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 – Website, GitHub, LinkedIn, Mastodon, X
• Wynn Netherland – GitHub, X

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!