US Open Government plans were released today. As part of this process, federal agencies are beginning to release data sets publicly in ways they never have before. Some substantial and thought-provoking blog posts over the last few weeks have discussed how government can do open data well.
There are significant cultural and social sticking points that have yet to be addressed in releasing data openly. A discussion with a colleague from NASA last week confirmed how far away most agencies are from the luxury of considering the innovative ideas for data set management available to them. Here's why:
Continue readingLIVE: HHS Announces Open Government Plan
The Department of Health and Human Services will be announcing their Open Government plan live via video at 1:30PM ET.... View Article
Continue readingLocal Spotlight
Today I want to spotlight Triad Watch’s great post on Greensboro, NC new policy on emails that are sent from... View Article
Continue readingTransparency Swarm
Last week we asked people to blog about why transparency is important to them. There was a great response and... View Article
Continue readingIdea to Action: Launching the Public=Online Campaign
Ultimately, Public=Online is focused on getting government to pass the transparency laws we need - laws that put government information online in real-time where we can use it - and we're going to do that by building a demand for transparency that is so large it cannot be ignored by politicians.
Continue readingIntroducing the Cycle of Transparency
This "Cycle of Transparency" demonstrates, in one image, the specific actions and the variety of actors that need to work together to create the open, transparent government we seek.
Continue readingEvery Non-Profit is an Open Government Non-Profit
Why your non-profit stands to benefit from Open Data
Often times at Sunlight the non-profit community looks at us strangely. Here in Washington, DC we've probably made more investments in technology than any other non-profit or advocacy organization I've run across. Certainly our mission is focused around the use of technology, so that makes a lot of sense-- we're focused on getting data out of government, doing interesting things with it, and letting you see what happens in Washington better. That means technology investment.
But one question I struggle with is: why doesn't every non-profit advocate for open data from the Government? Don't ALL of them stand to benefit?
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 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 readingCampaign Lessons from Dancing Guy
That said, Sivers posted something really brilliant on his blog yesterday - based on a TED talk he's given - and it's something that we can absolutely learn from as the movement for open government builds across the country. This is very much worth your three minutes of viewing time if you're an organizer or even remotely interested in why or how people come together. This "dancing guy" illustrates for us the elements of movement and campaign building in an incredibly condensed amount of time.
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