The Voting Information Project at the Great American Hackathon

This weekend, Sunlight Labs, Sunlight Foundation’s open source development community, held the first “Great American Hackathon.” Participants included nearly 200 coders from across the country. The event was made up of over 20 gatherings and people cooperated online via twitter and chatrooms.

Sunlight Labs graciously highlighted VIP as a source of data the attendees could work on. Aaron Strauss (official VIP title, Technical Advisor Extraordinaire) wrangled a couple of the software engineers attending the D.C. gathering, including Sumer Nemeth from Imagine Election, and they started work on what we think will be a really great project. 

You all know by now about our popular election information and polling place look-up gadget. This new collaboration of coders is creating the Federal Write-In Absentee Ballot (FWAB) gadget. We want to make it easier for military and overseas voters to cast ballots from afar — and our new gadget will help. A voter living on a military base in Afghanistan, for instance, would enter the U.S. address at which they were registered and our FWAB gadget would generate a PDF that the voter could use to select their preferred candidates, print out, and mail in. Like the initial gadget, this new FWAB project is open source.

There’s only a modest amount of code written at the moment, but we’ll be adding more over the winter. We hope to have something to debut by the end of January.

As we mentioned in our last post, the Virginia Voting Information Project Google Gadget was taken down right after the election. However, Google has left up the API for open development. You can access it here. If you are a creative developer with a great idea for using our data, have at it! We can’t wait to see what applications will go viral in 2010 and beyond.

Again, a big thank you to Sunlight, especially Clay Johnson, for asking us to participate in the Hackathon. We look forward to the next one.

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