But kinda like moldy cheese or bread, all too often, any of the good parts of government are crusted over or encroached upon by a kind of disgusting malfeasance. When we see moldy cheese, the oddly shaped growth on it makes us want to toss the whole thing out - when, if we could actually just cut off the bad part, we might still happily enjoy the tasty core.
Continue readingMore laws, longer sentences fuel explosive growth of federal criminal system
What if we Google Buzzed Government?
Following up on my hypothetical post on what would happen if Government had done the same thing that Google did with Google Buzz, I'd like to imagine something different: what if something like Google Buzz happened to government? What if, out of nowhere, the Executive Branch of government started exposing the most frequent contacts of each Senate Confirmed appointee based on their email inboxes? What would happen if we could, for instance, pull up Rahm Emmanuel's "Buzz" profile and see who he followed and who was following him, based not on his preferences, but based on the frequency of email contacts alone?
Continue readingAn Emblem for Open Government
We hope this emblem is a first step in giving us something we can all own and point to as a symbol for what open government means to us, and what we believe. We hope it becomes a rallying point for those standing up to make an open, transparent government something we can hang our hat on ...or our iPhones and Androids on.
Continue readingMore About the Door
But the electronics are just one part of the system. As I mentioned at the end of that last post, my colleagues did an impressive job of springing into action and building out the systems necessary to turn an SSH-accessible script into a useful interface. Here's how they did it. Continue reading
Post-Citizens United, Lobbying Firm Helps Explain How To Avoid Disclosure Rules
According to Talking Points Memo, the lobbying firm K&L Gates posted a “Policy and Law Alert” on the web site... View Article
Continue readingClearMaps: A Mapping Framework for Data Visualization
Despite the recent explosion of web based cartography tools, making effective maps for data visualization remains a challenge. While tools like Google Maps are great for helping navigate the world they fail terribly at data presentation tasks. Many features like roads and cities only get in the way of telling compelling stories with data. In fact, even the distance between places can be a distraction – who cares how far away Alaska is when the goal is to make a simple comparison between US states?
To overcome some of the limitations with existing mapping tools, Sunlight Lab is releasing ClearMaps, an ActionScript framework for interactive cartographic visualization. In addition to giving designers and developers total control over presentation the project aims to address some of the common technical challenges faced when building interactive, data driven maps for the web. ClearMaps is designed as a lightweight, flexible set of tools for building complex data visualizations. It is a framework not a plug-and-play component (though it could be a starting point for those wishing to make reusable tools).
Continue readingMorning Links
1) Everyone hates the Citizens United ruling. I can see Justice Alito shaking his head right about now. 2) Here’s... View Article
Continue readingAre the American People short on ideas?
A couple of developers from the Sunlight Labs community, including one of our Great American Hackathon organizers Jessy Cowan-Sharp, managed to put together something remarkable: OpenGovTracker (source here). The site lets you see where the ideas are coming in across the various agencies from a single dashboard.
What's the synopsis? According to this it's that the American People don't have a lot of ideas. Well-- a lot of agencies are pretty low on ideas. Only 611 ideas have been proposed. Treasury only has a dozen ideas? The best the American people can do is give Social Security 10 new ideas?.
As our the Sunlight Foundation's Policy director stated late last week: now is the time. Request a dataset or submit an idea to government. Here's how.
Continue readingCruching Numbers on the President’s Economic Report
James Jacobs (of Free Government Info) writes that the Economic Report of the President, which provides an overview of the... View Article
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