This Week in Open Government | February 1, 2013

  • In a state-of-the-city address on January 29th, Hamilton Mayor Bob Bratina announced his support of open data in the city. Bratina noted that open data in Hamilton will only succeed if those in power are willing to share their information and trust the citizens who elected them.

  • The organizers of the international Open Data Day hackathon have created a wiki to help find your local event. Be sure to check out the wiki for Montreal’s Open Data Day which we are co-hosting with Montreal Ouvert and Quebec Ouvert.

  • This week the Sunlight Foundation announced Docket Wrench, a new online research tool to dig into regulatory comments and uncover patterns among millions of documents in the United States. While influence on government from lobbying and campaign contributions is well researched, Docket Wrench represents a new effort to understand organizations that influence the regulatory process, monitoring comments from 10,000 organizations across 300 federal agencies.

  • The Knight Foundation has announced that their next news challenge will be about open government! The challenge seeks projects that improve the ways citizens and government interact and will launch on February 12th and close March 18th.