Technola : Public Interest Law & Technology Updates & Commentary : Matthew Burnett & Kate Bladow : Tech Advice for the Non-Profit Legal Sector

The Sunlight Foundation, a nonprofit working for a more open and accountable government, recently sponsored Apps for America 2 together with Google, O'Reilly Media, and TechWeb. These organizations wanted to demonstrate that developers will step up and make government data easier for the public to consume if the data is available.

The winners were announced at the Gov 2.0 Expo Showcase, and all three of the finalists, and many of the other apps, are worth a look. For example:

• GovPulse.us. Search the federal register by date, topic, or location. Searches can be saved in news readers, so new articles are automatically delivered. For an example, I tried out the phrase "Legal Services Corporation." The entries aren't very exciting, but imagine your organization's advocates getting articles about the Fair Debt Collection Practices Act or domestic violence.
• ThisWeKnow.org. Dig into data about a specific location. For my hometown, I found out that violent crime hasn't increased and it's just as homogeneous as when I lived there. (Alternatively, my current town isn't nearly as peaceful.) The front page also includes top ten lists for several topics including unemployment and toxins.
• DataMasher. Map data and look for patterns. A couple of examples: Federal Spending by State / Population Census 2008, % of Total Population in Prison, and Political Party Contributions Ratio. Make certain to read the comments. A warning: this tool makes mapping the data easy, but you need to think carefully before interpreting what you see.

Additional apps have been highlighted on the Sunlight Foundation's blog.

Apps for America 2 wasn't the Sunlight Foundation's first attempt to examine how technology can make the government more open. They have also suggested a facelight for the SCOTUS website and started crowdsourcing tedious tasks. - K

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I love my right to vote! If you haven't voted yet or aren't planning on voting, stop what you are doing, go, and make me happy. (Come on, so far I've used two exclamation points in this post. That should tell you how happy it would make me.)

If you paid attention to this year's campaigns, you saw the important role that technology played, but if not, pay attention today. Technology is being used in new and exciting ways to make certain that people get to vote and help them to document their voting stories. A few examples:

• TwitterVoteReport.com: This site tracks voting experiences, including wait times. And you can even report your own experience.
• Voter Interview: Jill Foster used Utterli to interview a first-time voter about his experience, and YouTube has set up a site where you can post a video of your voting experience. (Two sites to help you create this content: NetSquared, which tells you how to use Utterli, and a link from blogdiva, which has some great tips about guerilla broadcasting with your cell phone.)
• VoterStory.org: This group is collecting voter complaints. They've created a widget that you can put on your website to help readers submit their complaints.

And I am certain that there are plenty more. Keep your eyes and ears open today, and you'll hear about them. If you do, please take a minute to highlight them in the comments below. - K

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Thanks to Periscope Gadget, you can now integrate Basecamp with your iGoogle homepage. More background on their blog here and a few screencasts here. -M

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On Tuesday Mozilla released Ubiquity, an amazing command-based interface for navigating the Web and creating mashups. Check out the video below. -M

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On Tuesday NPR announced the launch of their new API, which allows users to easily generate custom API calls using an innovative query generator. The API can also return results in RSS, MediaRSS, JSON, Atom and through HTML and JavaScript widgets. For more background visit the Inside NPR.org blog or (for a more critical perspective) check out the related articles on TechCrunch and Mashable.com.

And for those unfamiliar with APIs, here's a nice overview. Examples? Pro Bono Net uses an API to share organizational data from the National Pro Bono Opportunities Guide with the ABA Second Season of Service's Volunteer Opportunity Search Engine, which also includes volunteer opportunities from the ABA National Directory of Law-Related Programs and Idealist.org. This same technology is being piloted to share resources between statewide advocates sites that are built on different templates and into case management systems so that advocates have ready access to resources that are automatically filtered based on a client's legal problem. -M

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Looking for a way to add current legal news to your website? The ABA Journal, winner of this year's 2008 Webby Awards People's Voice Winner, has a new widget available that lets you add their headlines to your site or blog.

And if that doesn't give you enough legal news, you can also check out their Twitter feed and get updates pushed your way all day long. - K

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Need to create a custom donation badge for your website? How about a mini-site for an upcoming advocacy initiative at your organization? A new widget for Facebook, iGoogle or your blog?

Sprout Builder is a fantastic new web-based application that allows you to build all of these things and much, much more. Easily embed images, multimedia and RSS feeds right into your widget, which can consist of one or more pages and include buttons, links and other navigational elements. It's very easy to do and the results make for a truly sophisticated widget. I was able to create the one below with a built-in RSS feed (click "recent posts") and links to external pages in under 15 minutes.

If you want to learn more, check out their forums and blog. You'll also find lots of inspiration in the gallery. And when you're all done, don't forget to let us know where your creativity leads you. -M

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Intel Research is hard at work on a new product, called Mash Maker, that they claim will make making mashups easy (even if saying it isn't). While they're clearly not first on the scene, see Microsoft's Popfly, Yahoo Pipes, and IBM's workplace solution, Lotus Mashups, Mash Maker differs in that it uses the browser itself as the mashup maker (initially as a Firefox add-on). Intel extols three virtues of its approach:

• Browse, Don't Program - it suggests mashups as you browse the web
• View the internet, not just a web page - it combines many pages into one view
• Build the semantic web as a community- it draws on the wisdom of the community to understand the structure and semantics of information on the web

I'm currently on the waiting list, but watch for an update after the release. -M

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