Re: Sunlight Foundation turning gov data into useful apps - $4 mil investment from Knight Foundation

Hi Steven & All,

Sounds great.  Congratulations!

Apps written socially in Executable English may be of interest, e.g.  [1,2].

They can explain their results, in English, at the non-technical level.

A system that supports this is live online with many examples [3], and can
be used to write and run apps in your browsers.

Apologies to folks who have seen this before, and thanks for comments.

                                                    -- Adrian


[1]  www.reengineeringllc.com/EnergyIndependence1.pdf

[2]  www.reengineeringllc.com/EnergyIndependence1Video.htm  (Flash video
with audio)

[3]  Internet Business Logic  -- Open Apps for Open Data
A Wiki and SOA Endpoint for Executable *Open Vocabulary* English Q/A Apps
over networked SQL
Online at www.reengineeringllc.com
Shared use is free, and there are no advertisements

On Tue, Jun 18, 2013 at 11:24 AM, Steven Clift <clift@e-democracy.org>wrote:

> In engaging the "general public" it is crucial to move the open
> gov/civic tech movement from "open to all" (but used by relatively few
> or folks who "already show up") toward a fundamental embrace of very
> diverse communities to move toward "used by all."  Also crucial is
> engaging lots of different groups in society in helping define the
> priority social challenges around which apps are created at the
> beginning of the process rather than at the end.
>
> The other week Sunlight opened their doors to an event -
> http://bitly.com/digicivic - on the Pew Civic Engagement in the
> Digital Era report - http://bitly.com/pewcivic - that I organized AND
> at the Personal Democracy Forum had an excellent panel on Open Gov and
> Inclusion. It is exciting to see the embrace of open gov/civic tech
> "for all." It is a sign the movement is maturing from doing cool stuff
> to doing important stuff that impact the everydays live of lots more
> people. (P.S. A Bay area http://bitly.com/digicivic - style gathering
> at Code for America is in the work on July 31 or Aug 1 - stay tuned.)
>
> Congrats Sunlight.
>
> Steven Clift
> E-Democracy.org
>
>
> More from Sunlight:
> http://bit.ly/sunlight4mil
>
> From:
> http://bit.ly/sunlightgrant
>
> Knight Blog     The blog of the John S. & James L. Knight Foundation
> Sunlight Foundation: Open government data made useful
>
> June 18, 2013, 9 a.m., Posted by Marie Gilot – 0 Comments
>
> Above, the Sunlight Foundation app Sitegeist allows users to instantly
> access public data about the neighborhood they’re in.
>
> Making government data available is crucial to government
> transparency. But that’s not enough. The data must be presented in
> ways that are useful to people –regular people, busy people, people
> who are not generally inclined to dig through government datasets for
> fun. The Sunlight Foundation, a seven-year-old open government
> organization based in Washington, D.C., is leading the way by turning
> dry government information into useful apps. For example, Sitegeist
> uses geolocation to deliver relevant information about a user’s
> surroundings using U.S. Census and other public resources. The app is
> a hit: It has been been downloaded more than 84,000 times in the six
> months since it launched and used about 115,000 times.
>
> To build on that success, Knight Foundation is making a $4 million
> grant to Sunlight. With this funding, Sunlight will expand its data
> sets, create apps and products that engage the general public (not
> just policy wonks) and help make government at all levels more open
> and participatory.
>
> The grant is a cornerstone of Knight Foundation’s focus on open
> government, which includes investments in a range of projects such as
> NYU GovLab, Code for America, Open Elections and Textizen among
> others. We will also be announcing the winners of the Knight News
> Challenge on Open Gov next week (June 24), at the MIT-Knight Civic
> Media Conference.
>
> Our proposition is that governments and anyone interested in open
> government should work together to produce tools that make public
> information more accessible, searchable and usable.  Sunlight has the
> technological know-how to make it happen. Its digital tools were used
> to access public information 400 million times in 2012. But what is
> truly innovative about Sunlight is that its leaders  have embraced a
> human-centered design approach to understand  community needs,
> behaviors and personalities and build products that truly connect.
>
> Our hope is that others in the nascent field of open government will
> work with Sunlight to adopt the mindset that making government data
> useful is the key to making government transparency pervasive and
> lasting.
>
> By Marie Gilot, media innovation associate at Knight Foundation.
>
>
>
> Steven Clift - http://stevenclift.com
>   Executive Director - http://E-Democracy.org
>   Twitter: http://twitter.com/democracy
>   Tel/Text: +1.612.234.7072
>
>