Post in US oGosh! IRC (chat) Meeting Sat Aug 16 4pm EDT

Aug 08 01:06 UTC

More cross-posting. Steven Clift

Subject: oGosh! IRC Meeting Aug 16 4pm EDT
Date: Thu, 07 Aug 2008 20:55:15 -0400
From: Josh Tauberer <tauberer@govtrack.us>
Reply-To: <email obscured>
To: <email obscured>, <email obscured>,
<email obscured>,  "Open(Data).Open[Govt]"
<odog@googlegroups.com>

(Apologies for four-way cross-posting!)

Hi all,

A current interest of mine is now how to build a larger, coherent
developer community around U.S. civic-technology projects of the types
we all work on. Something like channeling the developer power that is
out there that probably would want to work on these projects, in an
open-source project style, if only they knew about what interesting
things there are to do. There are a bunch of people thinking about a
developer community, each of us perhaps taking a stab at this in
different ways, so here's a stab from me.

I'm holding a meeting on IRC to talk about civic-technology projects,
on Saturday, August 16 at 4pm Eastern time. The agenda will be a mix
between seeing what various civic technology projects are up to
(GovTrack, OpenCongress, and any others run by people who show up), and
getting new people involved in ongoing projects. So, for instance, even
if no newcomers show up, the meeting will be useful for the old-timers
like us just to catch up with each other's recent work. But if we get
some newcomers, we can talk about how to get them on-board helping an
existing project.

As for the name "oGosh!"-- A couple of months ago I created the Facebook
group oGosh: Open Government Open Source Hacking. (For the ODOG list
members, it's a hat tip to that conference and a joke Micah made at the
beginning if the acronym had been OGOD.) The theme of the group is to be
a wide net for any technology project aimed at civics, in the U.S., like
the usual legislative transparency to, if I can eventually contact the
people, things like election transparency.

Despite the name, I don't mean to specifically exclude closed source
projects. Especially for this IRC meeting. It's just a name. It was
tricky finding something catchy aimed at the developer side of things.

Also as for the time- I'm doing this on a Saturday in the hopes of
making it more accessible to newcomers. We'll see how that works out.

The chat will be in the #transparency channel on Freenode. For more
information on the meeting (and on how to get to the chat), see:

http://wiki.opengovdata.org/index.php/OGosh
http://www.facebook.com/home.php#/group.php?gid=45606565313

Suggestions for agenda topics are most welcome either to me directly
(off-list) or by revising the wiki page above.

Hope to see you there.