Announcing Apps for America 2: The Data.gov Challenge
We've been planning this for awhile. Ever since we heard about Data.gov we have been planning a contest, and if you're reading this blog post, that means Data.gov has finally launched.
I'm pleased to wave the green flag on Apps for America 2: The Data.gov Challenge. This is a development and visualization challenge to see who can come up with the best application and visualization for data from Data.gov.
These are exciting times for us-- the walls between Government and Developers are starting to shrink, and we here in Sunlight Labs are terribly excited to get to work on doing great things with the data that's coming out. Government has made a move in the right direction-- now it is time for us to show them what we can do.
We're happy to launch Apps for America 2, this time with support from our friends. Google's put in some prize money, as has Craig Newmark, the founder of Craig's list. O'Reilly and Techweb have provided another wonderful incentive: tickets and table space to Gov2.0 summit for the winners.
Finally, we think that in building this community of technical talent, that we need not only developers but also talented and creative artists and visualizers. So we've created a special bonus "visualization and design" prize that will hopefully bring new ideas and talent to the table.
Take a look at our Apps for America 2 page for all the rules and details. This is going to be the best Apps for America yet.
Please, spread the word far and wide! This is the technical community's first and best chance to show our federal government the kind of talent and creativity that we all have, and more importantly to show it what happens when it engages the technical community.
Let the Games Begin.
Continue readingX-UA-Compatible Django Middleware
Microsoft's Internet Explorer 8 may choose to display your site using an older, less compliant rendering engine. Take control and tell IE which engine to use with our Django middleware and decorator.
Continue readingDownloading House Lobbying Disclosures
The Lobbying Disclosure Act of 1995 mandates that lobbyist that meet specific requirements are to register with Clerk of the House of Representatives and the Secretary of the Senate. Being the great body that they are, the House provides a searchable database and bulk download of the registration forms. Sure a searchable database is nice, but we can have the most fun with access to the entire data set. The disclosure forms are provided in XML format, divided by year and reporting period (quarerly, semi-annually, annually), and archived.
In order to download the disclosure archives, an HTML form must be submitted for each file. This can be a huge pain as the files are large and involves non-trivial human effort whenever files are released or updated. We've written a Python script that simulates the form submissions and automatically downloads all of the archives. In addition to the script, we've uploaded a recent download of the archives to Amazon S3 for easier distribution.
The simple download script can be found on GitHub and the archives can be downloaded from S3.
Continue reading2 Easy Wins for your Congressional Website
2 Easy wins for your Congressional Website
Lots of members of congress are busily updating their website. It seems these days that we're getting lots of brilliantly designed congressional websites as the innovation in design from the campaigns trickles ever so slowly into government.
If you're helping to build your Member of Congress' website, I'd like to ask you to do two things:
Continue readingMy Talk at Web2.0 Expo
Post RailsConf
Open government got a great spotlight at RailsConf this year, in Las Vegas. Dan Lathrop organized a panel on Government 2.0 there, and was kind enough to ask me to speak about Sunlight, and Wynn Netherland about his great work on TweetCongress. We had good turnout, and got plenty of questions. We even had a guy spontaneously write an IP address of an anonymous FTP server on a piece of paper, approach the podium to hand it to me, and promise us that there was raw legislative data on the other end.
Continue readingWhat do people want from Recovery.gov?
We scraped all the ideas off of the latest National Dialogue on Recovery.gov to see of we could condense what most of the ideas were about. Here's what we got:
Looks like most of the ideas were about data. People sure do want to set that data free, don't they?
On the new NYSenate.gov
The transparency community is abuzz today with the revelation of the New York Senate website. It is shiny and pretty. There are great new features and even our website, Public Markup gets a shout out. Neat!
What's great about it is uniformity. Every Senator has a website that's the same as every other Senator's, with links to their RSS feeds and even twitter accounts. They've got blogs and interestingly enough calendars. Now, the technology for transparency is there. Sadly, it doesn't look like the Senators are using it yet -- I find it hard to believe, for example, that the Senate President has a clear schedule for the rest of the month.. But the technology is there and the NY Senate technology team ought to be commended for building that in (and making it export in iCal!).
Continue readingShameless Plug: Beautiful Data
O'Reilly is publishing a new book entitled Beautiful Data that you should buy. Why?
- The two authors of the book, Jeff Hammerbacher and Toby Segaran are really great people. It looks like a great book.
- Half the proceeds of the book go to us here at the Sunlight Foundation. The other half goes to another great organization, Creative Commons
So buy the book and give us some much needed support so that we can continue liberating data and shining light in some of the darkest corners of Washington, DC. I'll sweeten the pot, too: If you're one of the first five people to buy the book and send me a picture of you with the book in your hands, I'll send you some very rare Sunlight Foundation/Labs stickers along with a very appreciative thank-you note.
Open Government at RailsConf
This year's RailsConf is going to have a real Open Government presence. If you're attending RailsConf in Vegas this year, there are a couple of events on Tuesday that should interest you.
Continue reading
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