beta version of their api to pull down data from their clients for the last six months. Luckily, they serve hundreds of municipalities across the country, so while the data isn't exhaustive, it's a nice sampling.

In addition to noting that the data does not contain every local government, users should also note that we haven't had a chance to scale the frequency of mentions by the frequency of the meetings. However you can still find some pretty interesting results (bonus: try searching for "earthquake" or "irene"). For instance, if you search for "taxes", you'll notice the mention of taxes in Montgomery County is off the charts for a county that size (Montgomery County is the 13th wealthiest county in the country and is also home to a few Sunlighters, including myself).

So that was our two day project for the 2011 Labs Olympics. Although it wasn't the winner, we're happy to work on something that takes opengov to the grassroots level, even if only experimentally.

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Open Goverment Roku Apps!

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The Roku box is a nice little gadget that streams audio and video over wifi to your TV. It was the very first device that streamed Netflix Instant Watch and to boot, it runs linux. I have one of the original Roku boxes and ever since they released an SDK, I'd been meaning to play around with it. I finally got the chance, and in some spare time at Sunlight I created two streaming video apps for White House and Congressional video and one streaming audio app for the Supreme Court (SCOTUS doesn't allow cameras). All three apps can be installed on your Roku via the channel store or the links on this page.

The White House app is the most powerful of the three apps, thanks to that institution doing the best job of exposing its data. WhiteHouse.gov/live makes all their live and archived video accessible via categorized RSS feeds. Since the Roku box has a native XML parser, it was easy to pull the video in and make it browsable by category. The quality of the videos is great and their video hosting is usually reliable, making for a nice viewing experience.

The Congress app is a great start, but has a way to go before it's on par with the White House app. All of the video in the Congress Roku app is streamed from HouseLive.gov, a service through which the Clerk of the House provides live and archived video of the House floor. Since their live session is streamed using Microsoft Silverlight, the linux-based Roku can't play it. But they do offer RSS feeds of archived video. We parse the HouseLive.gov page and these RSS feeds for video links and add them to our Real Time Congress API. So if you want to play around with these videos, just hit up the videos endpoint of our RTC API. Unfortunately, only one other committee, the Rules Committee, streams video using the same technology. We're hoping more committees come online and we can add these to the Roku app as well. The Senate doesn't have anything comparable to HouseLive.gov, so the app doesn't have any video from that chamber at this time. Most of their committees have some kind of flash player embedded in their site. You may have guessed it, but the Roku doesn't play nice with Flash either (or any other proprietary format).

Last is the Supreme Court Roku app. Since there are no cameras, we're left with only audio for this one. SCOTUS junkies can browse arguments and opinions heard before the court by year. The folks at Oyez.org have done a great job of cleaning up the raw audio and offering it in well organized RSS feeds. However, the audio interfaces exposed by the Roku box leave something to be desired, especially when compared to their video streaming interfaces.

Overall, working with the Roku apps was a little idiosyncratic, but development was quick enough. Their engineers are pretty responsive on the developer forum, which makes up for gaps in the technical documentation. Caitlin did an excellent job on the design for all three, but had to go through a lot of trial and error because the design guidelines are pretty lacking.

All three apps are open sourced on our github account and are available, free of charge, in the Roku Channel store, or by clicking the download links on this page.

Hat tips to Caitlin for her awesome design and Eric for helping out on Real Time Congress API integration!

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Help Develop Open Source Corporate Data Apps!

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Last week, XBRL.us launched the XBRL Challenge. The contest, which is offering a grand prize of $20,000, is soliciting open source analytical applications that make use of corporate XBRL data. XBRL is short for eXtensible Business Reporting Language, and starting this past June, all publicly traded companies are required to file their financial statements electronically to the SEC using it.

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