With TransparencyCamp kicking off this weekend, I want to issue a challenge to the entire open government and transparency community to help solve three big, easy problems. Starting this weekend, I'd like us to plan how we're going to solve these problems, and to have them solved them all by July 4th, 2010. We'll call it "Data Independence Day."
These ideas need full participation from as many people as possible and as many ideas as possible to get the best result. As such-- in conjunction with Phil Ashlock (who is awesome) over at TOPP Labs (who are awesome) we'll be working on these not only at TransparencyCamp here in Washington, DC but also at OpenGov West (which is awesome)
Here are the three big problems I want us to solve together:
Continue readingAnnouncing Our Google Summer of Code 2010 Participation
Yesterday Google announced the accepted organizations for the 2010 Google Summer of Code and Sunlight is honored to be one of the organizations that will be participating this year. This is our second year participating and we're looking forward to this year's batch of students.
If you are interested in applying check out our project ideas page and read on for details.
Continue readingOur next contest: Design for America
Our next contest, and first of two contests of 2010 is "Design for America". As we talked about in January, opening government involves more than just developers: we need the art and design community to take data from our government and tell stories about it.
Part contest, part festival, the Design for America contest's intent is to inspire the design community to tell great stories about how our government works, what our government does, and what it could do. It's a contest as much about possibility as transparency, and with categories ranging from infographics to web design, there's plenty for all to compete in. Each category has a $5,000 prize associated with it now, and as we gain sponsors for each category, we'll be increasing the prizes associated as sponsorship allows.
Read more about it after the jump
Continue readingIntroducing POIA
Today Representative Steve Israel introduced the Public Online Information Act calling for government to:
-
Create an expert committee for all three branches of government to steer government towards making datasets publicly available in meaningful ways.
-
Direct the executive branch to consider guidelines issued by that committee and for the CIOs of various agencies to do the same thing, and
-
Place online all publicly available government documents and data held by the executive branch. This includes everything they've got, with a few potential exceptions: classified information, personnel rules, trade secrets, "priviliged inter/intra agency memos", information affecting an individuals privacy, law enforcement records, records of financial institutions, and most importantly, geographical information concerning wells. Those are the same exceptions as in FOIA.
Quantifying Data Quality
You've already heard me complain about data quality -- how it's a bigger problem than most people realize, and a harder problem than many people hope. But let's not leave it there! Perfect datasets mostly exist in textbooks and computer simulations. We need to figure out what we can do with what we have. In this and other posts, I hope to give the developers in our community some idea of how they can deal with less-than-perfect data.
The first step is to figure out how bad things actually are. To do that, we'll use some simple statistics -- those of you with a strong stat background can skip to the next entry in your RSS reader (or better yet, correct my mistakes in comments).
Lobbyists and White House Visitors
Recently and continuously, the White House has been releasing the "White House Visitor Logs," showing America who is coming in to meet with the President and his staff. At the same time, the Center for Responsive Politics releases cleaned up data on lobbyist filings. We thought it'd be interesting to find the intersect between the names in both sets of data.
After the jump, you'll find our results along relevant information from both sets of data. Now-- this is important: just because the names match doesn't mean they're the same person. Because the White House doesn't release any other form of identity information besides the name, we're unable to tell whether or not the name in one dataset actually refers to the same person in the other. John Adams in one dataset may be a different John Adams in another.
Continue readingEvery Non-Profit is an Open Government Non-Profit
Why your non-profit stands to benefit from Open Data
Often times at Sunlight the non-profit community looks at us strangely. Here in Washington, DC we've probably made more investments in technology than any other non-profit or advocacy organization I've run across. Certainly our mission is focused around the use of technology, so that makes a lot of sense-- we're focused on getting data out of government, doing interesting things with it, and letting you see what happens in Washington better. That means technology investment.
But one question I struggle with is: why doesn't every non-profit advocate for open data from the Government? Don't ALL of them stand to benefit?
Continue readingWhat if we Google Buzzed Government?
Following up on my hypothetical post on what would happen if Government had done the same thing that Google did with Google Buzz, I'd like to imagine something different: what if something like Google Buzz happened to government? What if, out of nowhere, the Executive Branch of government started exposing the most frequent contacts of each Senate Confirmed appointee based on their email inboxes? What would happen if we could, for instance, pull up Rahm Emmanuel's "Buzz" profile and see who he followed and who was following him, based not on his preferences, but based on the frequency of email contacts alone?
Continue readingMore About the Door
But the electronics are just one part of the system. As I mentioned at the end of that last post, my colleagues did an impressive job of springing into action and building out the systems necessary to turn an SSH-accessible script into a useful interface. Here's how they did it. Continue reading
ClearMaps: A Mapping Framework for Data Visualization
Despite the recent explosion of web based cartography tools, making effective maps for data visualization remains a challenge. While tools like Google Maps are great for helping navigate the world they fail terribly at data presentation tasks. Many features like roads and cities only get in the way of telling compelling stories with data. In fact, even the distance between places can be a distraction – who cares how far away Alaska is when the goal is to make a simple comparison between US states?
To overcome some of the limitations with existing mapping tools, Sunlight Lab is releasing ClearMaps, an ActionScript framework for interactive cartographic visualization. In addition to giving designers and developers total control over presentation the project aims to address some of the common technical challenges faced when building interactive, data driven maps for the web. ClearMaps is designed as a lightweight, flexible set of tools for building complex data visualizations. It is a framework not a plug-and-play component (though it could be a starting point for those wishing to make reusable tools).
Continue reading
59063
