As we begin to engage the public in a regular, and sustained campaign to bring about the full potential for accountability and economic opportunity that open government promises, it's important hat we have some common principles and assumptions about where we're coming from and where we stand. And it's time to start clearly defining what those things are.
Continue reading5 Guiding Principles for a National Transparency Campaign
We believe that a disaffected, disengaged, cynical public threatens democracy in the United States as few other things can. At its heart, our campaign is about building the political and community clout necessary to combat this problem. We think we can invigorate democracy by coming together, demanding transparency with serious political muscle, using the very latest in technology to make government information more meaningfully accessible to us, and holding government accountable with it.
Continue readingThree Misconceptions about the Open Government Directive
There are three common misconceptions about the Open Government Directive that I’d like to clear up. 1. “It was late.”... View Article
Continue readingWhite House Publishes Open Government Directive
The White House has just released the Open Government Directive. In a livestreamed chat, blogpost, and document online, the White... View Article
Continue readingAdobe is Bad for Open Government
So next week, Adobe's having a conference here to tell Federal employees why they ought to be using "Adobe PDF, and Adobe® Flash® technology" to make government more open. They've spent what seems to be millions of dollars wrapping buses in DC with Adobe marketing materials all designed to tell us how necessary Adobe products are to Obama's Open Government Initiative. They've even got a beautiful website set up to tout the government's use of Flash and PDF, and are holding a conference here next week to talk about how Government should use ubiquitous and secure technologies to make government more open and interactive.
Here at the Sunlight Foundation, we spend a lot of time with Adobe's products-- mainly trying to reverse the damage that these technologies create when government discloses information. The PDF file format, for instance, isn't particularly easily parsed. As ubiquitous as a PDF file is, often times they're non-parsable by software, unfindable by search engines, and unreliable if text is extracted.
Continue readingThe Open Government Brainstorm
The Open Government Brainstorm is wrapping up, and a lot of people had a lot to say. Over 1000 ideas... View Article
Continue readingGovOS 09 – Let’s Start Coordinating Release Schedules
My Sunlight colleague, John Wonderlich, has a gift for finding interesting government web pages. This week he found the schedule... View Article
Continue readingOpen Govt Data Geeks Unite, and the Rise of 3-D Journalism
Micah Sifry (Sunlight senior strategic consultant) writes:
I've just finished spending two days at a mini-retreat on open government data organized by Carl Malamud of Public.Resource.Org, hosted by Tim O'Reilly of O'Reilly Media and funded by the Sunlight Foundation, Google and Yahoo!. The purpose of the meeting was to gather a bunch of folks from both the public and private sectors who are working on everything from pro-democracy websites to hyper-local news startups to see if we could draft some common principles for data and open government, and also to deepen connections and collaboration among a powerfully creative group of individuals and projects. (Full disclosure: I was there in my consulting role as a senior technology adviser to Sunlight, but this was another of those fortuitous events where I get to where all my hats as PdF editor, open government activist, and Sunlight consultant at once.)
In attendance were Adrian Holovaty and Daniel O'Neil of the soon-to-be-unveiled EveryBlock; Michal Mugurski and Eric Rodenbeck of Stamen Design, which does amazing work with data visualization; Josh Tauberer of GovTrack.us, which makes Thomas useful and amazes the rest of us with his efficiency; Lawrence Lessig of Stanford, who's focusing his prodigious energies on the problem of corruption; Dan Newman of MAPLight.org, which is doing path-breaking work connecting money, legislators, votes and power; John Geraci of outside.in, which is localizing the blogosphere down the neighborhood level; Ed Bender of the Institute for Money in State Politics, which has state-of-the-art APIs for mashing up state-level campaign finance data; Tom Steinberg of mySociety.org, probably the world's leader in pro-democracy web services (see TheyWorkForYou.com); David Moore and Donny Shaw of OpenCongress, which brings social wisdom to unveil what's really going inside Congress now; JL Needham of Google, you've probably heard of them; Ethan Zuckerman of the Berkman Center, who has more accomplishments in the geek-to-social-good sector than anyone I know (and he's only 34!!); Greg Palmer, whose stepping down as Congressman Henry Waxman's tech director soon to venture into some exciting projects in the private sector; Jamie Taylor of Metaweb, which is building a powerful platform called Freebase for public information sharing; Bradley Horowitz of Yahoo!, you've probably heard of them too; Zack Exley of the New Organizing Institute, whose one of my favorite progressive agitators; Michael Dale of Metavid, which is bringing transparency and interactivity to Congressional video; Joseph Lorenzo Hall of UC Berkeley, one of the world's experts on e-voting; Marcia Hoffman, a staff attorney for the Electronic Frontier Foundation, which I am a proud member of; David Orban of Metasocial Web, who is exploring the frontier of networked politics; Will Fitzpatrick of Omidyar Network, which is moving toward embracing transparency as a top priority; Aaron Swartz of Open Library, which is working on creating a wiki page for every book in the world; and myself and Greg Elin of the Sunlight Labs.
Continue reading- « Previous
- 1
- …
- 19
- 20
- 21
59063
