Open Government and the Citizen Coder (Interview)

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. Join the discussion Changelog++ members support our work, get closer to the metal, and make the ads disappear. Join today! 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!