Sunlight Foundation

I’m sitting here in building 40 at the GooglePlex in Mountain View and watching some of the best minds in technology, politics, media, and citizen engagement walk in the door to register for Transparency Camp West.

http://transparencycamp.org

Behind me is Sunlight board member Esther Dyson, Google’s Open Source lead Chris DiBona, the folks from Palantir, Jim Gilliam (who created one of my favorite new apps Act.ly among his many other creations), and technologist Carl Malamud. The weekend is sure to be a mashup of brilliance.

Transparency Camp is an unconference designed to convene a trans-partisan tribe of open government advocates from all walks — government representatives, technologists, developers, NGOs, wonks and activists — to share knowledge on how to use new technologies to make our government transparent and meaningfully accessible to the public.

An unconference basically means that there is no set agenda, so the participants here will be signing up to lead and attend workshops, discussions, or learning sessions on the topics that they are most interested in.

We’ll be tweeting all day from the event using hashtag #TCamp09, so you can follow us on Twitter and participate in the conversation whether you are here or not. Some of the Sunlight staff Twitter feeds will be updating regularly as well.  You can follow Sunlight’s:

Executive Director, Ellen Miller http://twitter.com/ellnmllr
Labs Director, Clay Johnson http://twitter.com/cjoh
Engagement Director, Jake Brewer, http://twitter.com/jakebrewer
Communications Director, Gabriela Schneider, http://twitter.com/stereogab
Policy Director, John Wonderlich, http://twitter.com/johnwonderlich
Sunlight Labs, Josh Ruihley http://twitter.com/jroo
Sunlight Labs, James Turk http://twitter.com/jamesturk

We’ll also be running a Twitter feed of Transparency Camp with event updates and highlights http://twitter.com/tcamp09

Can’t wait to update throughout the day!