I’m sitting here listening to Greg Elin talking about how Sunlight started, and I have to add that the presence of the Personal Democracy Forum also had a large role in how this all went forward.

Thanks for your feedback and for adding David Robinson’s name to my dataset. I use the terms hacktivist & hackademics in an article about the “architecture of transparency” (to be published later this year in a refeered journal dealing with the issue of collaboration. I’ll send you a draft when it’s ready). But the point here is the role of people like Jerry, You and David who can easily bridge these two “fairly separate” worlds and thus act as connectors between some innovative concepts in policy (collaborative governance) and in technology (web of data). Understanding the cultural differences that already exist inside this small world of “open data / open government” gives an idea of the huge cultural gap with people inside the political machine (civil servants, agencies, etc.) who mistake a server for a waiter :)

Also — OpenCongress has a new API in beta that everyone is encouraged to check out :: opencongress.org/api — providing access to much of the social data you mentioned generated by visitors & users on our site. Thanks for continuing to play your vital role in structuring Congressional data for all these uses & more exciting work to come.

1) I’ll just go down the list of Sunlight’s grants (http://sunlightfoundation.com/grants/) and pick off the ones that I think are relevant to this answer: Any grant toward a wiki project, funding Public.Resource.Org for conferences, toward Geocoder.us’s API, to NIMSP for API, to MAPLight and OpenCongress, to Taxpayers for Common Sense (now they publish their earmark Excel spreadsheet), to Metavid (an open source project), to Watchdog which mixed data from other sources, and to CRP to open their data. They also ran the TransparencyCamp conference a few months ago.

2) I love those terms, hacktivist and hackademic — haven’t heard them before. I’m not sure what the role of the hackademics have been in, say, the narrow theme I was addressing of orgs opening up their data. I’ve never met Beth, which just goes to show that our worlds aren’t that close. Another hackademic is my friend David Robinson at Princeton’s CITP- we’ve influenced each other’s thinking, so there’s that. But it feels like the two worlds are fairly separate, except, as you note, when one person is in both worlds (and I wouldn’t really consider myself a hackademic).

I don’t want to underplay the significance of the work I didn’t mention too much. There was certainly a lot going on in the last few years besides what I mentioned that all points to this growing movement. It’s just that what I picked out where what I believe to be the key events that directly changed where we are today in terms of sharing data in the nonprofit world.

1. Can you give more details about the moment when Sunlight promoted collaboration through funding? (“Sunlight recruited great staff and steamrolled through the open government world stamping out the idea that each open government group should be in its own little world — by funding interaction, in a sense. The expectations for government transparency advocacy changed.”)

2. You put the focus here on the hacktivists of the movement and don’t mention the open data hackademics (Beth Noveck, etc.). Being both an hacktivist and an hackademic yourself, which role do you think the research world played in this? (Another good example of open data hacktivist & hackademic is Jerry Brito)