Ethan Zuckerman writes
I’m in Sebastapol, CA today and tomorrow, participating in a conversation hosted by Tim O’Reilly and Carl Malamud of public.resource.org . The topic is "Open Government" and the folks in the room are some of the leading developers working on tools to make government information - especially US and UK information - more accessible to a wider audience, including journalists, policy wonks and perhaps interested users.
He lists some interesting platforms and intitiatives The Chicago Crime Mashup the Django framework a way of building web platforms and there is a book on Django there is the ability to annotate video via a wiki model
This I found really interesting
Greg Elin with Sunlight Labs is a master of meshing sets of political data. He talks about Sunlight’s holy grail - one click disclosure - integrating data from GovTrack.us, Open Congress, Center for Responsive Politics, GovernmentDocs.org and others. Sunlight has taken steps to ensure that these sites are cross-referenced and integrated, so you can view portraits of US politicians that include information on fundraising, contributions from lobbyists, voting on earmarks, etc. In the long term, Sunlight is looking into doing real-time analysis of newsfeeds from sources like AP, feeding the data through “data chewers” that monitor the articles for information on politicians and link the references to detailed profiles on the individuals in question. Elin points out that most newspapers don’t have the technical capacity to integrate this sort of data into online stories - his goal is to create a “journalists’ desktop” that puts this information at the hands of every reporter, and makes it as easy as possible for a paper to integrate this information into their coverage.
And the UK platform They Work For You is great Created by Tom Steinberg of MySociety
Speed, Transparency, Harnessing Collective Intelligence, Networks, Distributed Knowledge are all part of a different type of government.
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