Interested in becoming a Citizen Geek to monitor state and local government and live to tell the tale? Drop us a line to join the mailing list on investigative reporting training and get your not-really-official but highly coveted Citizen Geek press badge and “government speak” decoder ring.
Applications
Sunlight Labs
Sunlight Labs is part of the Sunlight Foundation a non-profit, non partisan Washington, DC based organization focused on digitization of government data and making tools and websites to make it easily accessible.
Apps for Democracy is an open-source contest to build a suite of tech tools to enable Washington, D.C., residents to more easily access public data. The 2008 outreach effort cost the city $50,000 and resulted in 47 iPhone, Facebook and web applications with an estimated value in excess of $2.6 million.
Civic engagement
Center for Public Deliberation promotes the development of a vibrant deliberative democracy in Northern Colorado.
Personal Democracy Forum is one hub for the conversation already underway between political practitioners and technologists, as well as anyone invigorated by the potential of all this to open up the process and engage more people in all the things that we can and must do together as citizens.
Tech President is a cross-partisan group blog that explores how political campaigns — presidential, congressional and state — are using the web, as well as how voters are using the web to affect those campaigns.
Data mashups
Data Masher helps citizens have a little fun with those data by creating mashups to visualize them in different ways and see how states compare on important issues. Users can combine different data sets in interesting ways and create their own custom rankings of the states.
Media watchers
Clay Shirky is a prescient voice on the Internet’s effects, argues that emerging technologies enabling loose collaboration will change the way our society works. He teaches at NYU’s Interactive Telecommunications Program.
Free Press promotes diverse and independent media ownership, strong public media, quality journalism, and universal access to communications.
Jay Rosen is a press critic, a writer, and a professor of journalism at New York University. He is frequently described in the media as an intellectual leader of the movement of public journalism.
Public data sources
The Bailout and Stimulus Guide is a comprehensive list of government spending watchdogs sites commissioned by the Columbia Journalism Review.
Data.gov enables the public to participate in government by providing downloadable Federal datasets to build applications, conduct analyses, and perform research.
ProPublica stimulus tracker minds the stimulus from bill to building, and we’re organizing citizens nationwide to watchdog local stimulus projects.
The U.S. Government Manual provides comprehensive information on the agencies of the legislative, judicial, and executive branches, including quasi-official agencies and more.
State legislatures
The Library of Congress has compiled a U.S. map with links to state and territorial legislature websites for quick access to bills, legislator contacts, committees and other resources.
Think tanks
ProgressiveMap is a working list of national and state-based think tank websites from Progressive Congress.
The Bell Policy Center is committed to identifying and promoting policies that help individuals and families access opportunity and move toward self-sufficiency.
Center for the Rocky Mountain West explores the interior West’s rich history and culture, current challenges, and emerging opportunities.
Independence Institute addresses a broad variety of public policy issues from a free-market, pro-freedom perspective.
Project New West is the leading authority on the values, issues, and demographics that define America’s “New West” – the eight state region that includes Arizona, Colorado, Idaho, Montana, Nevada, New Mexico, Utah, and Wyoming.
Rocky Mountain Institute envisages a world thriving, verdant, and secure, for all, for ever. To that end, our mission is to drive the efficient and restorative use of resources.
Watchdog tools
Exemption 10 is a new blog devoted to covering issues relating to freedom of information and open government. Our primary focus will be on the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) at the federal level.
FOIA Geek is a self-published challenge by a Colorado investigative reporter to submit 30 Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) requests to 30 federal agencies in 30 days. Follow Erin Rosa’s progress on the blog.
ACLU Guide to Colorado’s Open Records Act provides a handy, easy to understand framework for using the Colorado Open Records Act (both abbreviated as and pronounced CORA) for do-it-yourself muckraking.
Know of a think tank, public data or mashup how-to site that should be included on the blog roll? Tell us about it.
