I think that sometimes when technologists make the case for open standards it can seem like a purely theoretical exercise. For most people the downsides to publishing a document as, say, an MS Word file aren't readily apparent. Every computer they've used has had a Windows license built into its price. They've never had a reason to learn how to manipulate text programmatically. Everyone else with whom they exchange files has Word, and the program is pretty well-designed for most office work use cases*. The dire warnings issued by developers just don't seem plausible.
So it's worth taking a second to note an example of these problems happening in a different arena. Here in DC our primary transit agency, WMATA, issues an RFID card called the SmarTrip which works with nearly all of the area's various transit systems. It's quite handy: you don't have to take it out of your wallet to use it, the balance is supposedly loss- and theft-proof, and it automates things like bus transfers.
Unfortunately, this morning brought news that the SmarTrip has to be replaced. Why? Well, the vendor that our transit planners bought it from has gone out of business is ceasing to support the card, and they're pulling SmarTrip into oblivion with them is ceasing to support SmarTrip, and no one else can take their place: the card incorporates proprietary technology, so it's impossible to find a new supplier. WMATA has a stockpile of cards that'll last about two years, but after that it'll have to start using a new solution.
Sunlight’s (Mostly) Web-based Photo Booth
Sunlight Labs recently held an open house to bring members of the technology and transparency communities together over videogames and beer. Our systems administrator, Tim Ball, volunteered to create a photo booth for the event. A few days before the event Tim destroyed his arm in a terrible, unfortunate accident, nearly dashing our hopes for a photo booth. We had to honor Tim's memory (he's still alive) so rather than using an off-the-shelf photo booth software package, I hacked it up from scratch using Python, CSS3, WebSockets, and an iMac.
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Celebrating 100 GitHub Projects
Last week we hit a milestone that we're pretty proud of. The Sunlight Labs github account now features more than 100 projects. We've been putting projects on the account for just under 2 years, which makes for a rate of about one new project a week.
We thought it'd be interesting to look at a breakdown of our projects on GitHub, to look at the work that has been done in the last two years.
Also, because we realize that there's no way we'd be where we are without help from this wide range of contributors who have submitted code, forked our projects, and submitted tickets we've decided to offer a small prize in exchange for your help.
Continue readingWhat’s Going on in the Labs
September was a very busy month for us in the labs. New product launches, an open house, new employees, conferences, a broken system administrator and the daily task of maintaining existing products. Here's a rundown of what we've been up to and what you can expect to see from us soon.
Continue readingTo Know the Name of a Thing is to Have Power Over It
A flowery title for a blog post, I'll admit, but I hope that at least the Le Guin fans out there will forgive me. The problem of knowing something's true name is in the news, most particularly in this story from Wired's Spencer Ackerman:
Through a "joint venture," the notorious private security firm Blackwater has won a piece of a five-year State Department contract worth up to $10 billion, Danger Room has learned.
Apparently, there is no misdeed so big that it can keep guns-for-hire from working for the government. And this is despite a campaign pledge from Secretary of State Hillary Clinton to ban the company from federal contracts.
Eight private security firms have won State's giant Worldwide Protective Services contract, the big Foggy Bottom partnership to keep embassies and their inhabitants safe. Two of those firms are longtime State contract holders DynCorp and Triple Canopy. The others are newcomers to the big security contract: EOD Technology, SOC, Aegis Defense Services, Global Strategies Group, Torres International Services and International Development Solutions LLC.
Don't see any of Blackwater's myriad business names on there? That's apparently by design. Blackwater and the State Department tried their best to obscure their renewed relationship. As Danger Room reported on Wednesday, Blackwater did not appear on the vendors' list for Worldwide Protective Services. And the State Department confirms that the company, renamed Xe Services, didn't actually submit its own independent bid. Instead, they used a blandly-named cut out, "International Development Solutions," to retain a toehold into State's lucrative security business. No one who looks at the official announcement of the contract award would have any idea that firm is connected to Blackwater.
This is a troubling story. But for those of us who work with government data, it's an all-too-familiar one. Navigating the link between an entity's name and its identity is very, very difficult. Sunlight Reporting Group wrote about a similar problem back in January: a blacklist of contractors called the Excluded Party List System has been failing to do its job, partly because of difficulties in positively identifying the companies entered into it. People and even companies can have similar names, or the names entered into the system can contain typos. It's not uncommon to wind up with a fuzzy sort of match, and then to have to use whatever additional data is on hand -- an address, or a date, whatever -- to add confidence to the guess.
Continue readingOn DjangoCon 2010 and conferences in general
Sunlight Labs is a huge fan of Django. We use it in a majority of the projects we produce here and have released the source of numerous applications. So a few weeks ago a bunch of us eagerly packed our bags and flew out to Portland, OR for DjangoCon 2010.
Continue readingOpen Source, Open Gov, Open House
Hopefully all of you know this already (you are subscribed to the Labs Google Group, right? And following us on Twitter? And on our general Sunlight mailing list and maybe watching our office windows from across the street in case we write something important on a whiteboard? Good.). But if not: we're having an open house! It's this Thursday, it's happening at 6pm, and it would be great if you could make it. We'll have some drinks, some videogames, and some in-progress projects to demo. You just need to bring your charming self.
What: Sunlight Labs Open House
When: Starts at 6 pm on Thursday, September 23rd, 2010
Where: 1818 N Street Suite 300 NW Washington DC
If you can manage an RSVP, we'd appreciate it (but if you can't, that's fine, too).
Hope to see you Thursday!
Continue readingSunlight Hackathon at RubyConf
I'm happy to announce that Sunlight will be hosting an open government hackathon at RubyConf. The three day event will be held in New Orleans from November 11 to 13. This is the big show in the Ruby world, where the Ruby core team from Japan will make the trip across the Pacific. While the event initially sold in a matter of days when registration first opened, a second batch of tickets will be made available today. So head on over to the RubyConf registration page right now to get your seat.
The RubyConf organizers, Ruby Central Inc., have been gracious enough to provide us with a dedicated room at the conference venue. Previously, Sunlight has hosted successful hackathons at PyCon around the Open States Project. With the hackathon at RubyConf, we plan to have a diverse selection of projects for developers to work on. We'll have projects at the federal level and state level, like writing data importers for the National Data Catalog. In the past year within our community, there's been tremendous energy at the local level. We encourage those working on city-centric efforts to bring "shovel-ready" projects to the hackathon, and we'll support you throughout RubyConf. Just get in touch with me and we'll get your project on the board. We're also working with key stakeholders in New Orleans, and hope to have some projects ready that can directly help the city in its recovery efforts.
Continue readingCatalog of Government Publications Bulk Data
At Sunlight, we advocate for complete access to government data. That's why we built a crawler for the Catalog of Government Publications (CGP) to extract the data and share the resulting CGP bulk data publicly.
Continue readingCarrots and Sticks
The response to Clearspending has been overwhelmingly positive. People seem to care about government spending data quality to an extent I never would have anticipated. It's encouraging, and it makes me think we have a real shot at getting these problems fixed.
But there are some people with a different perspective. One of them is Gunnar Hellekson, who wrote a thoughtful blog post about why he disagrees with our approach. Naturally I don't plan to write responses to everyone who disagrees with us. But we really like and respect Gunnar, and he raised some important points in his post. To wit:
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