This month, a few members of Sunlight Labs continued our tradition of attending the always-exciting annual conference of North American Python developers: PyCon 2015. Here are the biggest highlights and takeaways from our trip.
Continue readingJoin Sunlight at PyCon 2015
Catch Sunlight at PyCon 2015 in Montreal — and help us build a new army of scrapers to collect data about political influence at all levels of government.
Continue readingSunlight at PyCon 2014
Labs members go to Canada, eat poutine and Paultag dazzles with an A+ talk. It's Sunlight's recap of PyCon 2014!
Continue readingSunlight at PyCon 2013
A few Sunlighters took off for the west coast last week to attend PyCon, the largest annual gathering for the... View Article
Continue readingOpen States: 50!
Three years ago at PyCon 2009, we had the first PyCon Open Government Hackathon. Our big project was Open States (then the 50 State Project). The goal was to begin scraping state legislatures' websites in the hope of providing a common format for bill metadata across all 50 states.
Today, as we kick off the 4th Annual Open Government Hackathon at PyCon we're extraordinarily happy to announce one of the most significant milestones in the history of Open States: as of today, all 50 states (as well as DC and Puerto Rico) are now supported via our API and bulk downloads. This makes Open States the first and only completely open, completely free resource for accessing legislative information in a uniform format across all 50 states.
This is a proud day for all of us here and for everyone who has contributed to the project. Over the past three years Open States has grown to be much more than we'd envisioned and a great deal of that is due to great suggestions, contributions, and uses by the entire Open States Community. It is no coincidence that Open States has become Sunlight's most contributed-to open source project; we needed the community to make this project happen, and over 40 of you have answered the call.
Continue readingSunlight at Southby (and PyCon!)
In a few short hours I and much of the rest of the internet will be descending on Austin, TX for SXSW Interactive. If you're among the folks who'll be attending, I hope you'll consider coming by one or more of the panels and events we'll be doing:
- Drew will be talking about corporate (and other) identifiers
- I'll be on a panel with Sarah Cohen and Vivek Kundra, where we'll discuss the successes and shortfalls of Gov 2.0
- And Ellen will be helping to judge SXSW Accelerator
But even if you can't make it to the panels, we hope you'll say hello -- just drop either Drew or me an email (tlee/dvogel (at) sunlightfoundation.com) or tweet at the @sunlightlabs account.
For those of you headed to California instead of Texas, note than an even bigger contingent of labs staffers is currently winging its way toward PyCon. They'll be leading our now-traditional open government code sprint, looking for folks who want to contribute to Open States and/or a new, super-secret (well, not really) community project.
Merry conference-going to all -- we're looking forward to seeing some old friends, and to making some new ones.
Continue readingSunlight @ PyCon 2011
Two years ago we held an Open Government Sprint at PyCon 2009. We had never hosted an event like that before, and had no idea what to expect. To our amazement we ended up with one of the largest groups of any of the sprint projects, completely filling our room for the first few days. Approximately 30 people attended and kicked off what has now become the Open State Project.
Next week, we'll be heading to PyCon and hosting an Open Government Hackathon for the third year in a row. The primary focus will again be the Open State Project but our space is open to everyone interested in government data. If you have a project you'd like to hack on let us know and I'll be sure to mention your project when I plug the sprint. If you aren't attending PyCon but happen to be near Atlanta you're welcome to join too, the Hackathon is free and open to the public (March 14th-16th @ the Hyatt Regency in downtown Atlanta).
Additionally, I'm going to be presenting a poster on the technical aspects of the Open State Project on Sunday. I'll be around to talk about the project itself but also web scraping and opening government data in general, so if you're at PyCon stop by during the poster session Sunday morning and say hi.
Continue readingThank you, PyCon
Today was an amazing day for Sunlight Labs. Check this out:
That's our code sprint in PyCon today. Developers have, according to the wiki, checked out over 20 states to work on, and it looks like amazing, serious progress is being made there.
So to the Pycon and greater Python community-- thank you for all that you do. You are amazing.
See more of Josh's photos here
Continue readingOpen Government Hackathon: Chicago, March 29-31
Sunlight Labs is proud to be hosting the first ever Open Government Hackathon, March 29-31 in Chicago as part of PyCon.
This will be a 48 hour sprint where developers that are interested in contributing to an open source project that will free or otherwise enhance government data can gather to brainstorm and hack on various projects related to government data.
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