Hopefully this is within the FC purview.... So, election season is coming up, which brings ones of my favorite topics to the forefront - open-democracy/e-government.
Anyway. A nifty, nifty set of government web services is from the UK based MySociety.org, which has a bunch of open-source databases, including WriteToThem.com which is a comprehensive listing of all your government, from township to parliament, sorted by zip-code. There is no comparable US data source, despite the creator (whom I've met) encouraging us to steal his stuff. There might be soon. I met a David from America Solutions (yes, it's Newt Gingrich's 527 with that "Drill Here, Drill Now" program, but that doesn't mean they can't otherwise be useful) at my internship, who is organizing a similar project. He plans to create a similar database, not by amassing the data themselves, but by creating a wiki for people to fill in and turning that into a zip-code searchable database. I don't know if the framework will be open source, but I hope so. I plan to ask him about that. I'm going to be communicating with him about this and to see what about e-government projects they're working on. Is there any interest here for involvement? What other e-democracy projects do you know of or want to see? The full list of MySociety projects is here: http://www.mysociety.org/projects FixMySteet.com is probably the niftyest, in my opinion. Love, Herbert. _______________________________________________ Discuss mailing list [email protected] http://freeculture.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/discuss
