While we commend D.C. on the fact that it's made an effort to release bulk legislative data, there are some issues that force us to downgrade the district's entry in our Open Legislative Data Report Card.
Continue readingOpenGov Voices: Opening up government reports through teamwork and open data
Recently, a project started to gather the work of every inspector general (IG) in the U.S. government by using web scrapers. This effort has now hit a major milestone, gathering the reports of every U.S. federal IG that publishes them: 65 inspectors general with over 18,000 reports.
Continue readingI learned basic JSON in the morning and made a silly Twitter bot with Sunlight’s API in the afternoon
It doesn't take a full-time software developer to build tools on Sunlight's data.
Continue readingMaking JSON as simple as a spreadsheet
Recently, I gave a workshop at Open Data Day whose goal was to demystify JSON. I searched, but couldn't find any tools to do this that worked inside the browser. The only solution was to make a new one!
Continue readingSunlight from the Command Line
Are you as big of a fan of Paul Tagliamonte as I am? If so, then you are well aware of python-sunlight, his awesome, comprehensive Python API client for Sunlight's APIs. The latest release includes a command line interface, or CLI, so you can interact with the Sunlight APIs directly from the shell. Cool, right?
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