This weekend, Texas Forums and the League of Technical Voters are co-sponsoring a gathering of technologists, citizens, non-profits organizations to work on the Transparent Federal Budget Project. The theme of the weekend is “We Are All Actors“. The goal of this project is to increase the transparency and accountability of our political processes. It will consist of a community-built legislation database, an intuitive web-based database UI, and a social network to tie each database contribution to the author’s identity and reputation.
We intend for this project to have a substantial, positive impact on this country, and this means knocking down as many barriers to participation as possible. To this end, a key proposal of ours is to create a social networking open standard, allowing users of existing social networking sites to participate in the TFB social network and community using their existing identities. We are enjoying tremendous support from former Senator Bill Bradley who wrote about the need for greater transparency in federal budgeting and legislation.
In the spirit of transparency, the entire event is being webcast at: mms://128.83.78.9/WAAA.
Throughout this weekend, I’ll enlist volunteers from our gathering to reflect on their experiences.
Technorati Tags: democracy, forums, League of Technical Voters, Transparent Federal Budget, Bill Bradley, technology, e-democracy, libraries, LBJ Library, Texas Forums, We are All Actors, e-democracywaaa2007
