The Changelog: Software Development, Open Source

Open Government and the Citizen Coder (Interview)

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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!

    ...more
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