“TransparencyCamp is this weekend right here in Washington DC”:http://transparencycamp.eventbrite.com. A lot has happened since the camp was announced back in November. The new Administration has taken concrete actions to show it is trying to be smart about communication and transparency and trying to use the right technologies. On Obama’s second day in office he posted “Memorandum for the Heads of Executive Departments and Agencies Subject: Transparency and Open Government”:http://politechbot.com/docs/obama/memorandum.open.government.012109.txt, and two weeks ago the White House launched “Recovery.gov”:www.Recovery.gov on an open source platform (Drupal).

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Then, just last week, Peter Orszag laid out a plan that requires “agencies…to provide a feed (preferred: Atom 1.0, acceptable: RSS) of the information so that content can be delivered via subscription” in the “Initial Implementing Guidance for the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act (PDF)”:http://is.gd/k5q3

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Open source developers and users are in a unique position to help build the applications that the US government needs to help open data. There is lots of chatter about open data right now within the Drupal community, because “DrupalCon”:http://dc2009.drupalcon.org is just days away here in DC and a lot of conversations are planned about how to make Drupal a great enabler for open data projects. All the Drupal folks that are coming into town early and were able to get tickets to TransparencyCamp before it sold out, ping me (“@ericg on Twitter”:http://twitter.com/ericg ) on Saturday and lets meet up. I want to take some of the good conversations happening at TransparencyCamp and make sure they carry over to the conference next week.

Here are a couple sessions from DruaplCon that might be cool for folks interested in open data:

• “Building APIs that Rock, Jeff Eaton”:http://dc2009.drupalcon.org/session/building-apis-rock

• “OpenID, Drupal, and the Open Web, James Walker”:http://dc2009.drupalcon.org/session/openid-drupal-and-open-web

• My own session: “Communicating Data Online, Data Visualizations and Opening Data”:http://dc2009.drupalcon.org/session/communicating-data-online-data-visualizations-and-open-data

• “Promiscuous Drupal: Building Your Site With Web APIs, Jeff Eaton”:http://dc2009.drupalcon.org/session/promiscuous-drupal-building-your-site-web-apis

• “Using SMS for Data Collection, Will White”:http://dc2009.drupalcon.org/session/using-sms-data-collection

See you on Saturday!