Geek Corps

A few weeks ago, Matthew Burton of speechology.org blogged about the need for a national ‘Geek Corps’ of people willing to contribute to making government systems up-to-date and more accountable (found by way of The Open House Project ).  Burton writes:

What we need is a foundation that serves as the middle man between
government needs and programmers' abilities. Even better, we need a
community of coders who are committed to improving the inner workings of DC,
and doing it in a way that inherently promotes transparency while fighting
government waste. We need a Mozilla Foundation for the government. A
stateside Geekcorps. A geeky Americorps. An army of impassioned programmers
committed to improving the government's information services, both internal
and those it provides to the public. It would make government more
organized, accountable and effective, and it would save them a lot of tax
dollars. And the result—open access to the code that runs our country—is a
great first step toward the kind of government transparency we're after.

At visiblegovernment.ca, we’re trying to build a movement of programmers creating tools for online democracy in Canada.   At Personal Democracy Forum 2008 , the non-profit group the Sunlight Foundation demo’d two of its tools that are starting to show what’s possible:

• OpenCongress.org – this tool allows people to track bills, share them with their friends, comment on particular sections of bills, and link back to sections of bills from their blog. 

• Metavid – this tool allows people to isolate and tag sections of congressional video and link to them from their blogs.  The links allows people to have more informed discussions in online forums about what actually happened in congress.  The tool also makes the people in congress more accountable  by providing an easy to access record of exactly what was said, in what context.

Both these tools are open source, ready and waiting for propagation around the globe.  One of my favourite comments from the audience at PDF2008 came from a reporter from a small New York paper, who after watching these two demos said:

“I’m amazed at what’s happening here.  It's incredible.  I’m going back and telling everybody.  Geeks rock.  Geek is new cool.”

I agree.