Project Ideas
From Sunlabs wiki
Below are a list of ideas that could be done with Sunlight Labs data or that people in the "Transparency Community" have talked about doing. If you choose to do one, fill out the associated wiki page and send an email out to the labs mailing list so that folks know what you're up to and can possibly help you out. These are rough idea summaries. Some ideas for projects have more descriptions (and sometimes their status) outlined on the project pages themselves.
Technical Ideas
OpenSecrets Gmail Greasemonkey Extension
Build a greasemonkey extension on top of the OpenSecrets.org (or the FEC database itself) that tells you the campaign contributions of the person you've received an email from. (Another one that highlights emails from registered federal lobbyists?)
A Publish/Subscribe Network Infrastructure To Enhance The Flow Of Information
As regulatory agencies require publishing of business documents, there needs to be a way of assuring that each of those documents are published and logged in a standardized way, and there should be a mechanism so that all approved readers of those documents get them in a timely manner. This problem has been solved in many large businesses by employing a network of message brokers that route messages securely from publishers to multiple subscribers. The way to a transparent government will require an infrastructure to help make it happen. The infrastructure is neutral to the encoding format of the documents, and can handle any document format. The Java Messaging Service is a good example of this sort of system, and Apache's ActiveMQ is a free open source implementation.
This is a quick win-- just create an OPML file of the existing structure of the Federal Government agencies in all branches.
Ahead of the 2010 Census, create a website that shows maps of districts, how they've changed over subsequent redistricting/gerrymandering, some way to discern "fair" and "unfair" redistricting, and finally, what a fair 2010 redistricting might look like. The idea is to focus public attention on the redistricting process, and build pressure to keep the 2010 redistricting fair and accountable.
Technically speaking, this would work with real GIS data, like the kind that MobileCommons' Congress Lookup API uses. That API is an open source Rails app, so some examples of using GIS with Ruby can be seen in the source code.
Automatic Redistricting Process
There surely is an algorithm that, given a state with N congress-persons, could create a set of districts that all had equal population and each had a minimum border length. This would result in districts that were shaped sort of like circles, closely packed together, they would resemble hexagons. Allow some small percent border adjusting to account for existing county lines or natural boundaries, but that is all. That would put an end to gerrymandering. Build a map of the country using that model and propose adopting it in every state. A web app (maybe built with Ruby-on-Rails) could compare what is current to what it could be in each state, and help build a consensus for change.
The Case For an Event Listing Standard
To create (or evolve) a standard Data Interchange Format that co-exists with the hCalendar standard, while explicitly defining additional information that doesn't necessarily need to be displayed.
The goal is to establish a standard service across vendors to support real time assessment of collaborative campaigns working to influence Congress and the agencies. The service would then publish "real time" public interest traffic hot spot maps that would be available to the community of participants.
Build an open IMDB-like service for All 300,000+ elected officials in the country and build biographies on all of them much like the style of IMDB. Allow for community participation, submission and vetting.
We need to use the Internet to make it so that communicating to congress, whether you're an activist, lobbyist, advocacy group, or just John Q. Public is easy and effective. It should aggregate ideas and allow people to publicly send messages to congress and allow for the public to read those messages and see what their neighbors are telling their representatives. Get Represented takes a look at the GetSatisfaction.com model and tries to apply it to Congress.
Build blog plugins in WordPress, MovableType, etc. that allow bloggers to pull in data about lawmakers in blog posts (for instance, widgets from sunlightmediaservices.com) Could also provide, pull data from other sources like Watchdog.net, OpenSecrets, etc.
Create a bookmarklet for a web browser that scrapes the page the user is on, looks for members of Congress on that page, and then provides information about those members of Congress and the relationships between them and the other subjects in the article (Could use something like Open Calais)
A simple API call that polls against the Sunlight Labs API Lobbyist Namespace and tells you whether or not a given string is a registered federal lobbyist or not.
ReCaptcha for Federal Form Data
Lots of federal data (like for instance FARAdb) come in hand-written formats or non digitizable formats. Blech! We could create a project like ReCaptcha that serves as a human validation test service while digitizing this data.
Set up a centralized bug tracker for the Federal Government to track "known issues" with technology problems (i.e. clerk office's buggy XML feed, FEC contribution erroneous data, etc) so that developers in our community don't have to discover the problems over and over again.
Really simple-- upload a spreadsheet that has members of Congress' names on them (and whatever other information is in there). Allow the user to select which column has those names in them, parse the spreadsheet and return relevant information in the Sunlight Labs API appended to the sheet.
A read/write API containing nicknames matched to known entities with some intelligent search associated with it. The API would take nicknames for people, corporations, and other nouns.
People's Agenda and Ping the President
Create an open-source, people-driven web utility to propose, discuss, and come to consensus on the agenda our government should put into action in our name. Replace the ineffective and opaque contact form on whitehouse.gov with a utility where people are guided to sign on to existing proposals, communications and requests, add their additional comments if needed, and so unite to more effectively and transparently lobby the President - and the President can actually reply to their input.
Capital Words Improvements Wish list of ideas for Capital words.
A study, using government data, of different approaches to keep data in different data sets synchronized. A correction in one data set should flow to others. Also just used for getting data updates. Things to consider: gnipcentral.com feedsync mesh4x "data tethering" atom
Permalinks for THOMAS, the Library of Congress' Legislative Information System
A person who looks up legislation, or a report, or performs any kind of search from THOMAS (thomas.loc.gov) receives a URL that goes dead in a matter of minutes to hours. However, there are ways to reformat the URL to make the links permanent. Create an app (along the lines of bit.ly) that converts THOMAS URLs into permalinks.
Non-Technical Ideas
Using Web 2.0 will reach its highest and best use when we, as voters, taxpayers and citizens have been given the right to National Ballot Measures. Bush's policies of fraudulent wars, scientific research, global warming, Wall Street, should have all be reversible by placing them on the ballot. We can do this today, using the power of the Internet and especally Web 2.0. Why not now? www.America2Inc.com
Congressional biographies in short form are unstructured and hard to find and maintain. They should come in a structured document containing short, medium and long form biographies that can be easily parsed for entry and maintenance inside of a database.
Create online screencasts demonstrating to citizens how to use our tools, the tools of our grantees and future tools we develop.
Building a Resource ClearingHouse of People of Passion .
We need help cataloging all fifty state's state legislature pages. Can you help us? We need to know the URL for all 50 states to find where they post their legislation online. Post them on the State Legislation Page.
FriendsWithMoney.org Let's build an app called "Friendswithmoney"
You let the app scan your contact list, it cross-references to CRP and IMSP's donor databases, and then spits out a list of matches. Now you have a list of people you know who make campaign contributions, and to whom.
Obviously, the name-matching step is a little tricky, but not insoluble. We could also do a geo-search tool called "DonorsNearYou." Basically Fundrace with all the data, not just presidential campaign donors.
