Sunlight Foundation, together with the Center for Collaborative Journalism at Mercer University will be hosting Unblight: a community unconference on housing and property data in Macon, Georgia on August 14-15, 2014.
Continue reading“UnBlight,” A community unconference on housing data
We are planning an Unblight unconference to bring together community advocates, technologists, journalists, policy makers and students interested in exchanging ideas and sharing lessons about combating blight and repurposing abandoned parts of our cities.
Continue readingBetter know a TCamper: OpenGov Voices edition
Cristina and her team are aggregating and publishing actionable information about public property inventories, sale mechanisms, development plans and incentives as a way of solving the challenge of buying property from the government.
Continue readingPDF Liberation Hackathon and the need for more civic innovation
Public Sector Credit Solutions and Sunlight Foundation organized a multi-location PDF Liberation hackathon which helped free some much needed data but also exposed the need for more civic innovation.
Continue readingCome to Ladies who Code DC!
Ladies who Code (like the name suggests) is a gathering of ladies who code. Ladies Who Code, which already has chapters in Manchester, New York and London, recently opened their DC chapter and the first Meetup will be hosted at Sunlight’s DC offices.
What: Ladies Who Code DC Meetup
Where: Sunlight Foundation, 1818 N St. NW Suite 300 Washington, DC, 20036
When: September 19, 6:30pm
Sign up: http://www.meetup.com/Ladies-Who-Code-Washington-DC/events/139227392/
Continue readingOpenGov Voices: Roundup of voices you may have missed
We are switching up this week’s OpenGov Voices and giving you a chance to catch up with some of the major OpenGov Voices blog posts that you may have missed. It’s also a good opportunity for you to reconnect with the wonderful opengov initiatives happening around the world and perhaps inspire you to start the transparency conversation in your community. Without much further ado:
Derek Eder’s post on how you can keep tabs on your local city council using a tool called Councilmatic -- was one not to 
miss.
OpenGov Voices: Keeping Tabs on your Local City Council with Councilmatic:
In recent years, many city clerks have taken a big step forward by publishing this legislation online. However, the current generation of municipal legislative information systems are mainly built to help councilmembers and clerks’ offices manage legislation. They were not built to help the public to understand what their city council is doing. Well, like so many of our problems, now there’s an app for that: Councilmatic.
When we launched our OpenGov Grants program in June (you can apply for a grant here), it was only appropriate that we show you how these grants are already at work. What better way than to let you hear from our friends at TurboVote. Kathryn Peters’ post on how TurboVote (a previous Sunlight grantee) is shaping the future of voting that you don’t have to wait in line (and sometimes miss a chance to cast your vote) because their tool is changing all that.
OpenGov Voices: How TurboVote is Shaping the Future of Voting: 
In 2010, my friend Seth Flaxman and I set out to create an electoral system that would fit the way WE live: TurboVote, a new user interface for voting, as it were, complete with push notifications about election deadlines and a Netflix-worthy delivery system for all that paperwork, so we didn't have to buy envelopes or track down stamps just to stay engaged.Continue reading
Sunlight APIs have a new home
As building blocks for our tools, our APIs are core not only to our work but also to the hundreds of outside applications and services that they power. (Hold up, what are APIs again?) In the past half year, we have taken your feedback and build a prominent API site that’s accessible from the main Sunlight Foundation navigation. The new API section features completely re-written and re-organized documentation, a summary of the status of each API and an interactive query builder to help developers build their requests. We’ve also added real time statistics for our APIs, so anyone can see their aggregate use over time.
Need inspiration? Want to help?
Aside from accessing our APIs, we have also collected real-life examples of our APIs at work-- just check out the gallery of projects using our APIs to see just some of the projects that can be built with our data. Then head over to the Community tab to see current data projects that we and other OpenGov-ers are working on. You can filter these projects by ones that need technical help, non-technical help and also projects to inspire.
Learn how to join the efforts on standardizing election data, to detailing key relationships between influencers and politicians, to scraping state level spending data and a whole host of other projects. Have a project you want to add? Submit it here.
Join us for a #FOIAchat on Sunlight’s 2012 ROI Story
Tomorrow I will be (guest) moderating #FOIAchat where we will be featuring Lindsay Young — Sunlight’s staff writer — as... View Article
Continue readingUnveiling Sunlight Open Gov Events
If you have been to any of our TransparencyCamp unconferences, the popular Labs Open House or happy hour then you know that we organize great events. And just as much as you support our events, we equally enjoy supporting other events -- especially when they involve bringing together a bunch of geeks like us who love cracking open code and making our government more transparent and open.
In that light, we are casting the net further by reviving our events platform to get you talking about your own event and assist you with sponsorship needs. For an idea about the kind of events that we are looking to engage in, here are a few that we have been a part of, so far:
Types of events we consider for sponsorship:
- Hackathons
- Tech Meetups
- Tech Bar Camps
- Datafests
- CityCamps
- Small tech conferences
- Tech Happy hours
Photos credit: Paul Schreiber, Howard Dy, dtraleigh.
Continue readingContent strategy in a social world – Internet Advocacy Roundtable
At Sunlight we make no secret about using technology to make government more accountable and drive the transparency message further.... View Article
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