[okfn-discuss] Fwd: HackingCongress.org

Sun Mar 22 17:14:43 UTC 2009

Yishay Mor flagged this up - looks interesting!

---------- Forwarded message ----------
Announcing: HackingCongress.org
            The intersection of civics & technology

            http://www.hackingcongress.org/

Our community is growing rapidly these days. And while TransparencyCamp
gave us a physical place to come together a few weeks ago, we're still a
little nomadic in the online world.

We're also a very diverse group. The fact that we all often have to
cross-post to the same set of lists indicates that we've got great inner
communities that focus separately on coding, policy, social media, etc.

HackingCongress.org is meant to be a neutral-ground home for the coder
community in the open government world. Really, it's just a links page.
But it's a links page with a nice Drupal theme you can proudly point to
and say "this is my movement". "Hacking" is, of course, a word with
several meanings. In the programming world it is very much a positive
term meaning something like "creative programming".

The site is running Drupal and anyone that creates an account can edit
any content on the site. So, it's basically a new wiki.

Right now you can find:

Community
---------

Links to the primary convergence locations for this community, the
Sunlight Labs and PoliParsers mail lists, the IRC channel #transparency,
the Planet oGosh blog aggregator, the oGosh Facebook group, and the
Upcoming Transparency Events page on the OpenCongress wiki.

Links to all of the other mail lists for our community (all of the one's
I've mailed here and some others).

Data & APIs
-----------

Then beginnings of a list of the databases and APIs that are available
for government transparency data. If you're a data source, add yourself
to the list or make sure I got your entry correct, please.

Projects
--------

Links to ongoing projects broken down by type-

  - Open-source coding projects like OpenCongress and Sunlight's
    Fifty States.

  - Policy projects like Open House/Senate.

  - Wiki projects like the new Wired gov data wiki.

It was everything I could come up with quickly. I'll be adding more as I
see them, but feel free to add your own project.

#transparency
-------------

Using a Drupal module you can enter the community's IRC channel
#transparency through the website.

Blog Aggregator
---------------

Recently I announced Planet oGosh, an aggregator bringing together a
whole bunch of blogs in the open government tech community. I'm changing
the URL to planet.hackingcongress.org.

Final Notes
-----------

Thanks to Kendall Clark for donating the domain name.

--
- Josh Tauberer
- GovTrack.us

http://razor.occams.info

"Yields falsehood when preceded by its quotation!  Yields
falsehood when preceded by its quotation!" Achilles to
Tortoise (in "Godel, Escher, Bach" by Douglas Hofstadter)

-- 
Jonathan Gray

Community Coordinator
The Open Knowledge Foundation
http://www.okfn.org