Making the Political Process More Open and Inclusive

Ed. Note: Champions of Change is a weekly initiative to highlight Americans who are making an impact in their communities and helping our country rise to meet the many challenges of the 21st century.

The Virginia General Assembly goes into session once each year, for 45–60 days. In a whirlwind of activity, the 140 legislators file thousands of bills, which wind their way towards becoming law in a process that can be confusing to legislators, and is downright baffling to citizens. The proceedings are covered by a dwindling press corps, the once-robust crowd of reporters having been reduced to just a few who reliably show up each day. The legislature has a website where the state’s eight million citizens can try to keep up with the goings-on, but the decade-old site often leaves people scratching their heads. Legislators’ voting records are nowhere to be found, no video of the proceedings is available, and the search engine works badly. It can be dispiriting for folks trying to find out what their legislators are doing.

As both a programmer and a follower of Virginia politics, I knew that there was a better way. I spent nights and weekends throughout the summer and fall of 2006 creating the sort of website that I wanted. The result, five years later, is Richmond Sunlight, a non-profit, non-partisan website that has changed how many people interact with and learn about their legislature.

Visitors are put at ease by a friendly, accessible color scheme and layout, by designer John Athayde. People can comment publicly on any bill, and robust discussions about the merits of legislation frequently follow, with legislators stopping by to answer questions or defend their proposals. Groups can create public portfolios of legislation that they’re following, with their own commentary and analysis about that legislation. Every legislator’s voting record is available to be browsed through, or downloaded as a spreadsheet for analysis. Video of the entire session is provided, indexed by bill and legislator, allowing anybody looking at a bill to instantly watch an automatically assembled highlight reel of every moment of floor discussion about it. A robust application programming interface (API) allows software and website developers to incorporate legislative data into their own applications. All of these features and more add up to a website that’s visited by over a hundred thousand Virginians each year.

How Open Government Technology Transforms the Way We Travel

Ed. Note: Champions of Change is a weekly initiative to highlight Americans who are making an impact in their communities and helping our country rise to meet the many challenges of the 21st century.

Five years ago, few people knew what "open transportation data" meant. If you wanted answers to seemingly basic questions about the trips you take every day -- whether or not the train you ride to work is running on time, for instance, or what route to school is the safest for bicycling -- you were typically on your own. Information provided by local governments and agencies was spotty at best, and often came attached with restrictive licenses or hefty usage fees. There were no established standards for exchanging data like transit schedules and bus stop locations. In short, it was not an environment conducive to innovation.

It was within that context that I set forth on what at the time was an unusual and ambitious project: creating an interactive online utility for planning multimodal trips (i.e. walking, bicycling, mass transit, or a combination thereof) in my hometown of Atlanta. I had recently sold my car -- a daring move in a sprawling Sunbelt city like ours -- and I was frustrated by the lack of information for people who wanted to travel by modes other than the private automobile. Planning trips on transit meant making sense of a bewildering array of printed schedules, all published in different formats by Atlanta's numerous transit providers. Determining the best routes for biking -- now one of my primary means of transportation -- was largely a matter of trial and error. I knew there had to be a better way.

Increasing Access to Data with Public-Private Partnerships

Ed. Note: Champions of Change is a weekly initiative to highlight Americans who are making an impact in their communities and helping our country rise to meet the many challenges of the 21st century.

Being named a Champion of Change opens the door to partner with non-profit entities that are publicly visibility. Why? Because while there is genuine interest in making successful businesses from open data, funding the research and development may very well be optimal from grants rather than angels or venture money.

There are a few reasons for this rational.  First, access to data is a constant threat to developers working with open data. Governments have a long standing working relationships with nonprofits and they are far more comfortable providing them with data rather than for-profit companies. Second, the public awareness around open data dovetails well within the charters of non-profits. Third, and perhaps most interesting, are the connections being studied between cities with open data apps to make life better and elections of officials promoting their development and use.