We've been really pleased with the enthusiastic response that OpenGov has received since its launch. Today's brought one more bit of good news: the site's been named a finalist in the Accelerator competition of this year's SXSWi. You can find the full details over at the OG blog. Congratulations to David, Carl and the rest of the PPF team!
And while I've got you thinking about state legislative data, check out what Gabriel Florit's done to visualize data from Open States. It's very neat stuff, and a great early example of the kinds of things that we think the project will make possible.
Continue readingStream Congress: A real-time data stream for Congress
Last month, we announced a preview of Stream Congress, and today we're making it available for general consumption. Stream Congress gives you a quick look into what exactly your members of Congress are up to. Resembling a lifestream (but for Congress), the app takes in data points from various sources and combines them into a clean, real-time interface.
Continue readingLabs Lunch Link Dump
Once a week here at Sunlight Labs we sit down for lunch to talk about new things we've learned, fun stuff we're playing with and anything else that we find interesting. It's always a highlight of the week and we want to share with you what we're discussing.
Continue readingSunlight Labs Virtual Office Hours: Jan 28 @ 3pm
All of us here are always interested in ways that we can better interact with all of you, whether it is contributing to our projects, posting on the Sunlight Labs Google Group, or just contacting us directly we're always impressed with the dedication and creativity of our community.
In addition to these better known channels we also have an IRC channel, but it is usually pretty quiet, so we'd like to try something new as a way to give more of you direct access to our team.
Friday, January 28th at 3pm Eastern we're going to be hosting office hours in #sunlightlabs on irc.freenode.net. This will be your chance to join us to talk about what we're working on, show off what you're working on, ask us questions, or just hang out and chat.
Continue readingdjango-mediasync 2.0: Havana Nights
It's been almost a year since the last release of mediasync, but the new features we've worked on are worth the wait! If you use mediasync, please indicate that you do so on our Django Packages profile.
Source on GitHub: https://github.com/sunlightlabs/django-mediasync
Package on PyPI: http://pypi.python.org/pypi/django-mediasync/
Install with pip or easy_install:
pip install django-mediasync
easy_install django-mediasync
What is this media syncing you speak of?
For those of you new to the project, mediasync is a Django app that manages static media in both development and production. Imagine a project where you have to make updates to existing media, but all references are hardcoded to some absolute path in production. Do you update the production media and risk breaking the site or do you temporarily point to local media and hope you don't forget to revert the change?
With mediasync you don't need to worry about any of that. Paths to media are automatically generated: local in debug, remote in production, and manually overridden when needed. Modify your media in your local development environment then use mediasync to push the change to the remote production server. Reduce stress and add years to your life!
Continue readingWhy Aren’t There More Open Data Startups?
It's a question I'm seeing asked more and more: by press, by Gov 2.0 advocates, and by the online public. Those of us excited by the possibilities of open data have promised great things. So why is BrightScope the only government data startup that anyone seems to talk about?
I think it's important that those of us who value open data be ready with an answer to this question. But part of that answer needs to address the misperceptions built into the query itself.
There Are Lots of Open Data Businesses
BrightScope is a wonderful example of a business that sells services built in part on publicly available data. They've gotten a lot of attention because they started up after the Open Government Directive, after data.gov -- after Gov 2.0 in general -- and can therefore be pointed to as a validation of that movement.But if we want to validate the idea of public sector information (PSI) being useful foundations for businesses *in general*, we can expand our scope considerably. And if we do, it's easy to find companies that are built on government data: there are databases of legal decisions, databases of patent information, medicare data, resellers of weather data, business intelligence services that rely in part on SEC data, GIS products derived from Census data, and many others.
Some of these should probably be free, open, and much less profitable than they currently are*. But all of them are examples of how genuinely possible it is to make money off of government data. It's not all that surprising that many of the most profitable uses of PSI emerged before anyone started talking about open data's business potential. That's just the magic of capitalism! This stuff was useful, and so people found it and commercialized it. The profit motive meant that nobody had to wait around for people like me to start talking about open formats and APIs. There are no doubt still efficiencies to be gained in improving and opening these systems, but let's not be shocked if a lot of the low-hanging commercial fruit turns out to have already been picked.
Still, surely there are more opportunities out there. A lot of new government data is being opened up. Some of it must be valuable... right?
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OpenGovernment.org is Live!
I'm proud to announce that OpenGovernment.org is now live with our first five states! If you're a regular reader of this blog, you've already heard a lot about the Open States project, our effort to collect states' legislative data in much the same way that we do at the federal level. We hope that that data will be used in a lot of different ways, but we think that OpenGov will be one of the most important. Our friends at the Participatory Politics Foundation -- the same people behind OpenCongress -- deserve a huge hand for making OpenGov what it is.
This is just the beginning, of course. We're excited about working with PPF to build out both Open States and OpenGov to include more states, more tools and more useful information. But today's launch is an important milestone.
But I'll keep this short -- I'd rather you spent your time on the site instead of reading my thoughts about it. If you'd like to hear more about our vision for the project, have a look at Ellen's announcement post. Otherwise, head on over to OpenGovernment.org and have a look at what we hope is the future of state-level legislative transparency.
Continue readingWe Have a Winner: Contributor Raffle Update
Last October we announced that to celebrate our 100th project on GitHub we'd be giving away a prize to one lucky contributor.
Earlier this week we drew the names from all of those who were eligible and entered and Brandon Lewis was drawn as the winner.
Continue reading112th Congress live in Congress API
Now that they've been sworn in, all members of the 112th Congress are now available in our Congress API.
All members are now added along with their ids on other sites (Project Vote Smart/FEC/bioguide/etc.) but we're still working on getting some of the contact information as house.gov and senate.gov have just updated. We'll be working on these today and tomorrow and expect that all contact information will be available today and social media accounts will be up to date within a week.
Continue readingLooking Back on 2010
It's been a busy year in the Labs. In a few days we'll filter back into the office, rested, recharged and ready to tackle 2011. But before then, let's take a second to recall everything that happened in 2010.
I should start with the most important stuff: the people. We added a bunch of new teammates this year. Andrew, Chris, Alison, Caitlin and Aaron have all proven to be great additions to Sunlight; we're lucky to have them. We also had some folks move around within the Labs. Ali officially became Sunlight's Creative Director; Ethan took over the Data Commons Project; and Kevin grabbed the helm of Subsidyscope. And I stepped into Clay's shoes partway through the year when he struck off in search of a new adventure.
We put all that new talent to good use: in 2010 we built a ton of stuff. Here are some -- but by no means all -- of the the things we made this year:
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