FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
November 4, 2009
Contact: Gabriela Schneider 202-742-1520
Washington, DC –Today, the Sunlight Labs, Sunlight Foundation’s open source development community, announced its first Great American Hackathon, to be held December 12-13, 2009 in partnership with Google, RedHat, Fedora, Mozilla, Open Source for America and Code for America. Sunlight and its partners created the Great American Hackathon to spur the open source community to organize events across the country to cooperatively work on technological solutions for making government information more publicly accessible online.
“There are over 1,000 developers working to open their government. Now, let's come together, nationwide, and spend a weekend focused on solving the problems we’ve encountered so far to make our government transparent on the Web,” said Clay Johnson, director of Sunlight Labs.
Sunlight is inviting civically-minded developers to create events across the country and participate in open source projects. These projects, suggested by Sunlight Labs staff or its broader community, would focus on digitizing or otherwise making more useful government information on the federal, state or local level. Initial proposed projects include creating a standardized way for citizens to look up representatives and candidates from the federal to the local level, using augmented reality to better visualize government data and developing a tool that allows Internet users to file online privacy complaints with consumer protection authorities, to name a few. Links to lists of established projects and ideas for new projects are available at Sunlight Labs' site. Participants can also suggest new projects.
Sunlight Labs created an organizing guide on its site to help train developers nationwide on how to organize events. The guide includes an application that allows organizers to invite guests and keep track of RSVPs. Participants can easily find events in their neighborhoods by entering their zip code at Sunlight Labs’ Events page. In addition, Sunlight Labs is providing organizers with support via the Sunlight Labs discussion list and its IRC channel #transparency at irc.freenode.net. All participants are encouraged to tag any photos or other web content about the Great American Hackathon with the hashtag: gah09.
The Sunlight Foundation is a non-partisan nonprofit dedicated to using the power of the Internet to catalyze greater government openness and transparency. Visit SunlightFoundation.com to learn more about Sunlight’s projects, including Transparency Corps, Party Time and OpenCongress.
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