Hacking the hackathon
Friends, romans, civic tech enthusiasts, lend me your eyeballs. I come to bury hackathons, not to praise them.
#open government
16 posts
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OpenHatch at Transparency Camp on May 4-5, celebrating open government
Read more → More from OpenHatch blog →TransparencyCamp is a yearly unconference to celebrate, and work toward, government transparency. It's run by the Sunlight Foundation, and we're honored to be a sponsor! Asheesh Laroia and I will be attending, and Sunlight Foundation has set aside a special area to help open government-oriented open source projects build stronger communities.
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Word games
Read more → More from Shauna's Blog →I've been hearing good things about the Capitol Words API for months now, so I decided to try doing something with it. I wrote a script which queries the API for instances of a given word and returns two text files: the first is a compendium of sentences from every time a Republican has said that word (in a given date range), and the second the same but for Democrats. I fed the results into a word cloud generator I found on github, which I modified slightly to suit my purposes.
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My life in links
Read more → More from Shauna's Blog →A round up of recent goings on:
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Open Data Day
Read more → More from Shauna's Blog →This Saturday, February 23rd, is Open Data Day, "a gathering of citizens in cities around the world to write applications, liberate data, create visualizations and publish analyses using open public data to show support for and encourage the adoption open data policies by the world's local, regional and national governments."
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Release of toxics in MA over two decades
Read more → More from Shauna's Blog →As I mentioned in my last post, I chose to look at the EPA Toxics Release Inventory this month. The full dataset was way too large for my little netbook to handle, so I filtered the results to my home state of Massachusetts, and downloaded it in csv format. I used this helpful pdf to identify the variables I was most interested in: year, total release of toxic substances, and whether the substance released was a carcinogen.
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Fifth time's the charm: a case study in data accessibility
Read more → More from Shauna's Blog →I try to explore a bit of government data every month. Previously, I've just grabbed data from the Sunlight Foundation's cleaned up APIs. This month, I tried out data.gov. It was a much more harrowing experience.
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Does one-party control stifle transparency?
Read more → More from Shauna's Blog →Massachusetts is not a great place for transparency. We have some of the worst public access to information of any state in the country, and legislators have barely any oversight or accountability. I've heard people talk about trying to get access to information from closed meetings where no attendance is taken and no minutes are kept.
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Busybody
Read more → More from Shauna's Blog →I've been a bit busier than usual the last few weeks. Missed last week's post. More beer for everyone! Here's a list of things I've done between my last post and now. (Why yes, this is a pretense for skipping another week. Glad you asked.)
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Following money
Read more → More from Shauna's Blog →Life has been super busy lately, so here's another link-and-run:
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Guest Post
Read more → More from Shauna's Blog →My post for the week is aaaaaaaall the way over at the Sunlight Foundation blog.
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4 Things I Thought About At Transparency Camp
Read more → More from Shauna's Blog →Following up from last week with a more in-depth post. While I heard a bunch of compelling stories and found out about a ton of amazing projects, ultimately what I appreciated most about Tcamp was the chance to talk about the common issues that have arisen for those of us doing open government work.
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11 Things I Learned About At Transparency Camp
Read more → More from Shauna's Blog →I just spent the last two days at Transparency Camp. My capacity for coherent thought is pretty much used up after all the talks and sessions, and I want to save what small amount is left for the hackathon tomorrow. So here's a list of some neat things I learned about, and I'll save the insightful analysis for later.
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Show Me the Stats: Correlation Coefficients
Read more → More from Shauna's Blog →So. Correlations. They're fairly simple creatures: they measure the relationship between variables, without making any assumptions or assertions about cause and effect, dependence, or direction. Correlation coefficients range from -1 to 1, with -1 meaning a perfect negative correlation, 1 being a perfect positive correlation, and 0 meaning no correlation at all.
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Show Me the Stats: Averages and Deviations
Read more → More from Shauna's Blog →My previous post about p-values has reminded me that I've been meaning to brush up on my statistics. I'm hoping to do this by writing a series of tutorials for this blog, and to keep things interesting for my less statistically-inclined readers, the datasets I'll be using will be campaign finance and lobbying information from Open Secrets and Sunlight Labs. So come, join me as I learn about quantitative analysis and also the pervasive corruption of our government\... The data in this post are from .OpenSecrets.org and represent the total contributions from commercial banks to individual house members in the current (2011-2012) election cycle.
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Three Talks
Read more → More from Shauna's Blog →I've given three public talks in the last six months. What really strikes me is how different these talks were, in content, structure, and intent.