DemocracyMap is an idea who's time has come. Come join Phil and others on the online working group at: http://forums.e-democracy.org/groups/democracymap
Go Phil Go! - Steve From: Philip Ashlock <[email protected]> Date: Fri, Feb 22, 2013 at 11:56 AM Subject: [cfabrigade] DemocracyMap: Help create the first open data set of government bodies and officials To: [email protected] DemocracyMap is a project to establish universal access to the basic information about every government body and government official that represents you. Currently it covers over 100,000 local officials at http://api.democracymap.org I've been working on this side project for a while, but it's just recently started to pick up some momentum and I think it provides a great opportunity to engage the brigade. Organizations like Govtrack, Sunlight and PPF have made major strides to provide universal access to national and state legislators, but when you start talking about counties and cities the coverage of open data is much more spotty. The good news is that much of this data is actually available in aggregate on a state by state basis, so I've started scraping those data sources and have already amassed a collection of about 100,000 city officials. I've stitched these data sources into an API that normalizes the data across each level of government, but so far there isn't a central data store, there are just a variety of scrapers on scraperwiki and an arsenal of supporting APIs like those from Sunlight. I've already identified most of the data sources for cities provided by each state and now it's a matter of going through them one by one and encouraging people to writing new scrapers. I've provided some documentation about this, but would love any additional feedback about outreach to engage contributors. You can find more information about the project and contributing at: http://api.democracymap.org/#get-involved There's a demo of the output of the normalized API at: http://api.democracymap.org/demo I also wrote up some more background about this project at: http://forums.e-democracy.org/groups/democracymap/messages/post/5JpNzBRpxjMYtpWTDRoQ61 I've started to coordinate more with Sunlight, PPF, MySociety, and OpenNorth on community building, creating standards, and helping to establish more tools to help government bodies better publish this data like MySociety's MapIt, but for now there's just a basic need to collect as much of the underlying data as possible. I'm also hoping to provide an interface to crowdsource some of the data collection in a non-technical, non-scraper way (like a structured wiki) but don't quite have that set up yet. One thing that would be helpful for non-technical folks to do would be to identify more data sources and add them to the wiki page I'm currently using for that. Any state or city that has a "blue book" or "blue pages" that is not available as raw data should be cited. Happy to field any questions and would love any help to spread the word about this for contributions tomorrow. Best, Phil -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "Brigade" group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to [email protected]. To post to this group, send email to [email protected]. Visit this group at http://groups.google.com/a/codeforamerica.org/group/brigade/?hl=en. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/a/codeforamerica.org/groups/opt_out. _______________________________________________ developers-public mailing list [email protected] https://secure.mysociety.org/admin/lists/mailman/listinfo/developers-public Unsubscribe: https://secure.mysociety.org/admin/lists/mailman/options/developers-public/archive%40mail-archive.com
