Open Government and the Citizen Coder (Changelog Interviews #47)

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