Democracy and Technology

I am excited to be giving a talk on my pet project disclosed.ca and open government at the Democracy and Technology pre-conference in Montreal, Concordia University. May 29 2009.

The topic of Open Government is very popular right now, especially so in the US. The Obama administration opened Pandora's box by launching recovery.gov earlier this year to track stimulus spending. There's now a parallel effort at recovery.org launched by a commercial entity. The Sunlight Foundation is also on a roll in the US to improve citizens' access to information. When I was at PyCon (an open source programming language conference) in Chicago a week ago, Sunlight had setup a 2 day sprint session where programmers passionate about the topic of open government could contribute their time to the cause by developing programs to download the disparate government data like legislation information into a common database format. Close to 30 people participated.

The momentum is definitely there. And Canada is not far behind. Here we have VisibleGovernment which is trying to be Canada's version of the Sunlight Foundation.

The future looks bright!