Have 15 to 20 minutes to help us redesign the FCC's website? There are just a few days left to participate in our card sorting exercise. If you have the time today or tomorrow, visit http://websort.net/s/B74CAB/ to get started. I'll be gathering the results Friday morning and will then start on the design.
Thanks to all who have participated so far!
Get Started here: http://websort.net/s/B74CAB/
Continue readingEarthquake apps from Apps for America
The USGS represented a lot of data on Data.gov in the early days of the contest, supplying developers with data about earthquakes and other geological information. As a result, we saw quite a few applications about earthquakes and other natural disasters led by visualization award winner QuakeSpotter. But that wasn't the only one.
SpendTrend.us shows an uptick in actual pork spending
That's what the Apps for America 2 honorable mention SpendTrend.us has to say at least. I like this entry a lot because it takes a complicated system like USASpending.gov and makes something really simple out of it. Where on USASpending.gov you have to navigate a giant search form SpendTrend.us gives us a simple search box.
The New SunlightLabs.com
The point here is simple: we want to make it easier for developers and designers to find ways to help, come up with ideas, and start projects of their own. We want to make it easier for you to reach out to people in your community and find people you can work with. And we wanted to make it easy for people who run projects to ask for help. So James built the new SunlightLabs to start providing you with the tools to do just that.
Continue readingApp For America Honorable Mention: Budget
Over the next few days I'm going to be blogging about and announcing the honorable mentions for Apps for America. The toughest part of this contest, honestly, were that there were so many really interesting apps. I hope that all the contestants make another stab at it and keep at their current apps.
Continue readingDealing with Inaccurate Government Data
Developers are good at getting bits to line up, importing data and getting great conclusions out of it. Designers are great at making things look great and making those conclusions and bits easily digestible. But in all the apps I've seen, they all ultimately suffer from the same fatal flaw: accuracy.
Continue readingTransparencyCorps Meets New York
After the success of our earmark campaigns, I've been working with the enthusiastic folks at OpenGovernmentNYC to help them launch a campaign of their own. Recently, they obtained from the NYC government a 169-page paper copy of the 1993 NYC Data Directory, bulk scanned it into a big PDF, and asked for help in digitizing it.
Visit the campaign and read Philip Ashlock's blog post to read a little more about why OpenGovNYC wants your help:
Update the NYC Public Data Directory
And if you're around NYC, consider going to one of their meetups - these guys are for serious.
Continue readingThe Visualization Prize Goes To
With Apps for America 2 we wanted to give a special prize to the best visualization. Part of the reson why is because we think that building up the art community inside of Sunlight Labs is a priority and just as important to our mission as the development community. The other reason is because the only way to make big data accessible to people is often by presenting simple, easy to understand visualizations.
Continue readingRedesigning the FCC: Getting Organized
There has been a lot of great discussion on our blog and in our google group regarding how to redesign the FCC website as part of our redesigning the government series. But instead of moving straight into the design I thought it might be beneficial to explore how we might organize the content of the FCC site by sharing with them, and other government agencies a tool on how to think through it.
Continue readingThe Apps for America Finalists
And then there were three. After 47 great entries, we have three finalists in the Apps for America contest, and now it is time for us to figure out the winners. After taking a look at the winners, there's instructions on how to vote at the end of the post. The finalists are in random order:
Continue reading
59063
