I met with Micheal Lenczner at a coffee shop in April, and was told that CivicAccess was a community of interest, with no specific plans for the future.
There's nothing wrong with maintaining a separate 'community of interest'... my impression was that CivicAccess seems to have a broader focus than visiblegovernment, with more interest in scientific data.
> From: Cory Horner <
[hidden email]>
> Subject: Re: [CivicAccess-discuss] Getting Tools Built
> To: "civicaccess discuss" <
[hidden email]>
> Received: Tuesday, July 8, 2008, 2:38 AM
> A while back there was brief discussion about CivicAccess
> becoming an
> umbrella foundation/non-profit to conglomerate the various
> Canadian
> access-related projects. I see a real need/use for this,
> as i'm sure
> each little project has little interest in all the
> paperwork involved
> to achieve non-profit status, when all they want is a
> little
> financial support; sticking a little "a CivicAccess
> project" logo in
> the corner is a lot more appealing.
>
> To contrast the two examples given by Jennifer, I guess I
> see
> mySociety as a handful of people who built tools who then
> built a non-
> profit around it, versus Sunlight as a group with a bucket
> of money
> who then built tools. CivicAccess and VisibleGovernment
> seem to be
> taking the similar approaches, respectively.
>
> My question is, are CivicAccess and VisibleGovernment
> competing, or
> should we try to, for example, make CivicAccess the
> umbrella/
> community, and VisibleGovernment the fundraising wing? Is
> there is a
> difference that i'm not seeing here, besides branding?
> (or is having
> 2 entities too confusing?)
>
> Thanks,
> Cory.
>
> On 7-Jul-08, at 1:11 PM, Jennifer Bell wrote:
>
> > I've been thinking the last while about the best
> approach for
> > promoting the creation of online tools for government
>
> > transparency. The Sunlight Foundation in the US and
> mySociety in
> > the UK are showing that the government can be changed
> by example,
> > from the outside. It just takes people to push to
> make it happen.
> >
> > What will it take to get a similar movement going here
> in Canada?
> > As I know there are several people here with
> experience in similar
> > groups, I'd like to get your opinions.
> >
> > The ingredients, as I see them, are:
> >
> > 1) Money.
> > 2) A Community.
> > 3) A Tool.
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