Hacking The Government (For Good, Not Evil)

Photo courtesy of
‘Open Government Data Session Tack-on Free For All’
courtesy of ‘illustir’

The hackers and do-gooders at Sunlight Labs are coordinating their first ever Open Government hackathon from March 29th to March 31st. Although the event takes place in Chicago (at PyCon2009 at the Crowne Plaza Chicago O’Hare hotel) there will also be an online presence, so those of you interested in making that rather large DC employer known as the federal government more open and accessible can still take part.

The nature of the sprint will be fairly freeform, two Sunlight Labs members will be on hand guiding users that want to contribute to opening up the government. Users can come to the sprint without any background and we would help coordinate them and place them on a project where there skills would be useful (there is always a ton of scraping that needs to be done, building mini-web apps to showcase gov’t data, etc.)

A decade ago, Ben Stanfield found himself at the intersection of politics and technology as he wandered nomadically around the country managing congressional races. But when he moved to DC 6 years ago, he found that the intersection had become, in the grand tradition of L’Enfant, a circle where politics and technology were joined by science, photography and a host of smaller side streets of interest. These days, he works as a Macintosh Server Administrator for a large governmental health institute in Bethesda. In his spare time, he’s an avid photographer, charter member at HacDC, and serves on the Board of Directors of the Columbia Heights Youth Club. In 2005 he founded of Draft Obama, a national grassroots movement to convince Barack Obama to run for President. Everything he writes here speaks for itself and not on behalf of any other group, organization, person, or any of his other personalities.

Comments are closed.