Sunlight Labs

If you haven't already, be sure to check out the new federalregister.gov, which launched last night. For some of you, the site might bring to mind govpulse, one of the winners of our second Apps for America contest. That's no coincidence: GPO and NARA, the agencies responsible for maintaining the FR, sought out Andrew, Dave and Bob -- the folks behind govpulse -- and asked them to help build the new site.

As you can imagine, those of us at Sunlight are pretty excited about this. It's a great validation of the work of the Labs community, and a wonderful example of what's possible when government stays open to the transformative possibilities offered by technology.

Over the weekend I was clearing out my RSS, and was pleasantly surprised to find Sunlight's work in an unexpected place. TheWashCycle is my favorite DC bike blog, and its author has started a series of posts designed to address arguments that are commonly faced by cycling advocates. One of those is that cyclists don't pay for roads — that the gas tax pays for them — and consequently folks on bikes aren't entitled to the use of roads, or are less entitled to space on the road than motorists, or shouldn't have a say in how roads are built.

As it turns out, the assumption that cyclists don't pay for roads is wrong. The WashCycle post linked to some work that we did for Pew's Subsidyscope project, which shows that gas taxes are paying for a decreasing share of our roads. In 2007 taxes and fees related to auto use covered only half the bill. The shortfall is made up by general revenues and debt — and though the specifics of the story play out differently from state to state it's safe to say that cyclists pay taxes that help build roads.

I mention all this not simply to highlight some pro-cyclist propaganda — though of course, as a daily bike commuter, I'm glad to do that, too — but rather to point this out as an example of what open government data can accomplish.

This weekend I had the opportunity to attend Scott Chacon's Advanced Git class at Jumpstart Lab. Scott works for Github and maintains the Git project's website. He's also written a book, ProGit, and the handy reference site Git Reference.

Scott spent a good bit of time going over the fundamentals of Git--the different types of objects stored in its database and how they point to one another. I had seen all this before when I first started using Git, but I wasn't ready to really understand it then. If you've ever felt that Git was a bit mysterious or scary I'd highly recommend going over the basics again. Try this article and these two sections of Scott's book.

Here are some other useful tips I picked up:

The Health 2.0 Developer Challenge launched last week, and I've been embarrassingly remiss at mentioning it. Hopefully, many of you are already in the loop and excited about the project. Let me take a second and fill the rest of you in.

There are a lot of app contests and hackathons and dev challenges around these days. But I think this is one worth getting excited about, for three reasons.

Last month for the two-day internal app competition we had at Sunlight Labs, Jeremy, Kaitlin, and I built geocron. Jeremy had a specific problem that just needed to be solved. When reaching his Red line Metro station during the commute home, he'd have to physically take out his iPhone and send a text message to his wife, asking to be picked up. Surely, such actions can and should be automated, and that's where geocron comes in. By combining the Google Latitude API with old-fashioned cron jobs, we've created a utility that can send automated email, SMS, or webhook payloads depending on the time of day and the place you're located.