Fwd: [sunlightlabs] Digest for sunlightlabs@googlegroups.com - 5 Messages in 2 Topics

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John Scott III

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Oct 5, 2012, 2:39:18 PM10/5/12

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From: sunlig...@googlegroups.com
Date: October 5, 2012 2:31:55 PM EDT
To: Digest Recipients <sunlig...@googlegroups.com>
Subject: [sunlightlabs] Digest for sunlig...@googlegroups.com - 5 Messages in 2 Topics
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Today's Topic Summary
Group: http://groups.google.com/group/sunlightlabs/topics

IRC channel for civic tech developers? [4 Updates]

Public domain US legal data and code [1 Update]

IRC channel for civic tech developers?

Steven Clift <cl...@e-democracy.org> Oct 05 09:24AM -0500

Perhaps among mysociety, sunlight, cfa, open plans, etc. there are
already some useful places where civic tech developers hang out in
real-time and provide cross-project coding advice/tips/etc. ... if
there are channels, where should I point our new developers?

If there are not cross-project IRC channels, is this a good idea?

For a civic-based project that relies on tech contractors and
volunteers rather than having tech folks at the core, we need places
to plug-in!

Thanks,
Steven Clift
E-Democracy.org

P.S. Meet Bill Bushey, our new tech lead:
http://tech.mn/news/2012/10/03/know-this-nerd-william-bushey/ Right
now he is focused on the python-based GroupServer online groups tool
that we use - http://groupserver.org/groups/development - and we are
also plotting a Drupal hack-a-thon on e-block tools that include VOIP
options for extreme accessibility -
http://groups.drupal.org/node/251383

Steven Clift - http://stevenclift.com
Executive Director - http://E-Democracy.org
Twitter: http://twitter.com/democracy
Tel/Text: +1.612.234.7072

Eric Mill <er...@sunlightfoundation.com> Oct 05 11:02AM -0400

I don't know of one right now. At the PMO conference in April, Benjamin
Ooghe-Tabanou created #openparliament on FreeNode - it seems to have died
off, but could always be resurrected.

--
Developer | sunlightfoundation.com

Jason Blum <jason...@gmail.com> Oct 05 11:22AM -0400

On a sort of related note (and apologies to folks I've already
contacted for cross-posting), some of us are starting up a "listserve
lottery" at http://nerdServe.org, inspired by http://thelistserve.com/, but
specifically for civic tech developers / hackers / makers / govies / etc.

The idea is to randomly select one subscriber each day to email all the
other subscribers with a few words on anything they like - but hopefully
something related to their work, their tooling, process, philosophy,
something they'd like to build, collaborate on, etc.

It's a daily email to inspire, expose you to unfamiliar technologies and
practices, introduce you to folks who might not attend the same
conferences, or hang out on the same IRC, but may be working on the same
problems.

We'll fire things up once we reach 100 subscribers, after which time we'll
require a recommendation from an existing subscriber. We'll moderate out
anything offensive. Lottery winners will have one week to draft their
emails. Winners will be selected randomly, so there's nothing keeping you
from being selected more than once. Your email will never be shared,
unless you include it in your message. All content is
http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0/.

I can't identify subscribers until they choose to do so in their own posts,
but I think folks will be excited by the notoriety of many of the folks who
have already signed up. I hope folks on these lists will consider joining!

Thanks

-Jason

Dan Schultz <sli...@gmail.com> Oct 05 11:33AM -0400

This exists!

It's called #opennews and it is fairly well populated.

Server is: irc.mozilla.org

- Dan

--
Dan Schultz
P: (215) 400-1233
E: schu...@mit.edu
T: @slifty
W: http://www.slifty.com

Public domain US legal data and code

Eric Mill <er...@sunlightfoundation.com> Oct 05 11:30AM -0400

Hi all,

I've been working for the last month or two with Josh Tauberer (of
GovTrack.us <http://govtrack.us/>) and Derek Willis on a project to produce
a public domain scraper and dataset from THOMAS.gov <http://thomas.gov/>,
the official source for legislative information for the US Congress.

It's a reasonably well documented set of Python scripts, which you can find
here:
https://github.com/unitedstates/congress

We just hit a great milestone - it gets everything important that THOMAS
has on bills, back to the year THOMAS starts (1973). We'vepublished and
documented <https://github.com/unitedstates/congress/wiki> all of this data
in bulk, and I've worked it into Sunlight's pipeline, so that searches for
bills in Scout<https://scout.sunlightfoundation.com/search/federal_bills/freedom%20of%20information>
use
data collected directly from this effort.

The data and code are all hosted on Github on a
"unitedstates<https://github.com/unitedstates/>"
organization, which is right now co-owned by me, Josh, and Derek - the
intent is to have this all exist in a common space. To the extent that the
code needs a license at all, I'm using a public domain
"unlicense<https://github.com/unitedstates/congress/blob/master/LICENSE>"
that should at least be sufficient for the US (other suggestions welcome).

There's other great stuff in this organization, too - Josh made an amazing
donation of his legislator
dataset<https://github.com/unitedstates/congress-legislators>,
and converted it to YAML for easy reuse. I've worked that dataset into
Sunlight's products already as well. I've also moved my legal citation
extractor <https://github.com/unitedstates/citation> into this organization
-- and my colleague Thom Neale has an in-progress parser for the US
Code<https://github.com/unitedstates/uscode>,
to convert it from binary typesetting codes into JSON.

Github's organization structure actually makes possible a very neat
commons. I'm hoping this model proves useful, both for us and for the
public.

-- Eric

--
Developer | sunlightfoundation.com

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