transparency - Page number 2

Interested citizens and government professionals, meet your new pal, Scout. It sends you notifications when new developments in government happen—your government, your departments of interest, your items of relevance. 

We caught up with Scout's creator, Eric Mill, a web and mobile developer at Sunlight Foundation, to give us the details of the technology powering Scout and some explanation to why we thought this tool already existed.

Mill is an expert at developing technology that makes government more transparent and avid about open source projects.

» Read more

Recently, I created and launched a new website for the Sunlight Foundation called Scout. It's the product I'm the most proud of building in my three years there. It is essentially a search and notification engine for government action. Simple idea, simple presentation, and it's easy to compare to Google Alerts—but there's a lot underneath the hood. » Read more

In case you haven't noticed, it's an election year in the United States. And with the election in full swing, there is a plethora of data, from a myriad of sources, about what is on the mind of the electorate, what is driving voters to make their decisions, and how they are likely to vote. » Read more

A brief tweet from Rep. Sheila Jackson Lee (D-TX) recently invited you to see her newly-decorated apartment and head-to-toe fashions. The problem? It wasn't her apartment. The link led to the website of a staffer in her press office and was promptly deleted from Twitter fifty-seven seconds later. Looks like someone got their social media accounts mixed up.

That might be the end of the story, except the gaffe lives on through Politwoops, an archive of deleted tweets from U.S. politicians hosted by the Sunlight Foundation. » Read more

The always-insightful Alex Reid has penned an essay "on the question of open peer review," which examines a draft white paper posted to Media Commons last week. » Read more

I've always believed that the best things in life should come in open source packages. Openness is a natural synonym with selflessness and, thus, with love in its truest form. That's the analogy that instantly came to my mind after reading this article by Bryan Behrenshausen, which discusses ways to explain the concept of openness to your friends. » Read more

Promoting a culture that supports failure is a foreign concept to most people, but not for the panelists speaking about open government and business at CityCamp Raleigh. According to the panelists, who range from vice presidents of corporations to chief information officers of Raleigh government, there is a general consensus that failing faster provides a quicker path to innovation. » Read more

Sustainable Harvest’s inclusive business model is called Relationship Coffee™. While many companies today operate on a series of short-term, profit-driven decisions, Relationship Coffee transforms the way business is done by building long-term relationships based on transparency and trust. We create market access and traceable supply chains for smallholder farmers, and involve our suppliers in negotiations with the final buyer, helping the farmers become empowered, informed actors in the coffee supply chain. By shifting the paradigm from closed, one-off transactions to an open and collaborative supply chain, we have seen Relationship Coffee strengthen the specialty coffee industry and help all stakeholders thrive in their businesses. » Read more

All modern businesses run on information, so business management is also about Information Management. However, software alone cannot transform an organization. Information Management mastery doesn't come from technology, it comes from the people! More specifically, it comes down to the CEO instilling an Information Culture for staff to follow. It's leadership not by force, but by example. » Read more

Can a company bust bureaucracy by liberating people to manage themselves? A team of managers from Roche Pharmaceuticals set out to prove this point through a management experiment—and reaped big dividends in the process. » Read more