Open Government: An Overview

Hackin’ onGovernment

“How can the webmake government

better?”

…what does “better”mean?

My definition:

More transparency

Shorter feedback loops

Better identificationof signal

within the noise

What has the politicalblogosphere (ugh)

already donefor politics?

What suitsthe web

to politics?

It’s great at archiving

It’s easy to reach

It can supportgreater depth

Examples:

FactCheck.org

PolitiFact: Truth-O-Meter

PolitiFact: The Obameter

OpenCongress

Full text of bills(comment on individual paragraphs!)

The world ofgovernment

can accommodatemore developers

Open-source softwareadvocates

will feel at home with theideals

The public sector doesn’t havethe talent or resources

to do it themselves

You don’t need anyone’spermission

So how do Ibuild my own?

Getting data

A vast amountof government data

is available…

…but it’s sloppy

THOMAS

Enter GovTrack

http://govtrack.us

Makescongressional datamachine-readable

XML data dumps

open-sourceand

non-profit

Sunlight Foundation

Sunlight Labs

Case study:

Filibusted http://filibusted.us

The U.S. Senate allowsfor a stall tactic

called the filibuster

To end a filibuster,you need a successful

cloture vote

The number of cloture votesis on a major upswing

in recent decades…

…reflecting increasing useof the filibuster

Methodology:

Keep a list of current senators(using Sunlight Labs’

Congressional Data API)

Every night, check GovTrackfor new Senate votes

(http://www.govtrack.us/data/us/111/votes.all.index.xml)

Any new cloture votes? If so…

Get information about the billand how each senator voted

Put it all on a page

Tweet about it!

Keep stats on senators

Keep stats on the 111th Congress

Present interesting data views

Ingredients:

Rails, a tiny database,and a bit of Ruby for parsing

XML.

Read the code:https://github.com/savetheclocktower/filibusted

Now it’s your turn

Data sources:

GovTrack data dumps:http://govtrack.us/data/

The Drumbone API:http://services.sunlightlabs.com/docs/Drumbone_API/

OpenCongress API:http://www.opencongress.org/api

Legislator information,bill trends,

most-blogged-about items

Sunlight Labs APIs:http://services.sunlightlabs.com/

Legislator information,campaign contributions,

state-by-state legislative data

New York Times Congress API:http://developer.nytimes.com/docs/congress_api

Legislator information,nominees, bills, votes

data.gov

Launched in May 2009

Drinking from the firehose

What aboutstate government?

The Open StateProject

http://openstates.sunlightlabs.com/

Things to consider:

Is it OK to havea point of view?

(of course)

Everyone has bias

Data-based methodologycan defend againstaccusations of bias

Your conclusionsmay be opinionated,

but the underlying data isn’t

Argue in good faithand play devil’s advocate

User participation?

sure, but be careful of:

1. spam

(you'll get spammed,even if you rel='nofollow',

and even if you escape HTML)

Use Akismetor something like it

2. sampling bias

Who visits web sites aboutgovernment?

OpenCongress’s pagefor the HCR bill:

Don’t use data from your usersto draw conclusions

about the general public

3. vitriol

anonymity + political passion =angry rhetoric

About the HCR bill:

Be tolerant, butknow what you’re in for

“ Politics is a strongand slow boringof hard boards. ”

— Max Weber