A large contingent of Sunlighters are heading to Austin this week for Netroots Nation, the 3rd annual gathering of Kos bloggers and others in the progressive blogosphere (that used to be called Yearly Kos). (Get ready for all of the #nn08 hashtag tweets!)

Try to connect with us if you are there. You can find us in the exhibit hall (along with folks from the Center for Responsive Politics,  National Institute on Money in State Politics and OpenCongress.org. We’ll be right up front, across from MAPLight.org’s booth, so you can’t miss us.

Sunlight colleagues are on a number of panels. Start your Friday morning off with one that is chaired by Sunlight consultant Micah Sifry, as he and his panelists discuss how the next administration can leverage the Web and the participatory transparent culture that goes along with it, to make our government work better.

That panel should inspire you to help improve our government. Join Sunlight’s John Wonderlich to find out how. He and OpenLeft blogger Matt Stoller will give you the scoop on the future of advocacy and what political influence should look like in a networked social environment. Their panel, “Lobbying Congress: Advocacy and Digital Empowerment” will be held on Saturday@ 1:30 p.m.

Right after that panel, come learn more about how to use the sites created by our ‘transparency posse’ during our workshop, “Insanely Useful Tools You Can Use to Keep Track of Congress and State Lawmakers” on Saturday @ 3pm. This will be moderated by Sunlighter, Paul Blumenthal.

While you’re in Austin, you might want to test how your political trivia smarts compare to Paul’s during a “Pub Quiz” organized by Dkos front pager AdamB to be held during Happy Hour on Friday at the local Champions Sports Bar. (Stop by our booth for more details.) Make sure to “study” beforehand by playing our new PoliQuiz game. We’ll release all of our answers in API format so they can be mashed up with relevant data. What else would you expect?!

See you in Austin!

0 Comments

Blogger, e-government guru and fellow panelist at PDF, David Stephenson, writing at The Huffington Post profiles a speech he’s to give at this week’s Netroots Nation Conference in Austin. David makes the case that government should free up its vast stores of information to the Web 2.0 revolution. This would allow citizens to create “data visualizations,” cool graphics that also help to make information understandable for the rest of us. He quotes Edward Tufte, the so called da Vinci of Data (who’s thinking of Italy?) “Often the most effective way to describe, explore and summarize a set of numbers — even a very large set — is to look at pictures of those numbers.” David says that such graphics “highlight inefficiencies, break down barriers between programs and agencies, and (potentially) leverage “the wisdom of crowds” both within agencies and among the general public to find creative new approaches.”

David highlights Everyblock Chicago, Neighborhood Knowledge Los Angeles and the District of Columbia’s Citywide Data Warehouse as examples of local governments freeing their data to the public.

Sunlight couldn’t agree more that’s why many of our analyses also rely on strong visualizations to bring the story home.

Lastly, my blogging and that of other Sunlighters will be light for the next few weeks as we all seek some  summertime  R and R.

0 Comments