We know that the Internet can be used to donate to political candidates. Or make fun of them. But, with a little help from citizens, it can also make government work better. First, we’ll look at a handful of sites that aggregate government data and present it in useful ways. Then we’ll explore the process of distilling government data dumps and APIs to build our own sites.

1. Hackin’ on
Government

2. “How can the web
make government
better?”

3. …what does “better”
mean?

4. My definition:

5. More transparency

6. Shorter feedback loops

7. Better identification
of signal
within the noise

8. What has the political
blogosphere (ugh)
already done
for politics?

9. What suits
the web
to politics?

10. It’s great at archiving

11. It’s easy to reach

12. It can support
greater depth

13. Examples:

14. FactCheck.org

15. PolitiFact: Truth-O-Meter

16. PolitiFact: The Obameter

18. OpenCongress

19. Full text of bills
(comment on individual paragraphs!)

20. The world of
government
can accommodate
more developers

21. Open-source software
advocates
will feel at home with the
ideals

22. The public sector doesn’t have
the talent or resources
to do it themselves

23. You don’t need anyone’s
permission

24. So how do I
build my own?

25. Getting data

26. A vast amount
of government data
is available…

27. …but it’s sloppy

28. THOMAS

29. Enter GovTrack

30. http://govtrack.us

31. Makes
congressional data
machine-readable

32. XML data dumps

33. open-source
and
non-profit

34. Sunlight Foundation

35. Sunlight Labs

36. Case study:

37. Filibusted
http://filibusted.us

38. The U.S. Senate allows
for a stall tactic
called the filibuster

39. To end a filibuster,
you need a successful
cloture vote

40. The number of cloture votes
is on a major upswing
in recent decades…

41. …reflecting increasing use
of the filibuster

42. Methodology:

43. Keep a list of current senators
(using Sunlight Labs’
Congressional Data API)

44. Every night, check GovTrack
for new Senate votes
(http://www.govtrack.us/data/us/111/votes.all.index.xml)

45. Any new cloture votes? If so…

46. Get information about the bill
and how each senator voted

47. Put it all on a page

48. Tweet about it!

49. Keep stats on senators

50. Keep stats on the 111th
Congress

51. Present interesting data views

52. Ingredients:

53. Rails, a tiny database,
and a bit of Ruby for parsing
XML.

54. Read the code:
https://github.com/savetheclocktower/filibusted

55. Now it’s your turn

56. Data sources:

57. GovTrack data dumps:
http://govtrack.us/data/
The Drumbone API:
http://services.sunlightlabs.com/docs/Drumbone_

58. OpenCongress API:
http://www.opencongress.org/api
Legislator information,
bill trends,
most-blogged-about items

59. Sunlight Labs APIs:
http://services.sunlightlabs.com/
Legislator information,
campaign contributions,
state-by-state legislative data

60. New York Times Congress API:
http://developer.nytimes.com/docs/congress_api
Legislator information,
nominees, bills, votes

61. data.gov

62. Launched in May 2009

63. Drinking from the firehose

64. What about
state government?

65. The Open State
Project
http://openstates.sunlightlabs.com/

66. Things to consider:

67. Is it OK to have
a point of view?

68. (of course)

69. Everyone has bias

70. Data-based methodology
can defend against
accusations of bias

71. Your conclusions
may be opinionated,
but the underlying data isn’t

72. Argue in good faith
and play devil’s advocate

73. User participation?

74. sure, but be careful of:

75. 1. spam

76. (you'll get spammed,
even if you rel='nofollow',
and even if you escape HTML)

77. Use Akismet
or something like it

78. 2. sampling bias

79. Who visits web sites about
government?

80. OpenCongress’s page
for the HCR bill:

81. Don’t use data from your users
to draw conclusions
about the general public

82. 3. vitriol

83. anonymity + political passion =
angry rhetoric

84. About the HCR bill:

85. Be tolerant, but
know what you’re in for

86. “ Politics is a strong
and slow boring
of hard boards. ”
— Max Weber