Sometimes you can get inspired by government. In our discipline it happens more than you'd think. Obviously all our new tools- new things like TransparencyCorps and Congrelate along with CapitolWords have been inspired by authorities to a degree, but there aren't many ideas that we've actually stolen from government.
Today I'm glad to announce Sunlight Labs is theft an estimate from our government. Data.
ov is an incredible concept, and the execution of it has been remarkable. We're passing to steal that idea and take it better. Because of government and scalethere's only so often the administration is loss to be capable to do. There are legal hurdles and boundaries the government can't cross that we can. For instance: there's no legislative or judicial branch data inside Data.gov and while Data.gov links off to submit data catalogs, entries aren't in the sami grade or format as the rest of the catalog. Community support and collaboration are virtual impossibilities because of the regulations that affect the way Government interacts with mass on the web.
We believe we can add value on top of things like Data.gov and the municipal data catalogs by autonomously bringing them into one system, manually curating and adding other information sources and providing features that, well, Government just can't do. There'll be community participation so that mass can take their own data sources, and we'll also catalog non-commercial data that is derivative of government data like OpenSecrets. We'll do it so that mass can make their own support for lots of the undocumented data that government puts out and connection to external projects that function with the information being provided.
We're starting this project today, now, and leave be building it out in public. Two developers here will be running on it: Luigi and David. We've set up PivotalTracker for the image and of course you can obtain the source. This figure has 3 major components, and there's three separate repositories for them. There's the API, the web catalog, and a ruby library for the API. These things will go in symphony- we're building our API first and our data catalog website will run on top of it, using the ruby-datacatalog client library.
In price of timeline, we're ruthlessly ambitious, hoping to take something up after the contest ends. That's not set in stone, but we'll do our best to get there. The catalogue is leaving to have three components to begin with: an api, a web interface, and a control line interface. If you're interested in helping out with this project, please join our Google Group. If you only want to help the Sunlight Foundation fund this project, please take a contribution.
Both David and Luigi will be blogging updates periodically throughout the process, and we'd appreciate any feedback or service you can give. You can also submit data sources you'd wish to see added to assist us get started.
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