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Open Government and the Citizen Coder (Changelog Interviews #47)
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 – Mastodon, Twitter, GitHub, LinkedIn, Website
- Wynn Netherland – Twitter, GitHub
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!