Government Mashups!

Nicole Carrier  November 11 2009 02:41:03 PM

The use case is one that I initially captured in a blog a few months back about one of our customers – Kent County Council- and their Pic and Mix project.  Essentially, the scenario is that those within the government sector are making more and more public records available to constituents and other interested parties, with the driving force being to foster a more transparent and more responsive government.  

To that end, I created a demo (in three parts) all about government and citizen mashups.  I posted these on youtube (in HD!)

In the first part of this demo, I start by walking few a couple of examples of mashups that would be interesting to citizens. Next, I show how both governments and citizens could take advantage of Mashup tooling like IBM Mashup Center to create and catalog information feeds for use by citizens or by other government agencies.

In part two of this demo, I show how these feeds can then be assembled into useful new mashups by leveraging IBM Mashup Center’s easy-to-use code-free Mashup Builder tool. I also show how the new mashup page can be embedded into any website- like a blog, and how the feeds can be consumed by other clients, like Lotus Notes.

In part 3 of this demo, I show how to create a custom widget using our Portlet Factory / Widget Factory tooling.  The widget will take in a zip code and return the legislators for that area.  The widget is built using a rest service provided by the Sunlight Foundation.

Here is a screenshot of one of the pages from the demo- showing info about a selected legislator.  The feeds are coming from twitter, sunlight foundation, and opensecrets.org.  In part 3 of the demo, I will create (using Widget Factory) the widget on the top row, next to the zip code search. The other widget created with Widget Factory is the one showing Top Contributors for the selected rep.  The other widgets on the page come out-of-the-box with Mashup Center version 2.

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