from Hacker News

Is Sunlight Labs shutdown the death knell for open government?

by nnnnnn on 10/20/16, 7:14 PM with 11 comments

• by nnnnnn on 10/20/16, 7:27 PM

  Posting this for two reasons --

  First of all, these organizations don't pop up or maintain themselves magically, it takes a leader to get this started and a smart team to keep it going. They deserve to be recognized for truly great work.

  Second, I think having open government data in a truly ACCESSIBLE format is extremely important. If you've ever tried to look up data on the FEC site, you'll know what I mean. Not to take away from the FEC data site -- it's an incredible data resource, but tech companies certainly do a better job productizing these large amounts of data from the government.

• by emilpitkin on 10/20/16, 7:22 PM

  Hey there. I'm Emil, the CEO of GovPredict. If you use Sunlight's repos, send me a note (emil@govpredict.com). I'd love to hear from you.

• by salbertson on 10/20/16, 7:26 PM

  I used their openstates repo a while back and found it amazing how well they could distill the data. I had tried writing scrapers before for the same purposes, but it took forever just to get a fraction of what they had. Best of luck to sunlight devs in the transition.

• by maplematch on 10/20/16, 7:47 PM

  Fascinating. I wonder how the future firms will leverage FOIA requests to continue building the database.

• by kumarski on 10/20/16, 7:43 PM

  Jesus, thanks for picking up the tab and maintaining it. surprised nobody is making a ruckus aobut it.

• by abhir on 10/20/16, 7:54 PM

  Government data is so incredibly messy - good on you guys!