Clay Johnson briefly runs through some of the more notable entries from the ‘Apps for America II’ development contest, all of which utilize information exclusively from Data.gov.

Among the awards offered was a $2500 prize for visualization, which aimed to encourage involvement from the artistic community. The winner of this prize, the Quakespotter Desktop app operates in conjunction with Google Earth and Twitter.com to match the location of an earthquake with mentions of the same earthquake on Twitter.

Johnson argues that this effort shows how over 1000 developers can make helpful, creative and retail use of the data collected wholesale by governments.  Additional entries he highlights include usaspending.gov, flyontime.us, thisweknow.org and datamasher.org.

More about the Apps for America 2: The Data.gov Challenge here.

This is a good moment to mention the upcoming next gov2.0 expo from 25. to 27 May 2010 in Washington DC, USA. See the full program here. Here is a preview of the panels Clay will be involved in:
Truly Open Data

Truly Open Data means going beyond putting a CSV file on the Internet. It means being responsible for what you put out in ways that government isn’t used to doing – and it means developing new lines of communications with the public. This workshop will give examples of how to publish data, how to maintain it, and how to handle it when things go wrong. Read more.
Sunlight Foundation Contest Winners

Clay Johnson, Director of Sunlight Labs, will be announcing winners from the Sunlight Foundation’s newest contest. Previous contests, Apps for America and Apps for America the Data.gov edition, have spurred a community of “hactivists” or civically-minded technologists to show off what they can do for their country. Read more.

The Business of Being Open

What is the future of technology, open data, and citizen collaboration? How does enterprise view its role in the open government community and within government? Hear from IBM, Adobe, and Microsoft about how each company works with local and federal governments, building a sustainable network, as well as the business of facilitating open government. Read more.

The National Data Catalog is an open platform for government data sets and APIs, making it easy to find datasets by and about government, across all levels (federal, state, and local) and across all branches (executive, legislative, and judicial). The data here is imported from several sources and curated by our staff. Currently, we catalog data from:

• Data.gov
• Washington, D.C.
• Utah
• The Sunlight Foundation and its partners

Transparency Data is a central source for federal lobbyist registrations and federal and state campaign contributions. Here you can begin your search, find the information you need, and then download records of what acandidate has received, what an individual has given, how much an organization has spent on lobbying, and many other queries.

Das krasseste Erlebnis kam gleich zu Anfang: eine Vorstellungsrunde mit drei Worten von allen (!) 250 Teilnehmern in gemeinsamer Runde (hat gar nicht so lange gedauert, wie man jetzt denken könnte, und war durchaus sehr erhellend). Sehr amerikanisch. :-) Daneben gab es viele interessante Vorträge, eine Übersicht findet sich im [Wiki http://barcamp.org/Tcamp-Sessions], dort finden sich auch viele Links zu neuen und aktuellen Open Data-Projekten in Amerika, sowie interessante Einblicke und Anregungen, über was gerade so diskutiert wird und wo die Probleme so liegen – aus amerikanischer Sicht. Eine gute Zusammenfassung der Veranstaltung bietet auch dieser Artikel der Washington Post. Ansonsten ist über das TransparencyCamp auch von Teilnehmern im Anschluss der Konferenz schon eine Menge geschrieben worden, eine gute Übersicht erhält man z.B. durch eine Blog-Suche bei Google.

Drafting Guidelines for Government Data Catalogs

A major focus of the Sunlight Labs is to push government to publish its data online. In recent months, we’ve gained in-depth familiarity with government data catalogs through our work on the National Data Catalog. The most prominent example of a data catalog is data.gov. Since its launch last year, a handful of states and cities have followed suit with their own efforts. As more data catalogs come online, we want to make sure their contents are open and exchangeable. We want to determine how to best structure the data catalog itself, and we want to ensure that the metadata it contains — the data about the data — exists in the most accessible way possible.

Weiter unten formulieren sie einen ersten zusammenfassenden Vorschlag:

• Ensure that you have enough metadata to closely follow the vocabulary.
• If publishing the catalog as a website, use the Microformat on the data detail pages.
• If publishing an API, use XML or JSON in conjunction with Resource-Oriented principles.
• If publishing the data catalog as a bulk download, use XML, JSON, or CSV.
• To publish updates of entries in the catalog, use Atom.

“Government transparency is critical to creating a better democracy, and of highest importance in how I cast my vote. I pledge, through my sustained engagement, to hold public officials accountable for being open and transparent.”

We seek to create a transparent government built on open data and information. We believe a transparent government is one more deserving of our trust, allowing its citizens the ability to fully participate, collaborate and hold government accountable as our Founders intended.

In einem Blogpost für die Sunlight Foundation schreibt Jake Brewer:

Well, friends, it’s time to start turning our talk into something with impact. Today, we are launching the Public=Online campaign to put public pressure on government to be more open and transparent. This is our new website where all the information about the campaign will be: http://PublicEqualsOnline.com

It’s a completely non-partisan campaign with the first goal of making government transparency a major issue in the upcoming mid-term elections.

Ultimately, Public=Online is focused on getting government to pass the transparency laws we need – laws that put government information online in real-time where we can use it – and we’re going to do that by building a demand for transparency that is so large it cannot be ignored by politicians.

Interessant in diesem Zusammenhang auch die neueste Stellungnahme des EFF zum Freedom of Information Act: EFF Testifies in Congress on Transparency

Today, EFF Senior Counsel David Sobel testified in a congressional hearing on the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) and the Obama administration. David’s testimony outlined the disconnect between the White House’s strong message on open government and the bureaucratic resistance to transparency in general.

In einem bemerkenswerten Artikel beschreibt Jake Brewer von der Sunlight Foundation die verschiedenen gesellschaftlichen Instanzen, ihre Rollen und ihr Zusammenspiel für einen transparenten Staat: Introducing the Cycle of Transparency

Government transparency is that rarest of political phenomena — a great idea with support across the political spectrum and popularity among the public. Yet, here we are in the 21st century with every tool we would need to make government more transparent and accountable, and still we are operating with a government that often behaves as it did in the 19th century.

So, transparent government is a good thing, but we do not yet have one. Now what?

This “Cycle of Transparency” demonstrates, in one image, the specific actions and the variety of actors that need to work together to create the open, transparent government we seek. We hope this graphic can be a useful tool in thinking about how to make city, state, federal, and even international governments more transparent.

Each type of actor and action complements the others in the Cycle to make every other element easier, or even possible at all. Of great importance is that just about anyone – from hardcore Internet developers to academics to government staff to reporters to activists – has a place in it.

Marshall Kirkpatrick schreibt dazu in einem Artikel auf ReadWriteWeb:

Unfortunately all this information is displayed quite simply; there is as of yet no deep personalization as in Sunlight’s years-old and fabulous OpenCongress project, there’s no search and the app doesn’t make use of the iPhone’s push capabilities. It’s not a bad start, but there is a lot of potential for an iPhone app to make Congressional activity a much more engaging part of peoples’ day-to-day lives.

Asked about push notifications, Josh Ruihley, Sunlight’s Technical Program Officer told us. “It’s definitely on the road map. Currently, every document, hearing and floor update you see in the app is tagged by the piece of legislation it is related to. Our next phase is to actually represent those relationships in the UI.”