Yes, Cause Caller's db is "open" as its a Semantic Media wiki that allows people to add politicians and all their relevant info. There is also a built in API because it stores all the data as RDF triples in XML that is accessible via Special:ExportRDF.
Or in other words, you can have machine-readable access to the database as doing stuff like: http://www.causecaller.com/wiki/Byron_L._Dorgan is: http://www.causecaller.com/wiki/Special:ExportRDF/Byron_L._Dorgan Good luck! F On Wed, Aug 6, 2008 at 10:18 AM, Kevin Driscoll <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>wrote: > 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 >
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