AppsforAmerica - Open Idea Thread

[JoeSolomon]

All right gentlemen, it's time to win something.

The Sunlight Foundation has put together a contest for the best apps
to mashup one (or more) of their rich political transparency APIs.

It's called AppsforAmerica -- http://sunlightlabs.com/appsforamerica/

I think we all wanted 'ChangeFox' to be a power tool for political
engagement - And this is our chance to come up with those big ideas,
flush 'em out, and make something change-making.

What do you think and What are you thinking?

Best,

Joe

[Dietrich Ayala]

after joe's tweet about this yesterday, i mocked up an idea i've been
kicking around for an app like this (attached).

some goals of the design:

- making government tangible: the application should provide a way for
people to feel intimately aware of what their representatives are
doing in as close to real-time as possible, in order to increase
awareness of the day-to-day activities of government in a way that's
reasonable for normal folks to keep up with. location updates, and
daily vote reports create a sense of government that is tangible and
nuanced.

- personalization: the user can provide their zip+4 in order to have
the application provide state- and district-specific information. news
and twitter search feeds could reflect issues the user tagged as
interesting, and issues specific to their locale. on a "neighborhood"
tab, could show donation information,

- awareness and accountability: providing a way to learn about your
governmental representatives' activities and influences at a glance,
with pathways for further research. for each elected representative,
could show graphs of industry and lobbyist contributions. could show
their event schedule, so it's easy to see which groups and causes they
spend time with.

- platform for action: instead of just notifying citizens about their
representatives activities, provide a mechanism for feedback on
*specific* issues. eg: a view of "what's on senator X's plate today"
would include talkback boxes for the specific issues, votes or floor
debates being referred to. the box could directly communicate with
representatives who have public email addresses, otherwise load a
browser window with the rep's feedback form.

my vision of this is somewhere between tweetdeck and a statistics
dashboard: clean, real-time and configurable. in my (totally biased)
opinion, it would be cool to ship it as a Firefox extension *and* a
standalone XULRunner application, but it could probably be done as a
web app as well.

-d

[Dietrich Ayala]

obama's hired a "director of citizen participation":
http://www.readwriteweb.com/jobwire/2009/01/obama-hires-silicon-valley-exe.php

another potential vector for citizen input!

i wonder how long until we see reddit.whitehouse.gov? :)

[Joe Solomon]

Dietrich and crew -- This rocks AND is the future!! I just tweeted a link to the mockup to confirm my gut:

@bella_b --
"holy crap that is awesome! definite potential as a web app, maybe with something more robust as standalone?"
"what i particularly like is the ability to focus on what MY reps are doing. what about feedback loops? how could it be 2-way?"
@rootwork "LOVE it"
@tominhaler "would you believe that i independently had almost the same idea last week??"

Ok, I wanted to share those :)

I'm VERY excited about this idea and helping to bring the Civic Engagement Hub to life!

Some suggestions:

Maybe just sticking to a national lens - your president/senators/congress reps and corresponding bills and actions and potentially research (State/local and My Neighborhood/District might be best set for a later version)

Perhaps explore the left hand column as an update column but also as a way to focus the main tabs. So if you click "R. Wyden", for example, the tabs would show the data that corresponded to R. Wyden.  You'd see his latest news, actions, bills, political contributions, etc.  Would President Obama be the default view?

Possibly add an Issues area to the left hand column.  Maybe users could check "x" # of the boxes for the issues they care about when they install the add-on.  OpenCongress has a bonanza of issues - could be worth finding a way to bridge some or all of them - http://www.opencongress.org/issue/alphabetical/A

Explore what the "News" tab would include. There's this trend, spearheaded by AllTop and others to box news up in difference sources.  This might work.  Like a top left box for latest Google News, top right for latest YouTube (C-Span?), another box for Flickr, etc.  We could think of the top news and media feeds we want to bridge. 

Maybe add a Bills Tab.

Potentially make the news tab, likely to be most dynamic and addictive, the default view tab.


This is going to be big, I have a hunch.  Is there a tool we could use to draw notes on top of the mockup?

Best,

Joe

[Abimanyu Raja]

I'm sorry I've been unresponsive.

What happened to this idea? Is there enough time to start working on this for AppsforAmerica? I'm still interested. :)

- Abi

2009/2/4 Joe Solomon <j...@engagejoe.com>

[Dietrich Ayala]

I haven't had time to work on it :(

Attached is an updated mockup, incorporating various changes Joe and I
talked about.

-d

On Wed, Mar 4, 2009 at 9:07 AM, Abimanyu Raja <abiman...@gmail.com> wrote:
> I'm sorry I've been unresponsive.
>
> What happened to this idea? Is there enough time to start working on this
> for AppsforAmerica? I'm still interested. :)
> - Abi
>
>
> 2009/2/4 Joe Solomon <j...@engagejoe.com>

> - Show quoted text -

> - Show quoted text -
> >
>

[Dietrich Ayala]

attachment fail! here it is :)

[Joe Solomon]

I still think this idea is game-changing :0)

I mentioned to Dietrich last night that that if you incorporated ways ppl could take actions from any or all of Social Actions' 40+ partners (including PolicyPitch) it'd be eligible for Social Actions' Change the Web Challenge - a contest I'm working on, so wouldn't be able to take on a direct role

AppsforAmerica submission deadline - March 31st (Top prize, 15k)
Social Actions Change the Web Deadline - April 3rd (Top prize, 5k)

Best,

Joe

[Abimanyu Raja]

I think this is pretty cool. Just the Status area alone is awesome (I'm surprised it hasn't been done before. has it?). I still need some time to ponder over the rest of the functionality.

Anyway, I'm in if anyone else is willing to rush for the March 31st deadline!! :)

Re: the implementation, having worked for the last few months mostly on FF extensions, I'm also biased towards it. But my brain says this would be better done as a web app. A couple of reasons (1) Doesn't have any functionality that would require it to be a extension (so why force the user to install something?) & (2) I find XUL UI very clunky (of course, we can just do HTML in a firefox extension but see (1)). If we agree to do it as a web app, what language should we use?

And.. is all the information we want available?

- Abi

2009/3/5 Joe Solomon <j...@engagejoe.com>

[Dietrich Ayala]

Yeah agreed it should be a web app... ideally exposing the data so
other clients can be written as well. Using any non-web platform as
the core is effectively a restriction on the availability to some set
of people.

I'm definitely interested in working on it, but am swamped so don't
have much time to contribute :(

[Seth Wagoner]

A few quick thoughts:

* I think the engagement hub mock-up looks very good.
* It falls into the category of "should exist" and also "surprised it
doesn't exist already". Are there missing infrastructure blocks that
have prevented something like this from being built? Or is it that the
APIs have only recently been created?
* eg Is there a lack of an API for sending feedback to congress? If
so, then is someone working on *that* problem and can we work with
them?
* Is the incentive for feedback reduced by the lack of response to
it, and is that partly due to the lack of tools on the congress side
of the equation? Essentially one wants to improve the feedback loop
for citizen interraction, better applications, tools and APIs on both
sides of the equation are a part of that, and will increase the
incentives for adoption by both citizens and politicians.
* This sort of personalized engagement hub is a nice demonstration of
what ought to be possible, and probably is possible.
* Designing it as APIs + Interface is the way to go. Twitter perfect
demonstration of that. So the question is, are all the APIs already
available? I haven't had time to look.
* Karl and I are both hideously busy this month. But it seems to me
that there are many people out there with the skill to achieve this,
now the vision has been set. It's just a matter of "are the APIs
there" and "who's available?". Oh and also "is this really new? Is
there really nothing out there that does this already?"
* Final thought: Potentially a great demonstration app for a web-app
framework. So maybe we find a team that's trying to promote their
framework and ask them to help build this, or point us in direction of
people who will help.

-- Seth.