Apps for America

In the spirit of governmental openness, the Washington Post’s www.WhoRunsGov.com, and the GeekPAC's Deki.Geek-PAC.org (all powered by MindTouch!), we've developed two XML extensions that call out to the Sunlight Labs and Capitol Words APIs to get information about the people who make the laws we all live under.

These extensions allow any of the ten million MindTouch users across 600,000 installations to easily access, mash up, and utilize information from those APIs; in doing so users and entities can display legislator information in ways that are meaningful for their own purposes, bringing governmental openness down to the people on a personal level. MindTouch, itself a fervent transparency supporter, provided a workshop to demonstrate how to use these extensions at the Government 2.0 Camp conference in Washington DC.

To help others learn how this was created and to inspire them to create other transparency-minded programs, a tutorial was written that discusses how it was all done. You can read about it here:
http://wiki.developer.mindtouch.com/Solutions_Utilizing_MindTouch_Deki/Creating_An_XML_Extension_That_Uses_The_Sunlight_Labs_Remote_API.