------ Forwarded message ---------- From: Philip Ashlock phil@openplans.org Date: Mon, Jun 7, 2010 at 12:14 PM Subject: Re: DemocracyMap for NYState To: Ryan Wold ryanjwold@gmail.com Cc: Steven Clift clift@e-democracy.org

This looks awesome Ryan! Out of curiosity, do you have a list of your sources for all the data? The work for NYState is fast tracked and a lot is moving forward with this right now - at least as far as having a planning meeting and DevCamp to pull in the relevant open source community and developers within NY State gov. Unfortunately it doesn't look like there are resources for paid work on this yet, but maybe on the second phase or with help from Sunlight.

We have a planning meeting scheduled for Thursday June 10th, from 9.30 am till 2:00 pm EST and would be happy to facilitate your involvement remotely via skype or whatever works best.

And a DevCamp (http://democracymap.eventbrite.com/) is set for Monday the 14th.

Don't spread the word too much on this yet. We actually don't want to have too many people involved quite yet because this is meant for immediate implementation for the state IT and a mob of developers and interested parties might complicate this moving forward on short notice.

Phil

Ryan Wold wrote:

Phil, Sorry for the delay. Lots of balls in the air at the moment. I'm willing to help any way I can. Tomorrow's my last day in the office, and I should have about a week free as I get things situated for DC. I'm not sure how much free time I'll have once I'm there. On the other hand, I may not get out there until July 1, which would leave me 3 weeks to help. The current iteration of the DMap work is available at http://wepublic.org, which can/may be moved to DemocracyMap.org. I also updated http://opensolano.org which is now a proof-of-concept for a UI based on the data. Some of the URL's: http://wepublic.org/cities.xml http://wepublic.org/counties.xml http://wepublic.org/states.xml http://wepublic.org/states/state_id.xml http://wepublic.org/states/state_id/counties.xml I created a Ruby .gem which enables easy querying of the wepublic.org data directly from Ruby/Rails. All this still needs lots of tuning, data cleanup and additional scraping, but I was able to get a couple days last week to push this along. Perhaps we can schedule a Skype call for sometime Friday. I'm free most of the day.

-- Ryan Wold (707) 673-6722