Checking out the DC tech scene at TransparencyCamp

Being in DC a few days before DrupalCon, we decided to stop by at TransparencyCamp (TCamp) last Sunday. TCamp, a BarCamp style event held last weekend in George Washington University, was announced as "an un-conference about convening a trans-partisan tribe of open government advocates from all walks — government representatives, technologists, developers, NGOs, wonks & activists — to share knowledge on how to use new technologies to make our government transparent and meaningfully accessible to the public."

Sunday morning, the 'Apps for Democracy' presentation/workshop proved to be very interesting. 'Apps for Democracy' is a contest, organised by iStrategyLabs, that challenged developers to create an application using (opened up) DC government data. Besides the well-known drupal websites Stumble Safely and DC Bikes, the winning application, iLive.at, provides a website where you can look up all sorts of information about a DC area where you are about to move to for example. You can look up all kinds of information about the population living there, find out about places to shop, emergency services, ... Really cool stuff. It was amazing to see how governmental data, once opened up, can be practical on the web for people's every day life.

People in the room were very anxious to move the practice of opening up government data further along. Some ideas included: a roadshow to show off possible uses of government data to municipal authorities, contacting congresmen, getting more government people on board, ... In other words: you could feel the electricity flowing in the room. It's clear that this is a movement of very enthusiastic developers, project managers, ... who want to move things forward.

(After the Apps for Democracy' session, we knocked ourselves out at an excellent all-you-can-eat pizza luch in between.)

In the afternoon, there were more interesting talks. Among others, one by David Recordon and Chris Messina (who will be presenting later this week at DrupalCon DC) about 'Our online identity'). Chris and Dave talked about using standard methods for collecting personal data at social network sites, so this type of data can be more easily shared and swapped and distributed across the internet (between different social network sites for example). His main point revolved around the idea that, while we have all these profiles scattered across the internet, we make it very hard for people to find us (and the information we want them to find) on line. Standardised methods (the word 'standards' must have been used every two sentences at TCamp, which was, well, great!) to exchange personal data across social networks seems like a logical solution to this.

At the end of the day, TCamp proved to be an excellent warm-up for DrupalCon DC, which is (yay!) starting tomorrow! During DCDC, there will be a lot of attention for open data, since Drupal is at the forefront in this area. Here's a list of sessions related to open data.

See you at DCDC!