Politics

OpenGovernment launch day round-up

By Sunlight Foundation & Participatory Politics Foundation

Yesterday was a fulfilling launch day for all of us at OpenGovernment — thanks to everyone who checked us out & helped spread the word. We build this site as a public resource, and are continually tweaking it in response to your feedback and actual usage patterns, so please don’t hesitate to hit us with your opinion. We’re interested and input from one person can have an impact to make the site a better tool for everyone. (That said, there is a lot we have planned to come, too, about which more below.) (Image at right: a CA bill page on OG.)

Tuesday’s launch 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. This is as good a time as any to remind everyone reading to check out the community-driven Open States project, the data from which will form the legislative backbone of OpenGovernment for all 50 states.

We’re still spreading the word and conducting outreach around this beta version of the site, and technically as of last night’s writing it had only been live for about 9 hours, but with those caveats, 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 & catch more screenshots over at the new OpenGovernment blog, and don’t forget to subscribe to the RSS feed to receive posts automatically. If you’re into micropublishing, which I’ve heard is really catching on, the official acc’t for news & updates will be open_gov on Twitter and opengovernment on Identi.ca, with a brand-new social networking group on the Facebook commercial service. And let us know what you think of this beta version!

Full post as published by Open Congress on January 19, 2011 (boomark / email).