Have you used OpenCongress.org recently? Are you aware of all its cool features, from RSS feeds to Facebook widgets? Check it all out is this short screencast:

• OpenCongress.org: What’s Happening In Congress? by ryanne, November 2, 2008.

Are you a techie who has a passion for government information, transparency, coding, mashups, and/or web 2.0 tools? Then sign up for the Apps for Democracy contest!

In conjunction with the DC Government’s Office of the Chief Technology Officer, the contest is offering $20,000 in prizes to be given to 60 different creators. The goal of the contest is "to reward technology developers with cash prizes and public recognition for creating applications that are useful for the DC government and the citizens, visitors and businesses of Washington, DC."

For more information, visit the Apps for Democracy website, and you can follow the contest on Twitter or through their Facebook Group.

Dang...if only I was better at coding...

If you're like me, you want to keep track of the presidential race between Barack Obama and John McCain. I thought I'd share a few sites that I've bookmarked in order to keep up to the minute. My favorite site is Electoral-vote.com. E-V collects national and state polls and shows a nice map of the current electoral vote count. As new state polls are released, the maps, spreadsheets, tables, graphs, etc. are updated. There's also a comparison for that day in the 2004 presidential race, roll-over stats for how each state voted since 1992, and tracking of Senate and House elections.

Another site of interest is FiveThirtyEight "electoral projections done right." This one has lots of graphs, "tipping point" states, a return on investment index and more. 538 (the # of electors in the electoral college of course :-) ) also tracks governors' races. It's run by Nate Silver, a writer and baseball statistician. You know how crazy baseball fans are for data, so you know that this site is sucking up as much data as they can, chewing it up and serving it up in lots of different ways.

Also check out RealClearPolitics. This one pulls together news, blogs, editorials, polls and electoral maps (although the mapping feature is only for presidential race).

[Thanks David Weinberger/JoHo for the RealClearPolitics tip!]

The United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) has just announced the "Google Earth Outreach" partnership with google earth. The program will allow humanitarian agencies the ability to use Google Earth and Maps to "highlight their work on behalf of millions of refugees and other populations of concern in some of the world's most remote and difficult areas." All one needs is to download the google earth application and the UNHCR kml file, then launch the app and open the kml file (KML = Keyhole Markup Language). Navigate to a region -- like Chad, Iraq, Colombia or the Darfur region of Sudan -- and you'll get access to news, video and other information about the situation and daily life/struggles of refugees.

Check out the google earth gallery for other KML files that people have built -- from world energy consumption to Death valley driving tour to Yosemite 1/2 dome hikes to the Burke and Wills expedition of 1860! I haven't yet come across an FDLP KML file, but perhaps one of our readers would like to start one? It's as easy as creating a google map and clicking the button "view in google earth" at the top right of the map. This will automatically generate the KML file. You can then send it to admin AT freegovinfo DOT info and we'll post it to the site.

TechSoup's NetSquared mashup challenge pays out a total $100K this year to the best of 122 submitted projects.

I'm going to have way too much fun browsing through the project proposals. Casting my votes, though, is already proving difficult... Using user downtime? Massive mashup calendars? Warnings for hidden corporate abuses every time I make an online purchase?

Ohboyohboyohboyohboy.

And of course, many of these envisioned projects would not even be imaginable were it not for widely available and mostly reliable government information data sources.

An interactive web service created by federal scientists on the University of Arizona campus in cooperation with the state of Arizona Department of Water Resources with funding from the U.S. Geological Survey "brings formerly hard-to-get water information as close as a mouse click." (UA-based scientists make water data easy to find on Net, by B. Poole, Tucson Citizen, 03.14.2008)

• Arizona Ground-Water Conditions Interactive Map

Data for creating and presenting the layers of information on ground-water conditions came from the USGS National Water Information System (NWIS) and the Arizona Department of Water Resources Groundwater Site Inventory). A document describes how the site was created: An Online Interactive Map Service for Displaying Ground-Water Conditions in Arizona, By Fred D Tillman, Stanley A. Leake, Marilyn E. Flynn, Jeffrey T. Cordova, and Kurt T. Schonauer. USGS, National Water Availability and Use Program, Open-File Report 2007-1436, U.S. Geological Survey, Reston, Virginia 2007.

The Geological Survey map complements Arizona Wells, produced by Sustainability of semi-Arid Hydrology and Riparian Areas (SAHARA), a University of Arizona-based group that aims to foster information exchange. Arizona Wells includes much of the data used in the Geological Survey map and water quality data from the Arizona Department of Water Resources.

One of the reasons we need open, re-usable, downloadable government information is so that sites like these can be built to create new information and to make information that was once hard to use, easier to use. As the Tucson Citizen article says, "Before such interactive maps, the public had to find the data, then interpret the numbers and codes in the databases."

Congresspedia.org has just launched a new site called "Wiki the Vote," a project to build citizen-written profiles on each and every candidate for Congress in 2008. What a cool new tool. Not only will it be collaborative in terms of reader-editors, but collaborative in terms of data -- collating campaign contributions from Open Secrets campaign database together with reader-submitted information on every Congressional candidate for the 2008 cycle.

The project is starting with nearly 300 basic profiles to be expanded and updated by citizens, journalists and even the campaigns themselves (or those of their opponents). Unlike Wikipedia, people connected to the subjects of articles are free to add to them as long as their contributions are rhetoric-free and comprised of fully documented, verifiable facts. The citizen editors are assisted and fact-checked by professional editors.

The first set of articles is based on confirmed candidates according to 2008racetracker.com and will eventually expand to cover every candidate on the ballot in the primary and general elections next year. When the OpenSecrets.org 2008 congressional campaign contributions database goes online in a few weeks, the candidate profiles will also display live feeds tracking the money race and who is funding it.

I've posted about this earlier at my home blog, but I thought it was worth a revisit and fuller entry because it did not get the attention it deserved. The Sunlight Foundation, the group that has fostered Congresspedia , the Open House Project, & OpenCongress.org, held a government "mashup" competition in April. In May, the winner, Uninfluence , was announced and won $2000. What follows is a list of the winner and the top 5 finalists. The 'project descriptions' are copied from the Sunlight project page. Additional entries can also be found there.

Winner

Uninfluence
Developed by Skye Bender-deMoll and Greg Michalec.
Project Description: Uninfluence, is an interactive information visualization of state level political contribution data.
Screencast: http://sunlightlabs.com/mashupfinalists/unfluence/unfluence.html
Mashup: http://unfluence.primate.net/index.html

The Finalists

CityCon (First Runner Up)
Project Description: CityCon allows you to find detailed information about any member of the current 110th U.S. Congress.
Screencast: http://sunlightlabs.com/mashupfinalists/citycon/CityCon%20FInal.html
Mashup: http://www.tetonpost.com/citycon

OpenHearings Live (Second Runner Up)
Project Description: A mini-site of schedules for current and future Senate committee hearings. Includes links to live audio and video of hearings in progress, anRSS feed of live hearings, iCalendar schedules for all committees and hearings, and the ability to import the "Live Hearing" view into your personalized Google homepage.
Screencast: http://sunlightlabs.com/mashupfinalists/openhearingslive/OpenHearings.or...
Mashup: http://openhearings.org/live

EchoDitto's Congressional Similarity Visualizer
Project Description: Java applet that lets users explore which legislators vote most similarly to one another. (Detailed explanation on the site provides background on the statistical analysis the visualization represents.)
Screencast: http://sunlightlabs.com/mashupfinalists/Echoditto3/Echoditto3.html
Mashup: http://labs.echoditto.com/projects/sunlight/

Second Life Congressional Info
Project Description: A mashup of the Sunlight APIs with Second Life, creating an interactive info center (kiosk) at the virtual Capitol Hill - a pro-bono educational area - in Second Life. Visitors can (and do!) access the information in a venue where they can discuss the information in the context of politics, policy and place.
Screencast: http://sunlightlabs.com/mashupfinalists/secondlife4/Second%20Life4.html
Writeup: http://clearnightsky.com/node/288

State-Machine
Project Description: Data Visualization showing the relationship between members of Congress and political access committees. (Watchingscreencast and reading description highly recommended.)
Screencast: http://sunlightlabs.com/mashupfinalists/statemachine/State%20Machine%20-...
Mashup: http://state-machine.org/

-- Tim Dennis