update 1-5-11, looking ahead to public launch

[David Moore :: OpenCongress]

Hi everyone, David with PPF here, thanks to the new members of our G-
Group here. We warmly welcome your thoughts & feedback. Quick-fast OG
updates below.

The PPF team and I are excited to launch OpenGovernment this month --
we've been working on this beta version for about three-quarters of a
year, so it's been a significant endeavor for us. I believe we have a
nice solid beta for the public to play with, a compelling use case for
rolling out this model to other locales, and a valuable open platform
for developers of all backgrounds to improve & remix. Can't say this
enough: open-source and open standards means OG can and hopefully will
spread far & wide.

In the short term, the timeline looks something like this -- we'll
soon be inviting members of this Google Group to a preview version of
the site, where you can submit your feedback and report issues using
our project management system, Lighthouse App ::

https://participatorypolitics.lighthouseapp.com/projects/47665-opengovernment/overview

... that's not quite ready to start this week, but we're aiming for
next week, and in advance, you can sign up for free using the link in
the upper-right hand corner, and start poking around. Thanks for your
patience as we gear up towards this preview.

Going forward, this Google Group will be used for a variety of
purposes centralizing knowledge around OG: developer chat & questions,
in-depth questions from users (not routine site issues, those will be
submitted to us via ZenDesk user support), ideas for enhancements,
sustainability & funding ideas, collaborative volunteer tasks, and
more.

Volunteers: if you're not a web developer, you can still help us w/
our crowdsourced project to obtain social media accounts and public
schedule info for members of the CA & TX state legislatures. All the
info you need is here on our Drumbeat page from the always-outstanding
Mozilla folks ::

https://www.drumbeat.org/project/opengovernment-needs-open-data

... we're simply capturing the data in a G-spreadsheet at the moment,
which will be fine for our purposes now. Going forward, with more
programming support or resources, we can make the volunteer process of
crowdsourcing gov't data for OG smoother & more enjoyable.

Developers: We look forward to encouraging a diverse (in terms of
skills, background, interests, time commitments, and other) community
of volunteers hacking on our code. (Our sibling non-profit, the
Participatory Culture Foundation, runs a large open-source software
project, the Miro video player, so we have direct appreciation for the
power of volunteers tackling little issues in a swarm, not to mention
the occasional major contribution from dedicated individuals.)

If you want to improve this site's features, get started by
downloading and setting up OG on your machine. Our README on GitHub
contains complete installation instructions ::

https://github.com/opengovernment/opengovernment/blob/master/README.md

... and you can drop by the IRC channel anytime: chat.freenode.net
channel #opengovernment . (I'm user: davidrussellmoor).

We'll be writing & talking more about this as we launch, but OG is
truly a community project, aggregating a variety of data sources.
We're big-time sticklers about attribution & shout-outs to our valued
data partners, in short: Sunlight Labs' Open State Project for
legislative data; Google News & Blog Search for related article
citations; Project VoteSmart for issue-group analysis and more;
FollowTheMoney.org for campaign donation data; and don't forget the
OpenCongress API ::

http://www.opencongress.org/about/code

... but most of all, developers, please take a moment to join the Open
States Project mentioned above, they're terrifically pushing things
forward with their scrapers and providing the legislative backbone for
OG ::

http://openstates.sunlightlabs.com/

... more to come, then, but for now, thoughts & questions welcome
here, I check my RSS feed for this group several times a day, and look
forward to building more discussion around it once the preview version
is ready next week. Sound good, all?

-David

http://www.participatorypolitics.org/

p.s. We're always looking for more non-profit funding support of our
open-source work. If you can help us pursue any funding leads with
philanthropists or charitable foundations, don't hesitate to get in
touch with me ::: david @ ppolitics d0000t org. Won't it be useful to
have a free version of OpenCongress.org for your state & city? We're
excited too. Thank you.