This Wednesday, May 18, Sunlight Labs will be at RailsConf in Baltimore, running an Open Government Hackathon at the event's official unconference, BohConf. We'll have several projects that need your help, and of course, you're welcome to bring your own. The hackathon runs from 1:50 to 5:15 pm.
- I (Luigi) will be leading development on shoring up the Ruby gems for Sunlight's various APIs: Congress, Transparency Data, and Real Time Congress. Eric will lead an effort to expand the Real Time Congress API with data provided by the new House website. Our friends from Code for America, Dan, Erik, Ryan, and Scott will be in attendance, working on a Ruby gem for local civic hacking.
But that's not the only #opengov activity happening at RailsConf. Dan from Code for America is giving a lightning keynote on Thursday morning. It'll be livestreamed at 9:50 am ET. Also, check out BohConf's schedule for more unconference fun. It should be a good time.
Continue readingRecapping the Open Government Hackathon at RubyConf
Last week, David, Eric, and I attended RubyConf in New Orleans. The organizers of the conference were kind enough to offer us space for an open government hackathon that we held every day of the conference. During the day, as conference sessions were going on, quite a few folks trickled in and out during the "open hacking" hours. On the first two evenings, after the conference sessions ended, we held a series of talks of our own in the hackathon room. We hosted a little over twenty people each night for the talks.
Big thanks goes to Tropo for sponsoring food and drinks for the hackathon attendees. We were able to enjoy beignets, soft pretzels, and king cake, not to mention stay hydrated and caffeinated, thanks to them.
Here's a quick recap of what we worked on:
Continue readingPreview: Real Time Congress API
My main project for the last month or so has been something we're calling the Real Time Congress API. It's not quite ready for production use, and the data in it is subject to change, but I wanted to give you all a preview of what's coming, and to ask for your help and ideas.
The goal of the Real Time Congress (RTC) API is to provide a current, RESTful API over all the artifacts of Congress, updated in as close to real time as possible. For the first version, we plan to include data about bills, votes, legislative and policy documents, committee schedules, updates from the House and Senate floor, and accompanying floor video.
Continue readingSunlight Hackathon at RubyConf
I'm happy to announce that Sunlight will be hosting an open government hackathon at RubyConf. The three day event will be held in New Orleans from November 11 to 13. This is the big show in the Ruby world, where the Ruby core team from Japan will make the trip across the Pacific. While the event initially sold in a matter of days when registration first opened, a second batch of tickets will be made available today. So head on over to the RubyConf registration page right now to get your seat.
The RubyConf organizers, Ruby Central Inc., have been gracious enough to provide us with a dedicated room at the conference venue. Previously, Sunlight has hosted successful hackathons at PyCon around the Open States Project. With the hackathon at RubyConf, we plan to have a diverse selection of projects for developers to work on. We'll have projects at the federal level and state level, like writing data importers for the National Data Catalog. In the past year within our community, there's been tremendous energy at the local level. We encourage those working on city-centric efforts to bring "shovel-ready" projects to the hackathon, and we'll support you throughout RubyConf. Just get in touch with me and we'll get your project on the board. We're also working with key stakeholders in New Orleans, and hope to have some projects ready that can directly help the city in its recovery efforts.
Continue readingHack for Humanity June 4-6 in DC
Hackathons are pretty much a dime a dozen these days. I just moved back to DC from the Bay Area, and I always say that what differentiates this area from Silicon Valley is the consistency with which you meet people who have a clear and specific purpose, mission, issue area or raison d'etre.
Random Hacks of Kindness (RHoK) is a joint effort between some of the biggest names in the tech community (NASA, Google, Microsoft, Yahoo!, and the World Bank to be precise). RHoK's mission is to, "mobilize a world-wide community of technologists to solve real-world problems through technology". On June 4-6, right here in DC, RHoK's first global hackathon will kick off with a reception at the State Department and continue with a weekend of programming apps and utilities related to disaster response.
If you're excited and want to get a head start, check out tomorrow's panel at the Web 2.0 expo, which will give some more background and context about the international initiative.
The hacker community that has emerged around disaster response perfectly captures that impression I described of DC: as a place for people with passion and purpose, and it's why RHoK is not Just Another Hackathon. So please join us-- sign up to Hack for Humanity, and show the rest of the world what the DC hacker community stands for!
Continue readingHow to Manage Large Volunteer Hackathons
Here at Sunlight, we've handled lots of hackathons for the developer community-- especially around Open Government. Some have been productive, some have not. By now, I think we've gotten it down to a particularly good set of principles and ideas to share. Below is a collection of those ideas that will help you run your event more smoothly, and hopefully get the most out of your event.
Remember: hackathons are not social engagements or consensus driven activities. They're about doing work. Habitat for Humanity, for instance, doesn't get bunches of people together to talk about how they should build a house at the beginning of the day. They identify skillsets and put people to work as quickly as possible, often times before the volunteer event starts, and have a plan for what roles people can play before they get there.
Your attendees will show up eager to work, and more than likely they've sacrificed some of their time so that they could feel useful. It is your job to make them leave there feeling useful. That means being able to put them directly to work. That means:
Continue readingHelp Build Neighborhoods by Building Neighborly
One result of the Great American Hackathon was a new project called Neighborly. Neighborly seeks to make it easy for you to find and create community out of your neighborhood.
The project is having a follow-on hackathon on January 9th. If you're up in Minnesota, or are interested in the project at all, check out Steven Clift's page for Neighborly and let him know. This is also a Knight News Challenge contestant which has made it into the second round. The winning group would be in great company. The Knight News Challenge has created great projects like EveryBlock, DocumentCloud and Spot.us
Continue readingGreat American Hackathon Wrap-up
On the second weekend of December, Sunlight Labs held the Great American Hackathon— a nation-wide get-together of developers interested in opening up government. I’m long overdue in my wrap-up, but the end result was a success. Events popped up across the country— about 20 in all. Average attendance, from the look of it, was about 10 developers per event. Here at Sunlight, we had about 30 people show up in all, and we managed to work on several projects. Here’s some of the highlights:
Continue readingThe Great American Hackathon Begins!
The Great American Hackathon has kicked-off in great stride. I'm personally amazed at how punctual folks here in Washington, DC are. So far, I can tell from the tweets that people on the East coast are waking up and getting to work. Here in DC, our friends at development seed are working on building maps, meanwhile here at Sunlight HQ, folks are working on all sorts of projects.
If you're interested in joining the fun, you can see a live stream of Sunlight and chat with us there., and also tune in to the MHVLUG U-Stream channel to see what's going on there. More hackathons are coming on line this morning. Follow me on twitter for frequent updates, or just search for the hashtag #gah09
Continue readingThe Great American Hackathon Starts Tomorrow!
Tomorrow morning Developers from Across the America will wake up ready to dedicate part of their weekend to making government data more available and accessible to the public. You Should Join Them. Here at Sunlight HQ, we'll be working on a bunch of different projects ranging from our own 50 State Project to the Voting Information Project. Out west, NASA employees are having an all-weekend hackathon at the Rainbow Mansion, freeing data from (dare I say it) SPACE!
Now is the time to sign up if you haven't already! This will be a really fun weekend. We'll also be online (we are now, actually so feel free to join us this afternoon if you'd like) on tinychat providing resources, data, and community to the people who need them. If you've already decided to join a hackathon in your area, that's great! When using twitter, flickr, et. al. remember to tag (or hashtag) your post #gah09.
If you haven't signed up, or there isn't an event happening in your area, not to worry you can still participate. Just join us in the chat or even better organize one today. And make sure to stay tuned to the blog throughout the day for new updates.
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