The Open Source Lab is organizing a Hackathon (code sprint) at the Open Source Bridge conference, June 17-19th at the Oregon Convention Center in Portland. We’re bringing people together to help out Sunlight Lab’s Fifty States Project. If you’re interested in helping promote government openness and transparency, this is your chance.

What

Part of the non-partisan Sunlight Foundation, Sunlight Labs is an open source development team that builds technology to make government more transparent and accountable. They have been building the Fifty States Project with the help of volunteers around the country. The project aims to provide parsers and an API for legislative data from each of the fifty state governments in the U.S. This is a local version of their already successful OpenCongress.org which provides the same data from the federal government.

Where

The hackathon will take place at the Open Source Bridge conference. Open Source Bridge is a new conference for developers working with open source technologies and for people interested in learning the open source way. It is an entirely volunteer organized conference. Open Source Bridge is providing a Hacker Lounge, providing a great environment to hack in 24 hours a day during the conference.

The hacker lounge is located at the Hilton Portland & Executive Tower, 921 SW Sixth Avenue, Portland, Oregon

When

The hacker lounge opens at 9am on June 17th and is open round the clock until 12am, June 19th.

• Project Intro: Anytime between 3pm - 8pm June 17th
• Coding: any time till the end of the conference

Who

We’re looking for any programmers of any level, interested in promoting openness and transparency in government. No prior experience with the project is needed, but feel free to check out the project wiki. Fifty States is written in python but other languages are welcome as well.

RSVP

If you’re interested in attending RSVP at Upcoming