As stated in the note from the Sunlight Foundation′s Board Chair, as of September 2020 the Sunlight Foundation is no longer active.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

Surge of EPA data in Data.gov

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Late afternoon yesterday, Data.gov went from 81 feeds to 261, and the EPA overtook the USGS for the agency providing the most data. The EPA added 180 new data files-- the Toxics Release Inventory data for each state and territory as well as for federal agencies for 2005, 2006 and 2007.

This data is interesting stuff-- dozens of CSV files (still in .exe compressed archives, ick) that speak to where corporations and government are managing toxic chemicals. There's lots of interesting data in there. But it isn't just a clear win-- this data is poorly documented byte delimited text files. While we do have some headers provided to get us started, but no real description of the actual files.

If you do end up working with this data for your [Apps for America 2: The Data.gov Challenge] entry, make some notes on how you parsed the data and let's create our own documentation for this data source.

Here's a breakdown of the data in Data.gov as of today:

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Where are the Government Web Developers?

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Where are the web developers in Government?

Are you a web developer who works for a non-defense related federal agency? Not a contractor, but actually employed by the Executive Branch of Government? If so, I'd like to meet you. Because I'm beginning to think you don't exist. USAJobs tends to agree with me, too. From what I'm able to gather, the entire federal government is hiring a total of 6 "IT Support Specialists," which look like cleverly disguised network administration jobs and "off the shelf software management" jobs.

To be specific, what I'm looking for is:

  1. A web developer (Someone who knows Python, ASP.NET, PHP, Django, Ruby on Rails, alongside HTML and CSS)
  2. Who doesn't work for a contracting firm, but is instead employed directly as a full time employee by a federal agency who
  3. Builds user facing federal websites, and
  4. Does not work for defense related agencies.

I've met strategists, managers, new media directors, bloggers, even "architects," but not a single developer. I've met lots of government contractors who work as developers as virtual FTEs for the Government. And granted, I don't have much contact with the Department of Defense-- I'm sure deep within that organization there are developers building software for the government that keeps us safe. But outside of defense, are there any? Do they exist? I've asked around, and nobody can seem to point me in the right direction.

If you know of any, point me in the right direction, and let me know why they seem so rare in the comments.

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New Data on Data.gov

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Good news and Bad news from Data.gov

Looks like Data.gov has added a whole bunch of new feeds, they're up from 47 to 87 in two weeks, not a bad start. Most of the new feeds come from the IRS, they look to be interesting data: 990 forms from 501(c)(3-9) organizations.

That's the good news.

The bad news? It's pretty bad so hold on to your britches.

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Redesigning the Government: U.S. Supreme Court

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Introduction Image

President Obama's nomination of Judge Sotomayor has brought increased attention to the U.S. Supreme Court. It also has led us to reexamine the Court's web site, which is long overdue for an overhaul. In its current form, its web design is suggestive of the 1990s, and its functionality is similarly dated.

The Justices appear to agree. They've recently ask Congress for money to move control of the site in-house, taking over responsibility from the GPO. This move would allow them, in their words, to "better control and manage the web site and to be able to expand the data and services provided by the site more efficiently."

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Us: Transparency, Them: Collaboration

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Today, the White House, via the Office of Science and Technology Policy released the Government "Conversation on Collaboration" that they've been having since February, in conjuction with the public Open Government Dialogue. This conversation happened on OMBMax wiki, a wiki powered by the Office of Management and Budget.

So after our analysis on Friday of The Open Government Dialogue this gives us the opportunity to make a comparison-- what are people inside the government saying vs. the general public?

Now we can see what people are saying inside the government and outside the government. I went ahead and used the rest of Sunlight's "word cloud" credit on creating a new word cloud of what people are saying on the inside, so we could put it next to one on the outside. Here it is:

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What I’d Change about Data.gov

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I think Data.gov is pretty awesome. So let me couch my sensational headline with the fact that I'm generally a fan of what Vivek Kundra & Team are trying to do inside of the federal government to make the our country more transparent. Heck, we're so excited about it we're doing our own contest with cash prizes to celebrate.

But I do have a few gripes. So in the interest of full transparency, and the hopes that this will create change, here are my gripes for all to see:

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Bills of the 110th Congressional Session

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Everyone has their own thoughts and perceptions on what generally happens to bills as they pass through the legislative process. With the thousands of bills that are introduced every year, it is hard to get an overall sense of what is happening. During the last couple of months, our intern Rebecca Shapiro collected and processed data (from the Thomas Web site run by the Library of Congress) on each bill in the 110th session of Congress in order to understand what happened to all of them.

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Keeping an Eye on Data.gov

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One thing that's curiously missing from Data.gov is an RSS feed for new data feeds. Sort of shockingly, and glaringly left out. We were disappointed, and didn't want to wait. Scraping here is such an easy thing to do that we decided to just build our own. Sunlight Labs' James Turk did it, and it's handy. Here's the feed and here's the source that makes the feed. This should be useful to anyone who wants to see what new stuff is coming out of Data.gov.

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Everything We Know About Data.gov

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Everything you wanted to know about Data.gov

Now that Data.gov's out, I thought I'd take a look under the hood and see what's in there, what's missing, and try and figure out what's coming.

First off searching through twitter for the phrase "Data.gov congratulations" I'm able to get enough evidence that hmiller23 and Jerad Speigel of the Phase One Consulting Group built the site. I asked them on Twitter, and they said "It Uses LAMP"

Right now the site is short on data. Federal CIOs: There are hundreds of us waiting to do interesting things with your data. Invest in putting it up on Data.gov now. You will be rewarded.

Right now the breakdown of the files looks like this:

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