Defending Open Data
This spring the US Congress proposed devastating cuts to the e-Government Fund, an essential source of support for data.gov, usaspending.gov and a variety of other vital resources in the US Gov 2.0/Open Data space. Sunlight was at the front lines of the fight to stop those cuts. In the process we learned important lessons about how the crisis arose, how it could be stopped, and what it means for the future of our movement. This presentation will attempt to prepare open data activists to face these challenges in other governmental contexts.
by Tom Lee on June 30th at 14:30 in Track I
Tom Lee is the Director of Sunlight Labs, the technical arm of the Sunlight Foundation, where he oversees projects like Subsidyscope, an effort to explore the level of federal involvement in various sectors of the economy; Clearspending, an analysis of US federal spending data quality; and Sunlight’s many databases, applications and and programmatic interfaces to information about the US government and the influences upon it. Tom came to Sunlight from EchoDitto, where he handled the technical implementation of Drupal projects for nonprofits like Greenpeace UK and Mother Jones magazine.
Rufus Pollock
Daniel Dietrich
Jason Kitcat
Sebastian Hellmann
Lucy Chambers
Hauke Gierow
[...] Shadbolt and Andrew Stott shared their lessons from setting up data.gov.uk, and Tom Lee talked about data.gov and the recent threats of its budget [...]