The Design for America contest led to the most compelling, interesting visualizations of any of our contests. With about 72 entries, the design community stepped up and showed amazing ways for us to view government and imagine new ways for government to serve citizens.
Read about all the winners after the jump.
Continue readingHack for Humanity June 4-6 in DC
Hackathons are pretty much a dime a dozen these days. I just moved back to DC from the Bay Area, and I always say that what differentiates this area from Silicon Valley is the consistency with which you meet people who have a clear and specific purpose, mission, issue area or raison d'etre.
Random Hacks of Kindness (RHoK) is a joint effort between some of the biggest names in the tech community (NASA, Google, Microsoft, Yahoo!, and the World Bank to be precise). RHoK's mission is to, "mobilize a world-wide community of technologists to solve real-world problems through technology". On June 4-6, right here in DC, RHoK's first global hackathon will kick off with a reception at the State Department and continue with a weekend of programming apps and utilities related to disaster response.
If you're excited and want to get a head start, check out tomorrow's panel at the Web 2.0 expo, which will give some more background and context about the international initiative.
The hacker community that has emerged around disaster response perfectly captures that impression I described of DC: as a place for people with passion and purpose, and it's why RHoK is not Just Another Hackathon. So please join us-- sign up to Hack for Humanity, and show the rest of the world what the DC hacker community stands for!
Continue readingChecking Out the New USASpending.gov
USASpending.gov got a face-lift on Wednesday evening, and it brought with it a raft of new features. Some of these are great; others are either not very useful, or an actual step backward. Let's run through them -- not only to highlight the features and shortcomings, but to examine what they can tell us about how government should be opening its data.
Grassroots Fundraising for Open Source Software
By now, you've heard of Diaspora, the Kickstarter-funded effort to build an open, privacy-minded alternative to Facebook. In recent weeks, helped by a widely-circulated New York Times article, the project has raised over $180,000 from 5,000 backers. Considering that the project, while well-thought out by four undergrads at NYU, has not produced a single line of code, these figures are surprising to say the least. But hoping for the best, assuming that this project does deliver something tangible and useful at the end of the summer, it would inform a workable funding model for open source software projects.
Continue readingPublic Data in your Email
I've been playing around a bit with Rapportive lately. It's a web service that lets you see information about the sender of an email based on publicly available social media profiles. It works on top of Gmail. If you're using Rapportive and see an email from me, it'll show you a picture of me alongside my work history from LinkedIn, my recent twitter activity, and a picture of me.
People put a lot of information about themselves online through the use of social media, but they also pop up in databases the government provides, too. So when we heard Rapportive was offering the ability for developers to create third party raplets we decided to throw something together.
Continue readingThe Drumbone API
On our new API homepage, we recently added the Drumbone API. It's a light, flexible, JSON-only API over Congressional legislator, bill, and vote data, and we currently use it in two of our products. I wanted to take a minute and explain why we built this, especially in the face of the existing suite of community sources for this data.
Continue readingFifty State Project: Redux
The Fifty State Project is now over a year old and has evolved from a Sunlight Labs side project to a funded endeavor. With this renewed focus on the project we're taking a look at some of the problems we've faced to see how we (and the community) can better tackle them.
Continue readingNational Data Catalog API
The National Data Catalog went live last week. Now we would like to share a little bit about our API and how it fits into our platform.
The National Data Catalog (NDC) is an open source catalog for government data sets and APIs. Our goal is to have it encompass all data released by or about governments in the United States. This includes federal, state, and local jurisdictions. The NDC will harness the community of users interested in open government data.
Web developers can take a look at our API documentation.
Continue readingExplore the House’s Expenditures
We've updated our House disbursement data to include a "bioguide ID" for each row pertaining to a legislator's office. For more information on why we did that, and how you can use it, read on.
Some of you may know that the House began posting its statements of disbursements online in November of last year. You can find them at disbursements.house.gov in PDF form. We at Sunlight parsed these PDFs and published the data ourselves in a structured format, for easy searchability.
It still hasn't been easy to link this dataset up to others.
Continue readingSummer of Code 2010 Participants
Google has announced the participants for this year's Google Summer of Code, and we're proud to have four excellent students out of a great overall batch of applications.
We'll be posting updates here over the course of the summer on how the projects progress. Even though our students don't wrap up their classes for another few weeks and so the real work won't begin until May we figured we'd go ahead and introduce our four new students and their projects to the community.
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