Blog - Articles Tagged 'PPF'

The team at the Participatory Politics Foundation is very pleased to announce that we've received a charitable grant from the Knight Foundation to take OpenGovernment.org down to the local level as a free & open-source public resource.

We're starting in two Knight Foundation communities over the next six months: Philadelphia, PA; San Jose, CA; as well as a third, Washington, D.C. We're searching for Rails programmers who want to make an impact in #opengov locally!

Our new work with the Knight Foundation is part of their exciting Tech For Engagement initiative, "founded on the ideal that technology has the power to transform our democracy." We're looking forward to extending the popular OpenCongress model of government transparency and civic engagement down to the city & local level - click through for more info.

I was pleased to present our work on OpenCongress at a panel discussion at Philanthropy New York:

The 2012 Election with MSNBC's Chris Hayes: Power Tools to Build a Better Democracy

Update, Sept. 18th: video of event has been posted. Chris leads off, I start 21:40 in presenting our work on OC. Here's a micropublishing update you can RT to spread the word. More info after the jump. 

The team behind OpenCongress - an open-source, not-for-profit project - has submitted a proposal to the Knight NewsChallenge. 

Help us out - click on the heart on this page to vote for our project :: 

What Matters Here - surfacing political issues from Twitter conversations in your city

You'll need to login or create a free Tumblr account, but it seriously only takes a minute, and helps us significantly. Thank you. Click through for more info on @WhatMattersHere.

The team behind OpenCongress submitted a proposal to the Knight NewsChallenge. Help us out -- vote for our idea here: 

What Matters Here - surfacing political issues from Twitter conversations in your city

In short, it's a new Web tool for finding urgent local political issues being discussed on Twitter and connecting people to lawmakers. Click through for more info on our proposal and please give us a "heart", it's easy and significantly helpful. (Image linked from some site called UpRoxx, by Column Five Media & InboxQ.)

As 2011 ends, the first session of the 112th U.S. Congress stumbles to a bad-faith curtain. The third branch of federal government in our representative democracy, Congress is down to a new record-low 11% approval rating, as per Gallup News this week. "This earns Congress a 17% yearly average for 2011, the lowest annual congressional approval rating in Gallup history," they report. USA #1 - we've hit a new bottom! These are the despised, fallible elected officials who write legislation shaping our laws, public policy priorities, & federal budget.

I'm pleased to have been asked to contribute a blog post on our work with OpenGovernment.org to VoxPopuLII, a legal research blog. Published today. Topics include the following: visceral contemporary public distrust of government; improved policy outcomes through deliberative democracy; mitigating systemic corruption through radical transparency; how researchers can use OpenGovernment to find & cite official bill text & legislative actions; OG's #opengov data partners & NGO allies; and our vision of making civic engagement as easy as using your favorite social networking service. Hope you'll read the post, click through for more info about it and a preview of what I think is its most share-able content.

We're very excited to announce that OpenGovernment was selected to be one of 8 finalists in the News category at South by Southwest Interactive's Accelerator contest, March 14-16th in the gem-of-a-town, Austin, TX. Looking forward to meeting & trading ideas w/ the other finalists & attending SxSW in general. We're honored to have been chosen and excited to show our work.

Read the full post at the OG Blog. We'll represent for radical transparency & comprehensive reform. Holler at us to say hi.

Yesterday's launch of OpenGovernment received a nice wave of reactions on the leading micro-blogging service. To highlight a few: Alex Howard of O'Reilly Radar (the wide-ranging @digiphile) placed it in the #opengov landscape (previously, as a civic org. to watch); Nick Judd of TechPresident held a nifty interview; and AFSCME's info center highlighted it as a new tool for their members.

Don't miss the blog post announcement from Ellen Miller, the Executive Director of our partners, the Sunlight Foundation; and another by Tom Lee, the Director of Sunlight Labs. (Image at right: a roll call visualization of a Louisiana bill, made uniquely user-friendly on OG.)

It's not too early to point out that the OpenGovernment web application is already generating unique info, in the form of the most-viewed bills & members (so far)... continue reading the full post (it gets pretty vocal) & check out more (and bigger) screenshots over at the new OpenGovernment Blog.