Nigeria's open-source community has high hopes, but low trust in government and little internet access. That didn't stop Reboot, which created a dataset on school construction — and then used the data to open a valuable civic dialogue.
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 readingLessons from DotGov Design Conference: How to merge government and good design
Last Friday, the Sunlight design team played hooky and attended the DotGov Design Conference, leaving with new ideas that sparked great dialogue and new challenges.
Continue readingRedesign is awful, but USASpending still proves power of the public
The latest iteration of USASpending.gov, which combines all the virtues of clunky design with the frustrations of diminished functionality, is a reminder for this writer of the early days of the Sunlight Foundation.
Continue readingMaking SublimeLinter work with rbenv and rubocop
Linting your code reveals syntactical errors and deviations from accepted stylistic conventions, and — as someone that switches between languages a lot — I heartily recommend it.
Continue readingDowngrading the district: Why we’re lowering D.C.’s legislative data score
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: Who tries to influence policies in Slovenia — and who knows about it?
TI Slovenia is mapping out a comprehensive public record of lobbyists’ influence, providing a way to better analyze corruption risks embedded in the legislative process.
Continue readingConverting HTML to PDF (uh oh): How we built #FOIApoetry
We just launched a project to encourage engagement around Sunshine Week and FOIA reform called #FOIApoetry. It was a fun, challenging experience, so we decided to write about how the tool came to be.
Continue readingIs that photo vintage, senator? Scattered data paint outdated picture of some in Congress
My gripes about our disjointed image repository set might seem trivial, but they point to a larger truth: If a government data source isn't updated appropriately, its value is principally historical.
Continue readingOpenGov Voices: The gaps in the holes – Oil and gas drilling data inadequacies
The scope and pace of modern oil and gas extraction has exploded in recent years with the advent of hydraulic fracturing and related exploration technologies. Data quality and management, unfortunately, have not kept up.
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