It has been about 10 days since we announced our goal to write parsers for all 50 state legislation websites. While 10 days ago we had nothing, I'm excited to report that today our github account shows substantial progress on 8 states and the District of Columbia. DC actually got two parsers-- one in Ruby and one in Python.
We've started these projects with just one function-- get_legislation that grabs all the bills of a particular state. That's the first step. We'll be grabbing votes, legislators and other things as we make progress. 8 states in 10 days is substantial progress! Great job!
To get involved and claim your state, check out our wiki page and our github project.
Thanks for all that you do!
Continue readingHiring Developers to Help Open Up Government
The Sunlight Foundation's technology team is growing. Help us manage the Sunlight Labs community by becoming a developer here at Sunlight. Right now we're hiring for a few positions:
- A developer with strong data and analytics skills for our Data Commons team
- Two creative, well versed developers for our Tools and Engagement team
- One more developer for our SubsidyScope team
If you've been thinking about a career-change, or if you're interested in getting into the realm of using your skills to change government, working on our tech team is a great opportunity.
I lead our team. What I'm committed to is, and what I believe my full time job is, is creating a compelling, fun work environment that keeps our team members and community engaged. What we're trying to do on our team is three-fold:
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Build a community of volunteer sophisticated open source developers who want to change their government. We do this through things like our hackathons and our Apps for America contest.
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Build a tech team at the Sunlight Foundation that builds great tools for citizens and journalists to better see what their government is doing, who is influencing it, and how their money is being spent.
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Support the overall mission of the Sunlight Foundation
If you're a great developer who wants to start using their skills to make a real difference in America, this is an opportunity for you. Send in your resume and let's talk.
Continue readingData.gov: The Vivek Kundra Opportunity
Over the past few months, I've had the pleasure of meeting and working with Vivek Kundra in his job as the CTO of Washington, DC. Today he was today he was appointed to the new position of CIO of the federal government. He's a visionary -- a leader in the field of eGovernment who understands that technology can be used to change the way government operates, can be used to save money, as a way to inform citizens -- all for the sake of our democracy for its citizens. From my interactions with him it is clear he believes in three things:
Continue readingYou know we can’t resist word clouds
Yesterday we sent out a request for people to tell us what they thought of TransparencyCamp. Here's a word cloud of their responses I thought we'd share:
Hackathons!
Our second big announcement of the day is that we're launching a pilot project: Sunlight Labs Live Hackathons.
The idea really came from Tim O'Reilly and O'Reilly media, who said "Hey, why don't you come out to Web 2.0 expo and see if you can get some projects done with some of the developers there." We said "Great Idea!"
At the same time, James opened up the doors for us at PyCon and they said "Great Idea!"
So now the question is: what do we do? We think that's a community decision, so we put up a feedback page where people can vote for what their favorite ideas are to work on. Go vote now!
Continue readingOur next big goal, The Fifty State Project
While no single developer has the time to volunteer writing a custom scraper for each state, the goal of having data for all fifty states is entirely attainable if we come together and share the workload. This is where you come in. We need your help databasing state legislation.
Continue readingDid the Navy Spend ~400k on Facebook? (Why Bulk Data is Important)
In our work with government data we encourage governments to develop great looking websites with fantastic APIs. But you can't have true transparency unless you go all the way down to the source giving citizens access to the raw bulk data.
Continue readingContent Management Systems just don’t work.
Somebody asked me the other day what I thought of Recovery.gov using Drupal and it got me thinking about content management systems. In my consulting days, I watched companies and political campaigns and non-profits sometimes spend hundreds of thousands of dollars annually trying to make their content management system do what they wanted it to do for their online campaigns. As an honest developer and honest consultant, this made me apoplectic-- I knew that at the end of the day, technically what they wanted was fairly easy to build. But they had to pay hundreds of dollars an hour to get a "Drupal Specialist" at an outside consultancy to set up simple pages because they could not figure out how to get the stuff to work right.
I think if your budget for your website is $40,000/yr or more, you shouldn't be worrying about Content Management Systems at all. You should be worrying about hiring. I'll explain why after the jump.
Continue readingWeekly Lab Report 2009.06
The Labs is preparing for a sold out TransparencyCamp (Feb 28, Mar 1). Meanwhile, interesting tidbits continue. Here's what happened this past week at Sunlight Labs...
48 Hour Open Govt Hack-a-thon Announced. Labs Developer James Turk is attending PyCon in Chicago at end of March (Mar 29 - 31) where Sunlight Labs will be hosting a 48 hour Hackathon. Great chance for developers to talk to people at the Labs.
Open Government Hackathon: Chicago, March 29-31
Sunlight Labs is proud to be hosting the first ever Open Government Hackathon, March 29-31 in Chicago as part of PyCon.
This will be a 48 hour sprint where developers that are interested in contributing to an open source project that will free or otherwise enhance government data can gather to brainstorm and hack on various projects related to government data.
Continue reading
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