Last week at RailsConf, Sunlight held an Open Government Hackathon at the event's official unconference, BohConf. We worked on a few projects:
- The Ruby gem for the Sunlight Congress API was updated. We added support for new fields on the Legislator resource and removed support for deprecated features. The developers behind search.usa.gov (a Rails app!) were there, and led development on a Ruby gem that wraps the site's product recalls API. Dan Melton from Code for America led development on a Ruby gem that wraps the Small Business Administration's API.
Speaking of Dan, he gave a keynote at RailsConf the next day:
Thanks to all who made it out and contributed!
Continue readingOpen Government Hackathon at RailsConf
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 readingPost RailsConf
Open government got a great spotlight at RailsConf this year, in Las Vegas. Dan Lathrop organized a panel on Government 2.0 there, and was kind enough to ask me to speak about Sunlight, and Wynn Netherland about his great work on TweetCongress. We had good turnout, and got plenty of questions. We even had a guy spontaneously write an IP address of an anonymous FTP server on a piece of paper, approach the podium to hand it to me, and promise us that there was raw legislative data on the other end.
Continue readingOpen Government at RailsConf
This year's RailsConf is going to have a real Open Government presence. If you're attending RailsConf in Vegas this year, there are a couple of events on Tuesday that should interest you.
Continue reading
59063
