It's not often that you get to be in on the ground floor of a movement. But I hope that a movement is what will come out of an extraordinary event that I attended this past weekend in Washington, D.C.

It was called Transparency Camp, and it was a "barcamp" or "unconference" on making government more transparent. And I think it has the potential to be the launching-off point for an incredible revolution in making government information more accessible to the public via the Internet.

The brainpower at this event was immense. There were folks from the Sunlight Foundation, OpenSecrets.org and FollowtheMoney.Org; folks like Josh Tauberer, who, despite the fact that I probably have socks older than he is, has created a Web site that lets the average person do more to track Congressional legislation than Congress' own Web site does; GIS people and programming people and people from Microsoft and Google; lots of folks from the open-source computer world; a few journalists like me; and a pretty good number of federal government employees for DHS, the CDC, the FEC, the EPA, and Recovery.Gov, most of whom seemed to genuinely want to make their agencies' information more accessible to the public via the Web. (And there were a couple of real celebrities. Craig of Craigslist was there, standing on the other side of some folks I was eating pizza with at lunch on Saturday. And the gent with the graying beard two seats from me in the session on transparency and citizen talent turned out to be Tim O'Reilly of O'Reilly Publishing.)

The upshot of this: There are a whole lot of really smart, creative people who want to make it easier for all of us in this country to interact with our government -- on the federal level, on the state level, on the local level. They want to make it easier for us to get information from our governments and easier for us to tell government how we want it to run.

Texas Watchdog is committed to making government transparent -- we've tried to do that with our interactive Google Maps, our searchable databases and our posting of useful source materials. It was a great honor for us to be invited to this event, and we were glad to kick in a little money as a sponsor for it. I may not have followed every thread in every discussion -- debating the merits of Web whozits and whatzits and programming languages and frameworks to present data on, I had to leave that to the real computer people in the room. But everyone can understand and appreciate what it would be like to be able to feel like your government really works for you and listens to you.

I just wanted to get this quick post out there to tell our Texas Watchdog readers about the incredible event I've been a part of. I'll post more later on. In the meantime, you can check out the official Transparency Camp Web site for lists of attendees and sessions, links to presentation slideshows, audio and video of some sessions and other cool stuff, including the flickr photo feed. Search Twitter for the official Transparency Camp hashtag of #tcamp09 -- TexasWatchdog was one of numerous people tweeting the weekend. And Transparency Campers are continuing their discussion, on Twitter and elsewhere, even now that the initial meeting is over.) And for those of you on the del.icio.us social bookmarking service, I'm marking many of the cool sites I heard about at Transparency Camp, or sites run by campers, with the tag of tcamp09, so just get in our network -- we're texaswatchdog -- and search on that tag. There are a few there now, with more to come.

(And thanks once again to the Sunlight Foundation staff for their hard work over the weekend.)


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