Sunday, May 01, 2011

#tcamp11 The opening Session kicks off

It is Sunday morning and day 2 of TransparencyCamp is kicking off. 

The objective is to kick off projects. The 3pm session is an Action Session. What do you want to build out of Transparency Camp.

Now for a couple of lightning presentations.

Andrew McLaughlin - Code for America. Talking about Civic Commons: Sharing technology for the public good.

Building common code stacks for common solutions. 

Michael Morisy - Muckrock.com

A simple way to submit Freedom of Information requests.

Started with a simple form. Added features when they knew it would be used.

Components: DocumentCloud, Django and Spot.us

Hard work now is okay - if you are working on the right things.

Think Small: Easier to build, maintain.

Play Favorites: Don't try to please everybody. Focus. Small core of passionate users.

FollowTheMoney.org - Providing the facts so you can draw conclusions.

Tracking political donations in all 50 states. Follow the influencers.

Journalists rely on the data because it is verifiable. Accuracy is with 1-2%.

David Moore - OpenGovernment.org - Participatory Politics Foundation.

Making legislative information accessible. Works with Sunlight Foundation's OpenStates Project.

Ruby on Rails open source code base that can be remixed for other projects.

RSS Feeds and Open API.

Demo of Beta message builder to congress that allows simple click to pull information about political contributions and other data in to an email.  Very Neat!

Erica Fowler talking about Wesleyan Media Project. Tracking all political tv ads in real time.

Sunlight and Knight Foundation were early sponsors. They now pull storyboards and full video files of TV ads.

A great ability to identify who is spending, on what, where and about what.  Can also show tone of Ads. Party Sponsored Ads are the most negative. Interest Groups are second most negative group.

CityCamp - 4 goals:

- bring together people to share perspectives about the cities they live in.
- Create and maintain patterns for local government
- Foster a community of practices
- Create outcomes from each camp.

Gov2.0 goes local. It is an Un-Conference.

Came from Transparency Camp and Gov2.0 and focused on local.

Open Source brand. 
Check out Meetups on meetup.com

/CityCamp+data+catalog
/CityCamp+ideation
/CityCamp+camp

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