[open-government] introduction from the Participatory Politics Foundation

Mon Oct 25 19:26:41 UTC 2010

Hi everyone,

Jonathan Gray invited us to send an email introduction to the list,  
glad to be in closer touch with you all.

I'm with the Participatory Politics Foundation, a U.S.-based non- 
profit that creates open-source software and websites for civic  
engagement ::

http://www.participatorypolitics.org/

... we created and maintain OpenCongress.org, one of a healthy  
ecosystem of open-gov websites over here, built with support from  
founding partners the Sunlight Foundation and inspired in large part  
by the work of the team at MySociety. Our site's info is entirely open  
& freely-licensed, please feel free to dive in to our code and check  
out our API  & semantic MediaWiki offerings ::

http://www.opencongress.org/about/code

... in addition to encouraging transparency & accountability in the  
U.S. Congress (w/ Sunlight and GovTrack and others), we're allies in  
the efforts to create open standards for civic data (w/ the teams at  
OpenPlans & CivicCommons & others), to organize for comprehensive  
electoral reform & fair U.S. elections (w/ FixCongressFirst & other  
orgs. in the reform movement), preserving net neutrality (w/ our  
longtime friends at FreePress and other advocates), and in building  
open-source software for independent & community media with our  
sibling non-profit, the Participatory Culture Foundation.

Ever since we launched OpenCongress way back in 2007, we've been asked  
the sensible question, "When will there be a version of OpenCongress  
for my state or city"? And especially: "When will there be a version  
of OpenCongress for my country?" As we all know, there's absolutely  
mammoth amounts of work to do on standards and access and more,  but  
we hope to move things forward a step with our new project, another  
joint effort with the Sunlight Foundation & the Open State Project at  
their Labs.

It's OpenGovernment.org, a free and open-source web application for  
aggregating and displaying government data ::

http://opengovernment.org/

... you'll see that's still a placeholder page at the moment, as the  
project is still in early development, but we hope it serves as a  
useful platform for other countries to make their legislative info  
more accessible. OpenGovernment, like OpenCongress, combines official  
government data with news & blog & social media coverage from around  
the open Web, with options to add in any available data streams of  
campaign contributions, political issue-area analysis, video of  
government proceedings, and more. The resulting website enables  
visitors to research, track, comment, and share bills and votes by  
their elected officials, wrapped in what we believe to be the most  
user-friendly interface on the Web for legislative info.

Carl Tashian, cc'd, is our Director of Technology and lead developer  
on OpenGovernment -- he & I are looking into options to hopefully be  
able to make it to London for the conference on Nov. 18-19th to meet  
and participate in-person with all the dedicated folks on this list.  
In the meantime and ongoing, we hope you'll get in touch if you have  
particular questions about OG (as we call it for short) or are  
interested in joining the development process more actively. I'll stay  
in touch with updates on when we'll be releasing a preview version of  
OpenGovernment for preview & public input. Overall, we couldn't  
believe more strongly in propagating open standards for a wide variety  
of government data (not only legislation but also, for example:  
budgets, citizen issue-reporting, video of committee hearings,  
transparent procurement processes, etc.) ... of course, many of you on  
this OKFN list-serv are making good progress on many of these areas,  
which we're thrilled to see, and with OpenGovernment and forthcoming  
projects we hope to make good use of what's out there and contribute  
back to the public commons.

For more info, please see this video of a brief presentation I gave  
last month as part of an opengov panel at the Personal Democracy Forum  
- EU conference in Barcelona, where I highlighted a few use cases &  
screenshots of OpenCongress and gave an overview where we're headed  
re: international opengovdata with OpenGovernment ::

http://bit.ly/OpenCongress_PdFEU

http://participatorypolitics.org/projects/

... and my contact info is below, please feel free to get in touch  
with me & Carl anytime. Hope to meet many of you in-person in a few  
weeks in London, and look forward to keeping up with this list.

Thanks,
-David

----
David Moore
Participatory Politics Foundation
m: (917) 753-3462
AIM / Jabber / Skype :: davidmooreppf
www.participatorypolitics.org
www.opencongress.org

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