The federal government has an incredible trove of data on local government financial performance. This collection of 18,000 annual audits can tell researchers an enormous amount about local government financial conditions and about how these agencies spend federal grants.
Continue readingOpenGov Voices: Mapping city boundary change over time with open data
MapStory.org, a Sunlight Foundation OpenGov grantee, has successfully collected, processed and mapped nearly every municipal annexation to occur in the state of New York since 1625 and made the data available on StoryLayers in their site.
Continue readingOpenGov Voices: Visualizing the U.S. budget and other civic tools
Data is only useful when people who need it can use it to make decisions. Making data transparent means not just releasing it to the public, but giving the public tools to understand it.
Continue readingOpenGov Voices: Creating open map layers for the census
JusticeMap.org is helping people — even those who do not have any map making or geographical information systems experience — to create maps that combine open map layers with their own data.
Continue readingOpenGov Voices: The new frontier in Government transparency
OpportunitySpace is spotlighting transparency in public land use by aggregating and publishing actionable information about public property inventories, sale mechanisms, development plans and incentives.
Continue readingOpenGov Voices: PDF Liberation Hackathon – At Sunlight in DC, SF and Around the World – January 17-19, 2014
Disclaimer: The opinions expressed by the guest blogger and those providing comments are theirs alone and do not reflect the opinions of the Sunlight Foundation or any employee thereof. 
Sunlight Foundation is not responsible for the accuracy of any of the information within the guest blog.
Marc Joffe is the founder of Public Sector Credit Solutions (PSCS), which applies open data and analytics to rating government bonds. Before starting PSCS, Marc was a Senior Director at Moody’s Analytics. You can contact him at marc@publicsectorcredit.org. Marc is also one of the winners of Sunlight Foundation’s OpenGov Grants.
Extracting useful information from PDFs is a problem as old as … PDFs. Too often, we focus on extracting information from a specific set of documents instead of looking at the bigger picture. If you’ve ever struggled with this problem, join us for Sunlight’s PDF Liberation Hackathon, dedicated to improving open source tools for PDF extraction.
Instead of focusing on one set of documents, coders will come together to add features, extensions and plugins to existing PDF extraction frameworks, making them more flexible, useful and sustainable. Sunlight’s PDF Liberation Hackathon will tackle real-world PDF data extraction problems. In doing so, we will build upon existing open-source PDF extraction solutions such as Tabula and Ashima’s PDF Table Extractor. ( A full list of PDF extraction technologies relevant to the hackathon can be found on our resource page here.) In addition, hackers will have the option of using licensed PDF software libraries as long as the implementation cost of these libraries is less than $1,000. If you have an idea for a library you want to use, please mention it in your signup form and we will try to work out the licensing ahead of time so that things run smoothly.
Register now to attend the PDF Liberation Hackathon!
Continue readingOpenGov Voices: Open Government is About Raising People’s Opinions
Disclaimer: The opinions expressed by the guest blogger and those providing comments are theirs alone and do not reflect the opinions of the Sunlight Foundation or any employee thereof. Sunlight 
Foundation is not responsible for the accuracy of any of the information within the guest blog.
Lucas Dailey is a UX designer and Chief Innovation Officer at political social network MyMaryland.net. You can follow him on Twitter @lucasdailey.
The mechanism for citizen interaction with government doesn’t start and end at the ballot box. An essential goal of our fight for greater government openness and transparency is to give citizens’ opinions greater power. For government to be responsive it must have a fast, easy means to understand how constituents feel about any given issues. Ultimately, government itself is a relationship between the institutions that constitute a polity and its citizens.
MyMaryland.net wants to bridge the gap between voters and their representatives because we believe people’s voices matter. MyMaryland.net connects verified Maryland voters with their elected officials in democracy’s first 24/7 online Town Hall.
Participation: a two-sided problem
One of the keys to a vibrant representative democracy is an informed and engaged citizenry. Yet only 10% of Americans contact their elected officials between elections. We can do better by lowering the hurdles to participate and raising the political value of opinions.
Members of Congress get hundreds or thousands of emails every day. It takes a considerable amount of staff resources to separate constituents from non-constituents, and when they’re finally separated only a very small percentage of messages are from actual voters in their districts.
With MyMaryland.net we prescreen all users through the Maryland voter registration file then connect them with their actual elected officials. Since elected officials know all messages and votes in their MyMaryland.net Town Hall are from their registered voters then they don’t need to spend the time to verify them.
Voters can show their support or opposition to a post simply by voting it up or down instead of writing their own message, thus saving time for citizens and legislative staff. Legislative staff also save time by writing a single response to each post instead of multiple responses to numerous similar messages.
With MyMaryland.net voters and elected officials are able to convey more opinions in less time.
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