Yesterday, I posted a bit about how data.gov shouldn't focus on data visualizations, but rather providing clean reliable data to citizens. But what this means is that we as a non-government community really need to start thinking about how to do visualizations when that data becomes available. Right now we're asking a lot of questions about data visualizations inside the Sunlight Offices that need to be shared with the wider Labs community:
- Should we hire somebody that does good data visualizations full time?
- Should we have a contest for best data visualization?
- What kinds of data visualizations would be successful in our field?
In order to kick off the discussion with the larger group, I want to gauge response from the wider design and visualization community and see what kind of people are out there. So I'm asking that if you're interested in working on the visualization and design side of things rather than the application and coding side of things that you fill out the form below.
Continue readingShould Data.gov visualize? Probably not.
A few people who saw our Data.gov design post asked for ways to visualize the data on Data.gov. As an organization that's such a proponent of data not only being free, but also using design to provide context to the data, why don't we advocate for data.gov to have visualizations for citizens to make sense of the data?
Continue readingLooking to Help “The Man”, Turning in My Chief Evangelist Badge
“What we’ve learned from the Open House Project,” said Sunlight’s Greg Elin, “is that whenever we sit outside and build things, we learn that there are people inside who want to do the same thing.”
That's me, quoted in Matthew Burton's 2008 essay, Why I Help "The Man", and Why You Should, Too. I've been thinking a lot about that quote and Burton's argument. I've been thinking I might like to be one of those people, "inside", taking advantage of the good stuff happening "outside". That's why I'm blogging my decision to resign as Chief Evangelist and conclude three years of consultancy with the wonderfully productive Sunlight Foundation in order to explore ways to more directly help the government build great web sites and embrace Government 2.0.
Continue readingThe Apps for America Judging Process
Since announcing the winners yesterday, a few people have asked for notes about how the Sunlight Foundation selected the winners. The answer is: we didn't. The Apps for America judging process went like this: we got 5 judges to agree to judge the contest-- Adrian Holovaty, Peter Corbett, Xeni Jardin, Aaron Swartz and myself. We built a very lightweight judging app (screenshot) and invited every judge to log in and rate each app according to the attributes we specified on in the contest rules.
Continue readingAnnouncing Our Summer of Code 2009 Participants
Yesterday Google announced this years participants in Google Summer of Code <http://socghop.appspot.com/>_, Google's program that pays students a stipend to work on an open source project during their summer.
This is Sunlight Labs' first year participating and we were extremely grateful to be granted three slots for this summer. Interest definitely exceeded our expectations leaving us with the difficult job of going through a lot of excellent proposals to select our top three applicants. We wish we could have accepted more proposals and hope that some of the students that found out about us through this program will pursue their ideas even though we were not able to accept them at this time.
Continue readingAnd The Winners Are…
Judging our first Apps for America contest was difficult: 45 solid, open source applications that solidly moved the ball forward in terms of opening government and providing new methods of communicating to our legislative branch.
The entries ranged from highly technical bayesian prediction tools like Words Vote, to the super simple and super useful GovPix. Every entry presented was open source and and amazing commitment on behalf of the development community to open their government. Every single entrant was amazing and I wish we could give prizes to everyone.
But we can't. The rules say there's 1 prize for first place, 1 prize for second place, 4 third place prizes and 10 honorable mentions prizes. Which gives us 16 total prizes to give away.
And the winners are...
Continue readingRedesigning the Government: Data.gov
One thing we’ve been most excited about here at the Sunlight Foundation is the concept of Data.gov. Due later this year, new federal CIO Vivek Kundra will release a new central repository for government data and research. And while in this series we traditionally re-design federal websites, we thought we’d actually take the opportunity to design data.gov right off the bat to show you all what we’d like to see happen.
Continue readingOpenSecrets.org Opens 20 Years Worth of Campaign Finance Data
In big news on the government data and transparency front, the premier provider of federal campaign finance information, Center for Responsive Politics (CRP), have announced they are opening for bulk download 20 years worth of data used to power their web site OpenSecrets.org. More than 200 million records are being made available of itemized contributions, campaign spending, lobbying, personal finance, and sponsored travel. CRP began tracking campaign contributions in the late 1980s. Their stats and staff are trusted and quoted by the Media as the gold standard reference. The opening of the OpenSecrets.org underlying archive of bulk, standardized and industry-coded data is a seminal event for transparency and Web 2.0 political data.
Continue readingFifty states Project: April 10th Status Report
Six weeks ago we announced on this blog <http://www.sunlightlabs.com/blog/2009/02/26/fifty-state-project/>_ the Fifty State Project <http://wiki.sunlightlabs.com/index.php/Fifty_State_Project>_, our ambitious project to begin building scrapers and storing data for all legislative information from all fifty states. At the time this project seemed like a longshot, but almost immediately a community rose to the challenge and there are now more than a dozen contributors and more than thirty states in progress.
Redesigning the Government: Lobbyist Disclosure
John Wonderlich and I teamed up to show how Sunlight envisions a future executive branch lobbying disclosure site. Check it out on the Sunlight Foundation blog.
Continue reading
59063
