Yesterday, ReadWriteWeb posted a story titled Data.gov to Face a Challenger From Sunlight Labs. I've actually been asked a few times questions along the same lines: "Does this mean you're giving up on Data.gov?"
Ask OpenSecrets if they've given up on the FEC or ask Weather.com if they've given up on the National Weather Service. The answer is quite the opposite: we're only able to do the catalog because of Data.gov. Without it, Government wouldn't be investing in and publishing its own data to add to our catalog. We're doing what you're supposed to: build on the shoulders of giants.
In addition, this project, like Apps for America 2, helps to ensure the success and longevity of Data.gov. And who knows, maybe we can help influence the features and functionality of Data.gov while we're on the way.
Continue readingKickoff: The National Data Catalog
Sometimes you can get inspired by government. In our field it happens more than you'd think. Obviously all our new tools-- new things like TransparencyCorps and Congrelate along with CapitolWords have been inspired by government to a degree, but there aren't many ideas that we've actually stolen from government.
Continue readingIntroducing Congrelate
I've been tweeting about this for quite some time, but I should announce it on the blog too. Check out Congrelate, another project of ours. Congrelate lets you view, sort, filter and share information about members of Congress. We've taken data from the Center for Responsive Politics, the Census, GovTrack and our own API and made it so you can create queries on that data and incorporate it into a big sheet. Of course, you can also export the data into CSV and JSON if you'd like, too.
Continue readingWhy Government Spends So Much on Software and Employees
As the person in the world that is least likely to become a government contractor, I will publicly state the obvious. Government spends a lot of money on software. $8.5 million is the price tag for Recovery.gov which is reasonable given what the Government is asking for. The White House Content Management System has a 16 Million contract on it. Or how about the 15 million dollars various agencies have spent this year on Sharepoint.
Continue readingReview: The USASpending.gov IT Dashboard
The Obama administration unveiled its “IT Dashboard” last week—to significant fanfare, including a write-up in The New York Times—as a symbol of its commitment to openness and understanding of technology.
But is it more than a flashy gizmo?
The Web site is only the first step in a broader effort to make government contracting data available online, and the tech-minded workers tasked with designing a system made the natural choice to start with what they know best: IT contracts.
And as an early (and rushed) prototype, we won’t fault it for the bugs and crashes that were prevalent for the first several days, most of which appear to be fixed.
But if the challenge for central agencies is coordinating across the wide federal bureaucracy, the sometimes narrow focus of technophiles may be the site’s shortcoming. There is little explanatory language placing information in context—understandable given that it’s being drawn from many different departments.
Continue readingApps for America 2 Update
With just under a month to go, I thought I'd introduce to you Judge #4 of Apps for America 2: The Data.gov Challenge. Her name is Allyson Kapin, she's the founder of Women Who Tech and Rad Campaign. It is great to have her on board the judging team.
Like I said, there's just a month left to enter the contest. So get building. What we're doing is really important: if we are able to show Government what kind of innovation exists outside its walls, we may be able to create new change on the inside.
We have one more judge to announce soon, but get cracking!
Continue reading18 Million for Recovery.gov 2.0
According to the GSA, Recovery.gov will be rebuilt over the course of five months for a total of $9,516,324. The Recovery Accountability and Transparency Board then has the option to exercise options that can take the contract through 4 more years for a total of $17,948,518. The award winner is a company called Smartronix which will likely subcontract out to several companies over the next few weeks to deliver the site.
There's a lively discussion happening on the Sunlight Labs Email List, and we're trying to gather information about what the contract details are. While Twitter is on fire with shock at the price tag, I don't think that's the real problem here.
The real problem is transparency. The real problem is that while many are outraged at the cost, you can't presume that the government isn't spending its money wisely unless you know both what Government is paying and what they're paying for. We don't know what they're paying for, yet.
I hope that this gets rectified soon and that the Recovery Accountability and Transparency Board, along with Smartronix works with our community to make sure of three things:
- That people know what every dime of that $18MM is being spent on,
- That Smartronix works with the community to make the process of building Recovery.gov open and transparent, and
- That Smartronix works with the Sunlight Labs community to make the data published on Recovery.gov accessible and machine readable to develops.
Here at Sunlight we're trying to make that happen. So we begin Chapter 2. As new stuff developers, we'll keep you informed.
Continue readingIntroducing Transparency Corps
A week ago at the Personal Democracy Forum, we unveiled TransparencyCorps, a new distributed volunteer-force application. It is a lightweight open source platform along the lines of "Mechanical Turk." Like all of our newer projects, it is open source software and you can check it out over on github. The app was written by Eric with tasks being written by several members of the Sunlight Labs team. It is written in Rails.
It is necessary and always will be: while we bring in a lot of data from Government, human eyes need to look at data and make associations that computers cannot. In the realm of transparency, there are solid links between documents on the web that are publicly available that machines simply cannot accurately make. So we built TransparencyCorps as a way for us to build a community to help out and complete these tasks.
TransparencyCorps isn't just for us though, but for all people in the transparency community. We're inviting our partners to create their own tasks and add them to the service along side our own in the hopes that in numbers we can do great things.
We're pretty excited about it as a platform and we'll continue to add more to it. If you have any thoughts or ideas, feel free to add your own or give us feedback. Make sure to tell Jeremy how great his leader-board drawings are.
Continue readingPlay the Government Contracting Color Match Game
Can you match the colors in the pie chart with the legend below?
From usaspending.gov
Continue readingHelp Sunlight Build Our FEC Testimony
Yesterday, the FEC posted a 46 page PDF file to its website asking for comments on the FEC.gov website. We've taken the entire PDF and put it up online for easy perusal. You can email the comments in to improvefecinternet@fec.gov, or send them in to the FEC via mail. But to make it really easy, we're launching our FEC Brainstorm today to solicit comments to submit to the FEC. We'll take the best comments that are submitted and include them in our testimony, with attribution of course.
Continue reading
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