Clay Johnson with the Sunlight Foundation shared challenges (see
below) he'd like to see addressed at TransparencyCamp and OpenGovWest.
A discussion of the Business.Gov API on city and county websites
sparked off a number of on-list - http://bit.ly/dCssZf - and
behind-the-scenes exchanges among a number of non-profits (The Open
Planning Project, E-Democracy.org, Sunlight, etc.) and individuals
interested in #2 in particular.
Come on in and collaborate:
http://etherpad.com/repdb
I can't imagine a more fundamental open government building block than
being able to reliably look-up from _across the web on many sites_ the
governments/public entities that serve you/tax you in one fell swoop.
And following that, the ability to look up who you have elected to
represent you at all levels particularly the very local level where
you are served by confusing and overlapping jurisdictions. If this
idea gains traction, the public interest will be served by making this
an open data set. Those who currently compile this information for
restricted use with their sweat equity will have the advantage of
having a leg up on how to further innovate with it and to perhaps at
fringes provide more accurate updates depending upon how well a mix of
government direct participation and crowd sourcing updates works.
For now the general discussion on this idea will continue on the
CityCamp Exchange, but to "get to work" use: http://etherpad.com/repdb
Cheers,
Steven Clift
E-Democracy.org
From: Clay Johnson <<email obscured>>
Date: Fri, Mar 19, 2010 at 11:39 AM
Subject: Re: [CityCamp Exchange] Who is going to Transparency Camp,
meet Fri. night? #tcamp2010
To: citycamp@forums.e-democracy.org
I'm going to (and we'll coordinate with the west coast at OpenGovWest to
collaborate as well) work on a challenge for the group to solve three big,
easy, important problems:
1. Build an OpenData playbook. An instruction manual for people inside
government to teach them *how* to open their data. This would range from
dealing with the bureaucracy to convince the organization to go "open" to
dealing with the technology one needs to go "open"
2. Building a free, open, distributed, editable database of all elected
officials and jurisdictions.
3. Creating a file format for data catalog exchange. We need a specification
that allows data catalogs to exchange data with one another.
I'd like to challenge our community to have all of these things done in
three months.