Summer vacation is over and it's back to school. Read on to see what we've been up to over the past month, including irradiating babies with thousands of IR beams!
Continue readingTag Archive: Technology
Open Goverment Roku Apps!
The Roku box is a nice little gadget that streams audio and video over wifi to your TV. It was the very first device that streamed Netflix Instant Watch and to boot, it runs linux. I have one of the original Roku boxes and ever since they released an SDK, I'd been meaning to play around with it. I finally got the chance, and in some spare time at Sunlight I created two streaming video apps for White House and Congressional video and one streaming audio app for the Supreme Court (SCOTUS doesn't allow cameras). All three apps can be installed on your Roku via the channel store or the links on this page.
The White House app is the most powerful of the three apps, thanks to that institution doing the best job of exposing its data. WhiteHouse.gov/live makes all their live and archived video accessible via categorized RSS feeds. Since the Roku box has a native XML parser, it was easy to pull the video in and make it browsable by category. The quality of the videos is great and their video hosting is usually reliable, making for a nice viewing experience.
The Congress app is a great start, but has a way to go before it's on par with the White House app. All of the video in the Congress Roku app is streamed from HouseLive.gov, a service through which the Clerk of the House provides live and archived video of the House floor. Since their live session is streamed using Microsoft Silverlight, the linux-based Roku can't play it. But they do offer RSS feeds of archived video. We parse the HouseLive.gov page and these RSS feeds for video links and add them to our Real Time Congress API. So if you want to play around with these videos, just hit up the videos endpoint of our RTC API. Unfortunately, only one other committee, the Rules Committee, streams video using the same technology. We're hoping more committees come online and we can add these to the Roku app as well. The Senate doesn't have anything comparable to HouseLive.gov, so the app doesn't have any video from that chamber at this time. Most of their committees have some kind of flash player embedded in their site. You may have guessed it, but the Roku doesn't play nice with Flash either (or any other proprietary format).
Last is the Supreme Court Roku app. Since there are no cameras, we're left with only audio for this one. SCOTUS junkies can browse arguments and opinions heard before the court by year. The folks at Oyez.org have done a great job of cleaning up the raw audio and offering it in well organized RSS feeds. However, the audio interfaces exposed by the Roku box leave something to be desired, especially when compared to their video streaming interfaces.
Overall, working with the Roku apps was a little idiosyncratic, but development was quick enough. Their engineers are pretty responsive on the developer forum, which makes up for gaps in the technical documentation. Caitlin did an excellent job on the design for all three, but had to go through a lot of trial and error because the design guidelines are pretty lacking.
All three apps are open sourced on our github account and are available, free of charge, in the Roku Channel store, or by clicking the download links on this page.
Hat tips to Caitlin for her awesome design and Eric for helping out on Real Time Congress API integration!
Continue readingDevelopers and federal agencies: Can we talk?
I recently posted about the good work the EPA is doing to get the developer community involved in their challege, Apps for the Environment. As part of their effort, the agency has been hosting a series of webinars where EPA experts discuss the data and tools that are being provided for the challenge.
This Thursday at 4pm I will be appearing on one of the webinars discussing the role of government challenges and their potential to open up agency data and spur innovation. I'll focus on what agencies can do to provide developers with the information they need and ensure that the applications that are produced are worthwhile and self-sustaining. Joining me will be:
- Alex Howard of O'Reilly Media, moderator
- Michaela Hackner of Forum One
Registration for the webinar is still open.
Continue readingData Visualization Fellowship
We've got a new job listing up, and I hope you'll have a look. If you do, you'll see that we're doing something new. This position came about because we decided that we wanted to create more and better data visualizations -- they're interesting, people like them, and they're a great opportunity to experiment with new technologies.
But as we started thinking through how to staff this position, we realized we didn't really want someone who was an expert in d3, or processing.js, or any other presentation technology. Don't get me wrong: finding someone with those skills for this position would be great. But we already have a bunch of talented front-end developers and designers. I think we can present answers in beautiful and compelling ways; what I could really use are better questions.
So, like I said, we're looking for something a little different. The listing says "quantitative social scientist," but you could easily substitute the "data scientist" buzzword that the tech industry seems to be embracing. Whatever you call it, what we're looking for boils down to this: we need someone with the ability to understand the questions that can reasonably be asked of our data; someone who knows the questions that people have asked of the data in the past; and who is be able to find some decent answers of her own. At Sunlight, those questions are likely to be about the U.S. government and the entities that try to influence it. Once you've got an interesting answer, we'll throw all the Javascript and CSS at it that you could ever want.
So please have a look, and if you know folks who you think would be a good fit, pass the link along to them. And if you yourself are thinking about applying, please don't be scared off by the specific requirements -- they describe what we think an ideal candidate would be, but we know that we're likely to find some surprises. This fellowship is a bit of an experiment for us, but I'm excited about the possibilities it represents.
Continue readingExamining the USASpending Agency Submissions
We’ve often looked at the macro perspective with this data, but what if we followed the transactions of a single program? Would we be able to understand and follow the data easily and provide citizen oversight, as was the intent of the legislation behind USASpending.gov?
Continue readingLabs Update: August 2011
Barely survived the hottest July ever in DC? That was nothing compared to this sweltering wave of updates from the Labs. While you read, cool yourself off with the song that topped the Billboard Top 100 chart this day in 1991...
Continue readingEPA’s Apps for the Environment Challenge
App contests are a dime a dozen these days. Right now there are 111 listed on challenge.gov. A quick review of the challenges showed that few agencies do anything to reach out to developer communities once the contest is posted. The EPA, however, has done a fantastic job with their Apps for the Environment contest by actively working with participants. Ethan McMahon, dedicated public servant and EPA employee, came to the last django-district meetup to try and get developers involved in the contest.
The EPA has compiled a great list of data sets and web services for developers to use. If you've looked these over and still don't have an idea, there is a curated list of potential app ideas to get you going. Still without an idea? The public has been submitting their own suggestions on the EPA's data blog.
One of the biggest issues with app contests like this has less to do with the quality of submitted applications and more with the proper usage of the data; many of the datasets that the government produces are quite complex. People have spent their entire careers becoming experts in their field, so how can a developer understand the data in the few months they have to create an app? EPA has really excelled in this area by hosting weekly webinars (I hate that word, it's netposium from here on out) to help developers understand the data sets they are working with. You can suggest a netposium or ask specific questions about the data by emailing greenapps@epa.gov. I'd love to see the netposiums continue after the contest ends so that anyone working with EPA data will have a rich resource to which they can refer.
Submissions are due by September 16, so get coding!
Continue readingInfluence Explorer Text API: Adding Influence Data to Text
Last month I wrote about Inbox Influence, a plugin for Gmail that highlights the political influence of people, companies and politicians mentioned in your emails. Gmail is just one example of a context where it makes sense to attach political influence data to text. (Another is news stories--see Poligraft.) But what about Yahoo Mail and Hotmail? What about Outlook and Thunderbird? What about RSS readers, PDF viewers and word processors? What about integrating political influence data into server-side systems such as blog engines and content management systems? Sunlight Labs can't do it all, which is why creating tools and APIs for developers is one of our primary missions. Indeed, nearly all of our products--including Inbox Influence--are powered by public APIs.
Continue readingIt’s Not Okay for Congressional Websites to Crash
Clearly, Washington hasn't been covering itself in glory lately. The debt ceiling standoff in particular seems to have catalyzed an outpouring of frustration over what many think has been an especially feckless congress.
Naturally, opinions differ about where blame should lie. But I hope we can all agree about this much: the fact that many congressional websites went offline last night is deeply shameful.
There was a reason for it, of course. The President addressed the nation and urged citizens to contact their representatives. Something like that is going to produce a lot of web traffic.
But the vendors who manage those systems should have been prepared for it. Congressional websites are not particularly complex. Caching technology, aggressively and properly applied, should have been able to avoid most of this problem. To the extent that it couldn't, there still isn't much of an excuse. We're now several years into the cloud computing revolution. Competent vendors should be ready for spikes in demand, and able to spin up additional resources as necessary.
The congressional phone system also shouldn't escape blame. I was at a hackathon in SF recently where one of the teams demoed a Twilio-based app that dialed their local representative's office -- in this case it was Nancy Pelosi. It was the weekend, and they were so confident that her voicemail inbox would be full and unable to accept new messages that they'd even written a little gag about it into their pitch. It was a funny joke, but it's not particularly amusing that this inability to communicate can be counted on to happen.
This stuff is important. Too often, people in Washington look at the huge volume of emails, letters and phone calls that arrive on the hill and shrug. There are a ton of messages, so handling them necessarily becomes a bit like a factory job. And the many correspondents can be counted on to have differing opinions, so no single call or missive can ever be given very much weight. As a result, it's tempting to view dealing with constituent communications as a pointless chore -- a pressure valve by which citizens can blow off steam, but not much else.
That view is tempting, but deeply wrong. These channels are the cheapest, fastest and most egalitarian way for citizens to exercise their constitutional right to petition their government. Making sure these channels stay up and running is a serious responsibility -- one that the Capitol Hill vendor community ought to take more seriously.
Continue readingHelp Develop Open Source Corporate Data Apps!
Last week, XBRL.us launched the XBRL Challenge. The contest, which is offering a grand prize of $20,000, is soliciting open source analytical applications that make use of corporate XBRL data. XBRL is short for eXtensible Business Reporting Language, and starting this past June, all publicly traded companies are required to file their financial statements electronically to the SEC using it.
Continue reading
