Sunlight Labs

Web Page: http://wiki.sunlightlabs.com/GSOC_2010

Mailing List: sunlightlabs@googlegroups.com

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. Sunlight Labs is an open source community of thousands dedicated to using technology to transform government. We focus on transparency- the idea that government can be more effective, more honest, and more accountable when it makes data about its process, operations, and influences available to the public. Our work revolves around opening up government data of all forms.

Projects

• ClearMaps-Expand the map builder(an AIR Application) to include line simplification and avoid adjacent polygon gaps ClearMaps is an ActionScript framework for interactive cartographic visualization. The project aims to address some of the common technical challenges faced when building interactive, data driven maps for the web. The objective of the project is to include the line simplification that prevent the creation of gaps between adjacent polygons to have smooth lines and curves in the map such that it loads quickly into ClearMaps Builder.
• Congress Android Application I will concentrate my efforts on two directions: improving existing application's features and adding new functionality. These modifications to the Congress application will try to present the information to the user in a more organized and user-friendly manner, while also allowing the programmers working with the existing code to be able to extend and adapt it very easily, with no or minimum code changes (mostly in configuration options), for state-level versions.
• Fifty States Project The aim of my project would be to create new scrapers for the Fifty States project and to improve existing scrapers.
• National Data Catalog: Importing and Curating The main purpose of this project is to write a curator that will automate many of the tasks that are done manually in the National Data Catalog.Another purpose of this project is to write importer scripts, to gather metadata from sources that have not yet been imported. The scripts for this project will be written using Ruby and the curator interface will be written using Ruby on Rails.