Join me at an IRC chat to talk about open source civic technology projects, on Saturday, August 16 at 4pm Eastern time! The agenda will be a mix between seeing what various civic technology projects are up to like GovTrack (my site, powered by Mono), OpenCongress, and any others run by people who show up, and getting new people involved in ongoing projects. “oGosh” is Open Government Open Source Hacking (wiki | Facebook), what I’m calling the loose community that binds these projects together.
The chat will be in the #transparency channel on Freenode. For more information on the meeting (and on how to get to the chat), see http://wiki.opengovdata.org/index.php/OGosh.
Suggestions for agenda topics are most welcome either to me directly or by revising the wiki page above. Hope to see you there.
Joshua Tauberer's Archived Blog 
Have you invited the people at http://www.mysociety.org/ ?
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Though my primary goal is to focus on the U.S. community, I know at least one person from MySociety will find out (or found out already) when I post the event on some more mail lists.
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I understand the desire to focus on a single location, but it strikes me that there are a lot of people doing the same thing (e.g., http://watchdog.net/ ) and it’s a shame to re-invent the wheel when there are open source ones out there already.
What would be particularly powerful would be the ability to take a global view of governance as well: while legislative processes are very different, the end result is very similar, and a lot of legislation pops up in one jurisdiction having already been passed in another (witness DMCA -> EUCD, for example).
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I was doing this years before there was watchdog.net. 🙂 In any case, the point isn’t to duplicate the programming effort that is happening at watchdog but to include them in a larger community. I think I’d respond the same way to your second paragraph: my goal with this is really community building, not to build a new tool.
But, I totally agree that a global view is something that would be both completely new and useful. You should start something!
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