Civic Commons, a non-profit initiative that aims to help cities and local governments harness the power of shared technologies and adapt to a more collaborative software development methodology, recently released an app store for civic technology called the Civic Commons Marketplace. Just last week, an alpha version of the Civic Commons Marketplace API for this app store was also released.
The FCC just launched a new tool that allows any user to custom build a dashboard from a variety of FCC released data, tools and services, built on the FCC API. The tool, called MyFCC, lets you create a customized FCC online experience for quick access to the tools and information you feel is most important. MyFCC make it possible to easily create, save and manage a customized page, choosing from a menu of 22 “widgets” such as, latest headlines and official documents, the daily digest, FCC forms and online filings.
When launching and managing your API, many companies choose to do all the work themselves, unaware that are service providers available to help you plan, deploy, launch and manage your API infrastructure and ecosystem. To help bring awareness, I wanted to take a few moments and do a roundup of API service providers.
We all have a duty as citizens to participate in government, even if it’s just to vote. With the convergence of the Internet, RESTful APIs, JSON, mobile phones and the wealth of programming resources available today, the opportunities to participate are increasing.
The Federal Register is touted as “The Daily Journal Of The United States Government”. Its website, federalregister.gov, allows access to the documents published there, which include proposed rules, final rules, public notices, and Presidential actions. It’s a pretty interesting and useful look into what the US Government is doing, and how it might affect your life. Amazingly enough, it has a full-featured API, which is a truly open source project, to allow access to the Federal Register within applications.
Hackathons have been a staple in Silicon Valley tech culture for quite some time, but recently we have seen seeing hackathons evolve outside of the valley — from Los Angeles to Prague.
The format of the Hackathon is pretty straightforward: You bring together a group of developers in a room, give them a topic to code around, then they break into teams and begin hacking for usually from 24-72 hours. On the final day, theypresent what they’ve built. Winners usually go home with cash, prizes, and of course notoriety.
Government watchdogs Sunlight Labs has released a new Influence Explorer Text API. The new API provides rich data on the political influence of individuals and organizations in Washington DC. Last month Sunlight Labs released Inbox Influence, a new tool that allows you to see the political contributions of the people and organizations, while viewing emails in Gmail. The Influence Explorer Text API provides developers with the same data, to build their own political influence applications and plugins.
Even though the future of Data.gov remains uncertain in these troubled economic times, many individual government agencies are still moving forward with President Obama’s mandate to make the U.S. federal government more transparent by making government data accessible online. The U.S. Department of Labor API makes it easier for software developers to incorporate Labor Department data into online and mobile applications.
The Metropolitan Transportation Authority of New York State (MTA) recently announced a new apps contest called MTA App Quest. The contest is designed to promote apps that cover a much broader system than just New York City and spark interest around the MTA API and newly released datasets. The MTA App Quest is the latest chapter in the MTA’s transformation from a relatively closed agency to one that is embracing open transit data.
Aadhaar is India’s ambitious project to provide a unique identification number to every citizen. The project has been in operation for the last two years and has now seen a unique number being assigned to over 9.2 million citizens. The latest strategy adopted by the UIDAI (Unique Identification Authority of India) is to create the UIDAI Authentication API and provide an SDK for its various subsystems, thereby inviting developers to create an ecosystem around it.
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