As stated in the note from the Sunlight Foundation′s Board Chair, as of September 2020 the Sunlight Foundation is no longer active. This site is maintained as a static archive only.

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Tag Archive: Technology

Recovery.gov Bid — a Good Failure

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Last week, we announced that we were going to bid on Recovery.gov. Here, 9 days later we have a few pages of information on our bid, but I don't think it makes sense to turn anything in tomorrow. So I'm declaring this experiment a failure. Most people confuse "failure" with being "wrong" but here in the Labs, we're into experimentation -- and you can't experiment or push the ball forward if you're afraid to fail.

This was a completely worthwhile experiment and we've learned a lot. I want to share some of the reasons why we failed, and what we've learned with all of you:

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Two Questions from the RFP Worth Noting

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Here's two interesting questions from the Recovery.gov RFP Q&A we just posted. These questions were asked by people who are eligible to bid on the Recovery.gov RFP that we're presently creating a community bid for. The questions:

Question 101: The requirements for XML firewall appear to have been copy/pasted from the IBM website (see http://www-01.ibm.com/software/integration/datapower/xs40/highlights.html). Is government looking biased towards an IBM solution for XML Firewall?

Answer 101: No, the government is not biased toward IBM or any vendor. The value of XML firewalls is technology dependent. The capability to provide XML firewalls is pervasive throughout industry and is proven to increase the security of Web Services. Technology descriptions were pulled from several Internet locations as a part of market research.

Question 103: The requirements for data Warehouse appear to have been copy/pasted from the IBM website (see http://www-01.ibm.com/software/data/infosphere/warehouse/enterprise-new.html). Is government biased to an IBM solution for data warehouse?

Answer 103: No, the government is not biased toward an IBM or any other vendors’ solution. Technology descriptions were pulled from several Internet locations as a part of market research.

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Data.gov gets an update

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For those of you keeping an eye on the ball, working hard on your Apps for America 2 entries, I've got some great news for you: Data.gov has given itself a slight upgrade, adding a bunch more feeds. To compensate, Data.gov has turned itself into three subcatalogs: A raw data catalog, a tool catalog and a geodata catalog.

By far and away, the Tool and Geodata catalogs exceed the Raw Data catalog, but we still don't have our 100,000 "feeds." We have 999 data sources in the Geodata Catalog, 999 data sources in the Tool Catalog, and 267 in the Raw Data Feeds catalog. These 999 numbers are troubling. Hopefully the software supports more than 1000 data feeds in each subcatalog.

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WE are going to bid on Recovery.gov

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We've decided to do something crazy. On Tuesday afternoon, someone handed us a copy of the Recovery.gov 2.0 RFP and we thought: what if we try something truly radical here. What if we opened up the process of government contracting by bidding on this thing? We together-- not just we meaning The Sunlight Foundation-- are going to bid on redoing Recovery.gov to learn more about the process of government contracting, and to try and build what is perhaps the biggest federal transparency-related website.

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The Future of Email Marketing? Twitter.

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Gross over-simplification: In the realm of non-profits and campaigns, the world revolves around one thing: email marketing. It isn't blogging, it isn't "my.barackobama.com" or anything of the like-- basically, what people do as "campaign strategists" in the online world is come up with new and elaborate ways to ask you for your email address so that they can do one thing: ask you for money.

Email marketeers measure the effectiveness of this by tracking four key statistics:

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CapitolCamp

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At the beginning of this year, the New York State Senate brought in Andrew Hoppin as their CIO with a mandate to revolutionize the way the NY Senate engaged people. The NY Senate's new website is the first major tangible product of Andrew's new and talented team. On June 5th, I attended another result of this newfound momentum in New York's government, CapitolCamp. A one-day BarCamp-style conference, CapitolCamp was in Albany, at the New York State Capitol, hosted by the New York State Senate, CIO, and the New York State CIO.

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Fun with Google Spreadsheets and Fusion Tables

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Fun with Google Spreadsheets and Fusion Tables

I've been having a lot of fun with Google tools today, and I wanted to share. This morning I was interested in generating this pie chart from the data off of Data.gov in my last post but needed to get all the data out of the Data.gov Data Catalog first.

Google Spreadsheets actually makes this really easy -- if you know what you're doing:

Step 1: Create a new spreadsheet, and put this little line in a cell:

=importHtml("http://www.data.gov/catalog#raw","table",2)

Step 2: There is no step 2. You're done.

Cool huh? You've now got a spreadsheet of all the data in Data.gov. But that's not what I wanted-- what I wanted was a count of each data source by agency to see who was providing the most data. The answer here was Google's new Fusion Tables. In Fusion Tables, I can then take the data, create an aggregation and provide me the counts, imported from my Google Spreadsheet.

Google Fusion Tables (Pre-Alpha)

Easy data analysis without a lick of code.

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