Is an Open Legislative Database Viable?

From Devsummit

Facilitated by Ryan Ozimek, PICnet, David Guilheufe, CivicSpace, Chris Lundberg and April Pederson, DemocracyInAction, and others

It's been discussed for years, and continues to be needed: a collaboratively maintained database of elected officials at local, regional, national and even international levels for use by advocacy and campaigning platforms. Currently a number of vendors maintain their own databases, duplicating efforts while balkanizing the data space.

While progress has been slow, passion remains high for discussing what's viable in terms of open legislative databases, and this session will take up the thread with the hope of identifying realistic goals and near-term steps in the current nonprofit software context.

A particular point of discussion will be how such an initiative might be funded, as any unfunded mandate will unlikely survive the light of the post-Summit day.

Models: - Wiki style models of a community generated database - Editor style models of high quality data - Hybrid models

Related Efforts: Sunlight Labs http://www.sunlightlabs.org/ Civic Footprint http://www.civicfootprint.org/