Get Ready to Vote with Google

(Cross-posted from the Official Google Blog and the Politics and Elections blog)

Every four years in the United States, people prepare to head to the polls and increasingly search for information about how to register to vote, where to vote and who is on their ballot. Even though it is 2012, important voting information is disorganized and hard to find on the Internet. To help voters research candidates and successfully cast their ballot on Election Day, we’ve launched our new Voter Information Tool. 

You can enter your address to find information on your polling place, early vote locations, ballot information with links to candidates’ social media sites and voting rules and requirements. The tool is easy to embed on any website and is open source so developers can modify it to create custom versions. We're working with a number of media partners to ensure the tool is accessible across the web, and partners like Foursquare and AT&T are doing great work building apps on our Civic Information API. 

We hope this tool will help make getting to the polls and casting your ballot as simple as possible.

Posted by Jesse Mwaura, Google Politics & Elections Team

Googlers at Tech@State: Open Source Technology Conference

Earlier this month two members of the Google Open Source Programs Office, Chris DiBona and Jeremy Allison, traveled to Washington, D.C. to speak on a panel about open source in government at the State Department’s Tech@State: Open Source conference.

Chris and Jeremy were joined by an impressive lineup of speakers who joined together to illustrate how open source software can improve the education, health, and welfare of the world's population. The video of their discussion is featured above, and more information about the event and videos from all of the sessions are available on the conference’s video page.

By Ellen Ko, Open Source Team

Report from the Gov 2.0 Summit

Clearly designed as a conference to start but certainly not finish the conversation, last week's Gov 2.0 Summit assembled an impressive cast of presenters and interviewers. Key White House decision makers, government innovators and industry enthusiasts took the stage and lined the hallways for three days.

Having spent the last five years focusing on helping government adopt Open Source software and its collaboration model, my radar was tuned for explicit mentions / inclusions / endorsements of Open Source software. It appeared that leveraging Open Source software to solve some of the thornier technology problems challenging government (think healthcare and public safety interoperability) had been more implied than expressed in recent months. For the wider community looking for more signs of game change, the event provided plenty of evidence that Open Source is clearly at play.

Paul Rademacher, Google and AllForGood.org, Brian Behlendorf, White House Consultant and Leonard Lin, CodeforAmerica.org

The Google-hosted reception Monday evening packed the public space at their headquarters on New York Avenue. The event was attended by private industry, publicists and social media converts, non-profit and Open Source community leadership and government attendees and offered a nice opportunity to mix it up after a day of the Gov 2.0 Expo Showcase I sadly missed. Some of the sessions however are video-archived on the web.

Lifting off in a small flurry of debate over the right hash tag for the Gov2.0 Summit, the two day Gov2.0 Summit opened with the and energy and grin of Aneesh Chopra, Federal Chief Technology Officer. Chopra earned a reputation for creative collaboration with industry in his prior role as the Secretary of Technology for the Commonwealth of Virginia and brings the same to the federal scene. Virginia's extensive use of Open Source and open collaboration, as well as that of former D.C. CTO — now Federal Chief Information Officer Vivek Kundra, is well known.

The conference brought attendees through a whirlwind tour of recent innovation in government IT: data transparency projects like Apps for Democracy and resulting mash-ups and visualization as inexpensive and "dirty" Open Source solutions to real problems. Open Source and its exceptional benefits of open standards and interoperability were highlighted in many presentations.

Conference highlights:

• Beth Noveck provided the most comprehensive picture of what progress had been made by the new administration and its policy road map.


• Best of Show for Crowd-Rallying: Carl Malamud discussed the need to make judiciary information — data and hearings — truly public in a day where “public” means “on the Internet.” In his speech designed in part for an audience not in the room, his closing comment asserted government operating systems should be Open Sourced brought the crowd to resounding applause.


• Favorite Projects: Anything visualized — and most frequently enabled by Open Source.


• Killer App: All things Geo-spatial.


• Significant Announcement: The General Services Administration (GSA) will begin experimenting with the use of OpenID to manage identity on government web sites.

David Recordon, OpenID Foundation Board of Directors

For the seasoned government attendees, there was in reality not a great deal of new information to be had. That was, in fact, good news; as one government manager shared with me, social media tools like Twitter and GovLoop have made it much easier to stay in touch with what other agencies are up to, plus the 2009 Federal IT Strategy has been broadly distributed and much discussed internally.

The White House will release its new Open Government Directive in a few weeks and will set federal agency wheels in motion. Implementation will be challenging and require the philosophy of change to shift into gear. Industry and government seem to agree that the next non-trivial challenge to technology innovation will be procurement reform.

Ed. Note: Post updated to correct caption.

By Deb Bryant, Public Sector Communities Manager, Oregon State University Open Source Lab and Producer, Government Open Source Conference

Let the Sunshine In - Transparency Camp West 2009

Last weekend the Sunlight Foundation and Google hosted TransparencyCamp West, an unconference dedicated to making our governments (from municipal governments all the way up to the federal government) more accessible and transparent. The intent was to help bring people together and create community from the event; to get people in the same room, and get them to know and learn from one another.

It was a great gathering of more than 150 developers, NGOs, wonks, activists and government representatives from as far away as Russia and Israel, including folks from Sunlight Labs alongside open government legends like Carl Malamud and the folks from the National Institute of Money and State Politics working with new people in the field with an increasing desire to open up their governments.

You'll notice I keep pluralizing governments. That's because one of the big takeaways from the gathering was how important it was to open up local & both statewide and federal governments. Transparency is desired from the very bottom, like local and regional US school boards to the very top. People want access to information pertaining to their cities - representatives from cities across North America participated - and what's impacting them at a local level.

The other thing is the concept of wholesale vs. retail government web operations. There is a strong desire amongst journalists and developers for government to start being wholesalers of data, providing us with bulk access to machine readable data, and to get government to not to worry so much about retailing access to their data.

All-in-all, the event was a success and I think it was a good beginning for growing the conversation amongst the transparency community on the West Coast and far beyond.

By Clay Johnson, Sunlight Foundation

Australia Goes Open

Here in Google's shiny new Sydney office, we recently hosted the first hackfest for OpenAustralia.org. OpenAustralia takes the data from Australia's record of Federal Parliament speeches, the Australian Hansard, and makes it easy for people to follow topics they're interested in.

Back in 2004, Matthew Landauer and Katherine Szuminska found themselves at the launch of the UK site TheyWorkForYou.com, a website designed to allow the average person to quickly and easily search the United Kingdom's Hansard - the record of all happenings in Parliament. Their work blossomed and they were inspired to make a similar site happen in Australia, OpenAustralia.org.

Both websites give ordinary people, who often have no idea who their local representative is, let alone what their representative has been doing on their behalf, the ability to track topics they're interested in and find out exactly what their representatives are doing.

When Matthew emailed out asking for a location for a place to host a hackfest, we were very happy to lend a helping hand. The hackfest ran on Saturday the 13th of June at the newly opened Google offices in Sydney, Australia and was successful beyond anyone's expectations.

When originally announced, the event's original 25 attendee slots filled so fast that we ended up increasing the number to 50 (which also filled remarkably fast). More surprisingly, almost everyone turned up and we even had a number of attendees fly in from other Australian states. No one expected this level of enthusiasm from the community, and we were pleased to share in everyone's excitement.



Some cool outcomes include a tool for crowd sourcing transcription of the "register of member's interests", an API and datasource for mapping street addresses to representatives, a "FixMyStreet" iPhone App and numerous bugs on the site fixed. More information on these and the ongoing efforts of this community can be found on the Open Australia Development list.



Matthew was also gracious enough to give a tech talk for Googlers about some of the many challenges faced by creating such a site, e.g. dealing with Crown Copyright, problems with getting a clean source of data, and problems getting the data fixed when it's clearly in error. Enjoy!



By Tim Ansell, Technical Solutions Engineering Team