Hey Herbert, This is excellent stuff. Perhaps we should do a blog post collecting participatory politics web tools like Nelson did for video.
Some more useful sites along these lines, Open Congress (the grand poobah of this ish) http://www.opencongress.org/ Cause Caller (Fred's project!) http://www.causecaller.com/ Kevin On Tue, Aug 5, 2008 at 6:50 PM, Samantha (Herbert) Tanzer <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > 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 > -- )_)_)_)_)_)_ _______________________________________________ Discuss mailing list [email protected] http://freeculture.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/discuss
