Adam and Wynn caught up with Carl Tashian from Open Government to talk about OpenGovernment.org, OpenCongress.org, and the rise of the Citizen Coder.

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Featuring:

Adam Stacoviak – Website, GitHub, LinkedIn, Mastodon, X
Wynn Netherland – GitHub, X

Show Notes:

Carl Tashian is Director of Technology at Open Government
OpenGovernment: Empower individuals and organizations to track government at every level
OpenCongress.org - open source Rails app to track the goings on in the US Congress
Library of Congress THOMAS site is the source for federal legislative information
OpenGovernment.org, a public resource for government transparency at the state, city, and local levels. Free and open-source.
Open States API
The Sunlight Foundation aims to make government transparent and accountable
Wynn helped create TweetCongress.org winner of a SXSW 2009 Web award for activism, making use of Sunlight APIs
Follow the money and connect the dots between bills, key votes, and campaign donations.
Transparency Data is a central source for federal lobbying disclosure, federal grants and contracts, earmarks and federal and state campaign contributions, complete with it’s own API
GovKit
Luigi Montanez and Wynn wrote a wrapper for Transparency Data
Fog, the Ruby cloud services library
Carl worked at ZipCar prior to joining Open Government
Syncing large datasets from different providers is a big challenge
PostgreSQL and PostGIS power the backend of OpenGovernment
GeoServer is an open source software server written in Java that allows users to share and edit geospatial data.
MongoDB and Rack provide a fast way to track page views in the app
Sunlight, Code for America, and Open Government - rise of the Citizen Coder?
Oakland Crimespotting is a case study on developers having an impact on government
DocumentCloud, featured in Episode 0.0.5
Jammit, Industrial Strength Asset Packaging for Rails
Pythonistas, why not help out by creating a scraper for your state?
Kenneth and Wynn debate the best terminal font

Something missing or broken? PRs welcome!

215: 10 Lessons from 5 Years of Speak like a CEO. Oliver Aust