CivicAccess - Fwd: [open-government] Google.org invests $3.7 million in civic innovation through technology

The Internet is redefining citizenship in the 21st century. Technology is helping people to connect, engage, and contribute to society and each other like never before.

We’ve seen developers use our Civic Information API to bring election data to citizens in new and exciting ways. Our live election results maps have been viewed by billions around the world, bringing real-time transparency to elections in Egypt, Mexico, Ghana, and more. Last week, we launched the Kenya Elections Hub for citizens to access the latest news and resources for the country’s presidential election.

Beyond elections, technology can improve everyday civic life: the way we connect, engage, access and act on critical government information. Worldwide, organizations are developing new ways to encourage more open and innovative societies. Google.org is supporting two of these leaders--the Sunlight Foundation and mySociety--and their work on tech solutions for civic innovation.

We are providing $2.1 million to the Sunlight Foundation to grow their programs for open government data, with a focus on making civic information for U.S. cities transparent, available, and useable. By opening up information at the city level for developers as well as citizens, Sunlight is creating opportunity for new ideas that can have an impact in local markets.

We are also supporting mySociety, providing $1.6 million to build a global platform to equip developers with tools and resources--such as open source code--to more easily and quickly launch new civic apps and services. This initiative can promote collaboration between civic-minded technologists, regardless of geography. For example, a civic app created in Finland might be easily replicated 9,000 miles away by a developer in Chile.

Both organizations are working to bring together a larger community--governments, developers, companies, nonprofits, and citizens--with an interest in improving societies. By creating these open platforms today, we can open doors to ambitious new solutions in the future.

Posted by Matthew Stepka, VP, Google.org

We’re starting the year with some really wonderful news: Google.org is granting us a fantastic $1.6m, to be spent over two years.

Clearly, this is a significant sum of money, which will really turbo-charge our efforts to build technologies to help groups like mySociety in countries around the world.

We will be using the money to provide developers with open source technologies to help them to more easily and quickly launch new civic apps and services. We will also be working with lots of other groups to promote greater knowledge and technology sharing amongst civil society groups of all kinds, especially in the accountability sector.

Currently, it can take a great deal of work to launch even relatively simple sites or apps with civic purposes, because the sector is not rich with mature, sector-specific tools and technologies. This high barrier to getting started has a bad effect on the range and strength of popular, impactful civic sites and apps online, globally.

Working with international partners we plan to develop some common, open source components that will reduce the effort required to launch new services in a broad range of areas: including accountability, legal, environmental, political, and more.

mySociety will work with local partners in various targeted regions to help those partners make the greatest possible benefit from using these new, common, collaboratively-developed open source components. And we’ll be working to help them contribute back, both in terms of shared code and shared knowledge.

The project will also develop new approaches to bringing together the global civic-technology community, so that it can collaborate more easily on new projects.

We’re really excited to see where this project will take us next – and we are very grateful to Google.org for the increased opportunities their funding brings us.

Google.org Awards New Grant to Sunlight

We're excited to share the news that Google.org just announced a $2.1 million grant for Sunlight to expand our mission to open government data. The work will include everything from extending our policy and data work to the municipal level to supporting the creation of policy case studies that demonstrate the power and success of tech-driven transparency to improve civic engagement and people's lives. Thanks to Google.org's support we will also be able to expand our mini-grant program to grow the community working towards a common goal.

This backing is an affirmation of our goals, and we're thrilled to have Google.org support.

We're eager to get started on this work and honored that another organization has found the Sunlight Foundation's work worthy of support. Thank you Google.org! You now join the ranks of our many funders, which readers can check out on our funding page.

Stay tuned for more updates about how you can get involved.

Sunlight Goes Local

If you caught yesterday's announcement, you may have noticed a new major focus for the Sunlight Foundation: local government transparency. Broadening our focus to include municipal transparency is both a natural extension of our work and a unique opportunity to explore and deepen our general understanding of the ways in which individuals and governments need, produce, and exchange information. Over the past few years, we’ve occasionally addressed local issues, but we have never made a concerted effort to explore what openness at the local level really means or the implications such work could have for transparency in national and international contexts.

Municipalities are important because, in a sense, people live more of their lives in cities than in countries. We may call our nation state “home” when we need to describe the broadest context of where we’re from, but our days and nights are spent working and living and sleeping in the reality of cities and towns. Cities and towns plow and mend the roads that line our commutes, zone and police our neighborhoods, grant permits to our parades, and create and clean our public parks. Whether or not you have a family or a business or a bike, the decisions made by your local government affect the fabric of the world you physically live in.

This remains true, even when our attention is directed elsewhere: Much of our political activism and ideological identity are focused on national issues. Certainly, for Americans, our sense of being a citizen is tangled in our sense of the national-level issues that often dominate our public consciousness - our understanding of which freedoms we fight for, which party we vote for, and the four year stretch between the only ballot box we think we’re supposed to care about.

To be clear, the federal government has a profound impact on our lives and is the primary expression of the sovereignty of a people. But to ignore the role played by local government would be to miss out on the richness of what local governments create for us.

Our local governments aren't just last-stop service providers for our federal government. They’re the foundation upon which all political representation and participation is built. Cities and other local governments present an unparalleled opportunity for us as citizens to see our needs, frustrations, and ideas recognized and acted upon, our values made visible, and our interests reflected in the society that surrounds us. Our cities are essential drivers of commerce and innovation. Our towns are critical to our understanding of interdependence, community, and history. Municipalities are the heart of our culture and our society, and there is no reason why they should not also be at the heart of our vision for open government.

In all of Sunlight’s work, we try to balance contributing new ideas and solutions to important problems while also supporting and learning from the great work being done by our peers and mentors. As we expand our scope to local issues, we’re looking forward to learning from efforts we already know about, such as the work done by our friends at Code for America, and the work of new allies we have yet to meet.

A snapshot of what you can expect from us: Over the next year, we're going to be exploring what the landscape of open data and open access to information looks like in America's cities and municipalities. In addition to ramping up our desk-based investigations, monitoring, and commentary, we're going to get creative, exploring bigger questions about municipal government and the impact of local culture through a variety of media and in-person visits. And as we start to pursue this work, we’re looking forward to working with and hearing from you.

Fwd: [open-government] Google.org invests $3.7 million in civic innovation through technology - via Sunlight Foundation and mySociety

Fwd: [open-government] Google.org invests $3.7 million in civic innovation through technology - via Sunlight Foundation and mySociety

Promoting civic innovation through technology

Wednesday 1/16/2013 08:00:00 AM

A big thankyou to Google.org – fabulous funding news

Google.org Awards New Grant to Sunlight

Sunlight Goes Local