Lots of people are working to make neighborhoods in Madison, Wisconsin more equitable and complete. Could open data from the city help their work? And if so, how? Our third pilot project of Tactical Data Engagement sets out to answer these questions.
Continue readingRemember Sunlight this #GivingTuesday
First, there was Black Friday, then Cyber Monday and now there is #GivingTuesday, a day dedicated to inspiring individuals, families, communities and businesses to give back and to raise awareness about charitable activities. So, take this opportunity to give back to the opengov movement with a donation to Sunlight today!
So, in the midst of Black Friday and Cyber Monday, don’t forget to give back! Donate $10, $25, $50 or more to Sunlight! Whether it’s a little or a lot, participating in #GivingTuesday will bring us closer to the open government we seek while raising awareness about philanthropic activity worldwide.
Continue readingRecovery.gov Augmented Reality Mashup
As of today Android and iPhone users can see recovery.gov contract data on their phones via the Layar augmented reality application. Layar is an application that overlays your view of the real world with waypoints representing your favorite coffee place, the movie theatre you're trying to find, or in this case, where some of that $787 billion from the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act is going.
Sunlight Labs API One Year Later
It has been about a year since we launched the new version of the Sunlight Labs API and seeing as just recently it recieved it's 500th user and 3,000,000th api call, we thought it might be good to take a look at the changes over the last year. This chart should give some idea of what the growth has been like to get to this point:
Dealing with Inaccurate Government Data
Developers are good at getting bits to line up, importing data and getting great conclusions out of it. Designers are great at making things look great and making those conclusions and bits easily digestible. But in all the apps I've seen, they all ultimately suffer from the same fatal flaw: accuracy.
Continue readingHackathons!
Our second big announcement of the day is that we're launching a pilot project: Sunlight Labs Live Hackathons.
The idea really came from Tim O'Reilly and O'Reilly media, who said "Hey, why don't you come out to Web 2.0 expo and see if you can get some projects done with some of the developers there." We said "Great Idea!"
At the same time, James opened up the doors for us at PyCon and they said "Great Idea!"
So now the question is: what do we do? We think that's a community decision, so we put up a feedback page where people can vote for what their favorite ideas are to work on. Go vote now!
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