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Open Government: An Overview
The document discusses improving government through web technologies, emphasizing transparency, shorter feedback loops, and effective data management. It highlights existing resources like GovTrack and the Sunlight Foundation that provide access to government data and examples of projects like Filibusted that utilize this data to track congressional activity. The text encourages developers to engage with government data while being mindful of potential biases and user participation challenges.
Open Government: An Overview
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- 2. “How can theweb make government better?”
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- 8. What has thepolitical blogosphere (ugh) already done for politics?
- 9. What suits the web topolitics?
- 10. It’s great atarchiving
- 11. It’s easy toreach
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- 19. Full text ofbills (comment on individual paragraphs!)
- 20. The world of government canaccommodate more developers
- 21. Open-source software advocates will feelat home with the ideals
- 22. The public sectordoesn’t have the talent or resources to do it themselves
- 23. You don’t needanyone’s permission
- 24. So how doI build my own?
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- 26. A vast amount ofgovernment data is available…
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- 38. The U.S. Senateallows for a stall tactic called the filibuster
- 39. To end afilibuster, you need a successful cloture vote
- 40. The number ofcloture votes is on a major upswing in recent decades…
- 41. …reflecting increasing use ofthe filibuster
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- 43. Keep a listof current senators (using Sunlight Labs’ Congressional Data API)
- 44. Every night, checkGovTrack for new Senate votes (http://www.govtrack.us/data/us/111/votes.all.index.xml)
- 45. Any new cloturevotes? If so…
- 46. Get information aboutthe bill and how each senator voted
- 47. Put it allon a page
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- 49. Keep stats onsenators
- 50. Keep stats onthe 111th Congress
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- 53. Rails, a tinydatabase, and a bit of Ruby for parsing XML.
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- 55. Now it’s yourturn
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- 57. GovTrack data dumps: http://govtrack.us/data/ TheDrumbone API: http://services.sunlightlabs.com/docs/Drumbone_
- 58. OpenCongress API: http://www.opencongress.org/api Legislator information, billtrends, most-blogged-about items
- 59. Sunlight Labs APIs: http://services.sunlightlabs.com/ Legislatorinformation, campaign contributions, state-by-state legislative data
- 60. New York TimesCongress API: http://developer.nytimes.com/docs/congress_api Legislator information, nominees, bills, votes
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- 62. Launched in May2009
- 63. Drinking from thefirehose
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- 67. Is it OKto have a point of view?
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- 70. Data-based methodology can defendagainst accusations of bias
- 71. Your conclusions may beopinionated, but the underlying data isn’t
- 72. Argue in goodfaith and play devil’s advocate
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- 74. sure, but becareful of:
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- 76. (you'll get spammed, evenif you rel='nofollow', and even if you escape HTML)
- 77. Use Akismet or somethinglike it
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- 79. Who visits websites about government?
- 80. OpenCongress’s page for theHCR bill:
- 81. Don’t use datafrom your users to draw conclusions about the general public
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- 83. anonymity + politicalpassion = angry rhetoric
- 84. About the HCRbill:
- 85. Be tolerant, but knowwhat you’re in for
- 86. “ Politics isa strong and slow boring of hard boards. ” — Max Weber