Transparency Camp 2012 by Burt Lum

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.

Open source and open goverment communities have always been peas in a pod – an opened pod, of course. The Sunlight Foundation’s many tools and applications are open source – from Checking Influence, which lets you see the political affiliations of the companies you exchange money with, to Capitol Words, which helps you visualize Congress’ most popular phrases, to Scout, a political notification service. You can contribute to the code. They also run Open States, a project which collects and organizes state-level legislative data – and which employs frequent OpenHatch volunteer Paul Tagliamonte.

Paul isn’t the only OpenHatcher with an interest in OpenGov. I’ve been organizing open government meetups in Boston, MA, for over two years, and had a blast at Transparency Camp last year. Board member Karen Rustad interned at open-source-oriented Code for America during summer 2011, working on a system to help cities leverage local open source communities. Asheesh has written code for an Electronic Frontier Foundation project around patent re-examination and has been active in e-voting transparency in the past.

Last year, the conference attracted more than 400 attendees from around the world and the U.S. Here’s what it was like:

Thanks to the event’s sponsors, Sunlight was able to provide a travel scholarship to lots lots of other attendees. Asheesh and I are honored to be a part of that.

If you can get out to the Washington, D.C., area on Sat May 4 – Sun May 5, you should sign up and attend! Hope to see you there!