Hey all, anyone coming to DC by Friday evening for the weekend's
Transparency Camp is welcome to join an informal gathering of "local
up" online transparency and participation builders from 7:30 p.m. at
James Hoban's - 1 Dupont Circle -
http://www.jameshobansdc.com/direct.html
I will not be there until after 8:30 p.m. depending upon my flight so
if you don't recognize anyone, rely on Twitter #TCamp2010 - I would
guess there will be a decent crowd.
Speaking of "builders," Clay Johnson put out some challenges -
http://sunlightlabs.com/blog/2010/transparencycamp-three-challenges -
for TransparencyCamp and Open Gov West. Work on the second challenge,
spurred by recent energy on the CityCamp Exchange -
http://e-democracy.org/citycamp - is now underway. See:
http://e-democracy.org/democracymap - and - http://etherpad.com/repdb
Phil Ashlock (The Open Planning Project) and I (E-Democracy.org) have
been feeding the passionate Ryan Wold - http://www.ryanwold.net - with
lots of information to see what he can build out over the week to
provide a foundation for deep explorations at the two weekend events.
Phil and Ryan will be at OpenGovWest.
I've also been in touch with my Federal and White House contacts to
let them know about the opportunity for the
non-profit/inter-governmental community to help crowd-source updates
to the starting point information leading to a living open data source
of all government websites by jurisdiction (if you can't make this
work first, you can't expect to move toward officials someday).
According to the Census of Governments there are some 30,000 of them
(many are small townships) ... and word on the street is that many
smaller governments change their URLs or simply have a web page or two
on a local non-government site for example. The Dept. of Ed doesn't
even ask the state's for school district (or school) web site
addresses anymore because of past reliability issues. The Business.Gov
collection of some 8,000 city and county URLs feeding their API is
being updated weekly and is interested in crowd-sourcing ideas just as
we are interested in getting this source data out for all to use
freely. Phil suggested the title "DemocracyMap" because one of the
ultimate goals is to help people get a full "local up" listing of the
government jurisdictions that serve them based on a location.
If you want to help move on this, join our technical working group at:
http://e-democracy.org/democracymap
Cheers,
Steven Clift
E-Democracy.org
Steven Clift - http://stevenclift.com
Executive Director - http://E-Democracy.Org
Follow me - http://twitter.com/democracy
New Tel: +1.612.234.7072
Transparency Camp is welcome to join an informal gathering of "local
up" online transparency and participation builders from 7:30 p.m. at
James Hoban's - 1 Dupont Circle -
http://www.jameshobansdc.com/direct.html
I will not be there until after 8:30 p.m. depending upon my flight so
if you don't recognize anyone, rely on Twitter #TCamp2010 - I would
guess there will be a decent crowd.
Speaking of "builders," Clay Johnson put out some challenges -
http://sunlightlabs.com/blog/2010/transparencycamp-three-challenges -
for TransparencyCamp and Open Gov West. Work on the second challenge,
spurred by recent energy on the CityCamp Exchange -
http://e-democracy.org/citycamp - is now underway. See:
http://e-democracy.org/democracymap - and - http://etherpad.com/repdb
Phil Ashlock (The Open Planning Project) and I (E-Democracy.org) have
been feeding the passionate Ryan Wold - http://www.ryanwold.net - with
lots of information to see what he can build out over the week to
provide a foundation for deep explorations at the two weekend events.
Phil and Ryan will be at OpenGovWest.
I've also been in touch with my Federal and White House contacts to
let them know about the opportunity for the
non-profit/inter-governmental community to help crowd-source updates
to the starting point information leading to a living open data source
of all government websites by jurisdiction (if you can't make this
work first, you can't expect to move toward officials someday).
According to the Census of Governments there are some 30,000 of them
(many are small townships) ... and word on the street is that many
smaller governments change their URLs or simply have a web page or two
on a local non-government site for example. The Dept. of Ed doesn't
even ask the state's for school district (or school) web site
addresses anymore because of past reliability issues. The Business.Gov
collection of some 8,000 city and county URLs feeding their API is
being updated weekly and is interested in crowd-sourcing ideas just as
we are interested in getting this source data out for all to use
freely. Phil suggested the title "DemocracyMap" because one of the
ultimate goals is to help people get a full "local up" listing of the
government jurisdictions that serve them based on a location.
If you want to help move on this, join our technical working group at:
http://e-democracy.org/democracymap
Cheers,
Steven Clift
E-Democracy.org
Steven Clift - http://stevenclift.com
Executive Director - http://E-Democracy.Org
Follow me - http://twitter.com/democracy
New Tel: +1.612.234.7072
