Sunlight Labs is having three "Hack-a-Thons" coming up. One at Transparency Camp, one at PyCon, and Web2.0 expo. Heck, a few of us are going to SxSW this year and we may do one there, too. Please vote on these ideas and let us know what you think we should be working on at these hack-a-thons. A note: we're naturally averse to advocacy type ideas. We'll likely not do them. It isn't that we don't believe in democracy though! It is because we're a c3 organization, and are legally prohibited in certain ways from doing very much in the form of advocacy.
A big, hairy, ambitious goal: We're going to parse state legislation websites transform legislation, legislators and votes into a standard relational database model. Developers need to pick a state, crawl it, and transform the data into our data model.
We want to create a open source web application that allows voters to suggest questions to be asked to candidates during an election. Candidates will be allowed to login and either post answers to the questions or refuse to answer questions. Alternately, administrators can phone candidates to ask questions, and enter the answers manually. (Candidates can login and change answers to questions, but a version history of answers will be kept after the answers are made public). Voters will be able to enter their addresses and get a list of candidates that are running for office. For each candidate they should be able to see which questions the candidates have chosen to answer. We want this application to have a local focus so we want to make it easy for voters in a given city to be able to set this up with ease.
a utility to take in a document such as ARRA, posted at Recovery.gov as a 13 MB PDF, and turn it into searchable, abstractable text
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.
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.
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 utility to take in a document such as ARRA, posted at Recovery.gov as a 13 MB PDF, and turn it into searchable, abstractable text
Goal: Create a House bill preference poll, making the will of the people visible on House bills Description: Allow users to register for representation with their U.S. Representative, notify them of House bills scheduled for a vote, invite them to express their preference for proposed laws in yes-or-no polls. Publish poll results and compare them to House votes, thus making the will of the people visible on House bills. For example: Poll results for H.R. 1424 Troubled Assets Relief Program the People: Nay (29% vs. 71%) the House: Yea (66% vs. 34%) This tool would give average citizens access to their Representatives equal to that of lobbyists. Making the will of the people visible on House bills will be a way of showing, via transparency, whether Representatives are representing constituents or somebody else. See http://www.p-poll.org for more.
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.
A prototype spreadsheet-type tool that allows a user to check-off any row based data about a particular district and its member. Fields could include: Name, Census information about the district like Poverty Rate, etc, committees a member is a part of, caucuses that a member is a part of, maybe the top words of a member (from the capitol words API), top industries that have given to the member (from the OpenSecrets API), and a roll call vote. The user should be able to then sort a table that is a result of this query. Just a simple sortable dhtml table. The end result is being able to get a table of SB 227, and then to say "which members of the banking committee that are in high-poverty districts voted for the bankruptcy bill" by sorting the table. Or "which members voted for TARP had 'Finance and Banking' as their top industries."
Posting new ideas has been disabled for this site.