Politics and Elections Blog
Trends, tools and news from the Google Politics & Elections team
Gov 2.0 Summit Videos
Monday, September 14, 2009
If you weren't able to make the
Gov 2.0 Summit
last week in DC, you're in luck -
videos of most presentations are now online
.
A few Googlers had the chance to participate as speakers.
John Markoff of the New York Times led a discussion about developing an effective platform with
TCP/IP creator
and Googler Vint Cerf, Twitter founder Jack Dorsey and Facebook's Tim Sparapani.
And as we mentioned on a previous post, Tim O'Reilly interviewed Google's Chief Economist Hal Varian about how government can take advantage of real time data and economic indicators.
We'll post an update when Ola Rosling's presentation on
public data search and visualization
is online.
Posted by Ginny Hunt, Public Sector team
Transparency, Technology & You: A Message from Gov 2.0
Thursday, September 10, 2009
At the second day of the
Gov 2.0 Summit
in Washington, DC,
Chris DiBona
, Google's
Open Source
and
Public Sector
Programs Manager, explored how transparency can first be considered a social problem rather than a technical issue.
Using the
DARPA
logo as focal point for his talk, he noted the difficulties in getting a high resolution version of the agency's logo and the required searching through the
USPTO's
databases to ensure he was complying with trademark law when using the logo in his presentation. Chris closed by encouraging the audience of more than 200 to build transparency into government and its applications from day one, thanking everyone for creation of the ultimate open platform, the Internet.
For those of you who couldn't join us, check out the slides from Chris' presentation.
Post by Leslie Hawthorn, Open Source Team
Real Time Economics and Google Domestic Trends
Wednesday, September 9, 2009
One of our readers gave us a timely tip to include
Google Domestic Trends
, a new feature within Google Finance, on our list of interesting tools for the public sector.
Hal Varian, our Chief Economist, spoke today at the
Gov 2.0 Summit
about the general topic of real time economics and wrote a
blog post
announcing Domestic Trends:
Google Domestic Trends tracks Google search traffic across specific sectors of the economy. The changes in the search volume of a given sector on google.com may provide useful economic insight. We've created 23 indexes that track the major economic sectors, such as retail, auto and unemployment.
For example, the
Google Luxuries Index
tracks queries like [jewelry], [rings], [diamond], [ring], [jewelers], [tiffany] and so forth. As you can see from the screenshot below, this index has seasonal spikes in December — however, in the last two years there has been a pronounced decrease as the recession made consumers wary of spending on luxury items.
Read more about this on the
Google Finance Blog
, and be sure to check out the
Google Research Blog
for info on Hal's research on using Google Trends data to predict economic activities.
Congrats to Apps for America 2 Winners
Wednesday, September 9, 2009
We were excited to support
Apps for America 2: The Data.gov Challenge
and even more excited to see the submissions. The public sector developer community never fails to impress. Congrats to the winners!
DataMasher
Datamasher allows you to take two different public data sources and mash them up with an operator (+ - * /). Then you can share them with your friends and comment on the mashups of others. A few of my favorite mashups include:
High School Graduation vs. Guns in Household
,
% Total Population in Prison
, and my favorite:
People per US Representative
.
GovPulse.us
GovPulse is a
Federal Register
browser. The Federal Register is the official journal of the federal government of the United States. In it, you find any kind of notice, notification and solicitation that a federal agency puts out. GovPulse parses it and gives you a way to browse the tens-of-thousands-of-pages-log register by agency, category or date. What's also compelling about it is the visualizations and analysis the software does on top of the register. For instance, check out the
agency page
to see sparklines of the notices from each agency, or the
map of places mentioned by an agency
.
ThisWeKnow.org
This we know is probably best described as the
EveryBlock
for federal data. Type in your zip code or city and state, and ThisWeKnow will provide you with details that the federal government has about your community. The depth of information in the site is incredible. You can see the mass exodus occurring in
Bellevue, NE
or the breakdown of
people diagnosed with cancer
in Los Angeles.
Posted by Ginny Hunt, Public Sector team
"Choose the Future" - Google Japan's 2009 Election site
Tuesday, September 8, 2009
Cross-posted from the Google Japan blog,
posted by Google Japan "choose the future 2009" team
In preparation for Japan's recent election, the Google Japan team launched a 2009 election
"choose the future"
site with election information and candidate responses to "5 Questions" asked and selected by citizens via Google Moderator.
The site, which now displays election results and news, also included candidate search trends leading up to election day.
Japanese voters could find their polling place and directions to get there:
＜東京都渋谷区桜丘町 26-1 の例＞
"Example 26-1 Sakuragaoka-cho Shibuya-ku in Tokyo"
＜東京都渋谷区渋谷の例＞
"Examples of Shibuya, Shibuya-ku, Tokyo"
The "5 Questions" video responses could be viewed on a map for each electoral district.
There were three different ways to find candidates and their videos:
Search by any street address.
＜東京 7 区の例＞
"Ku, Tokyo 7 cases of"
Search by party and district:
＜愛媛 1 区の例＞
"Ehime district example"
Search from constituencies
:
＜神奈川 13 区の例＞
"Kanagawa-ku, 13 cases of"
News and resources across Google
Tuesday, September 8, 2009
Lots of product and country teams at Google work with the public sector to make information more easily available - on projects like releasing
Los Angeles wildfire imagery
or the
flu public service announcement contest on YouTube
with the Department of Health and Human Services.
We'll be using the public sector blog to update you on these projects, and the next few posts are an effort to bring us up to speed.
If there's something we've missed, leave us information in the comments - we read them!
Posted by Ginny Hunt, Public Sector team
Smarter searching in All for Good
Monday, August 24, 2009
[
All for Good
helps people find ways to volunteer and do good in their communities. Googlers on the public sector team helped build and contribute to the site as a 20% project.]
One of the top concerns we've been hearing from nonprofit organizations who list volunteer opportunities on
All for Good
is that their opportunities aren't updated on the site as frequently as they need. This happens because All for Good doesn't directly receive volunteer opportunities from nonprofits - we
crawl
feeds from partners like
VolunteerMatch
and
Idealist
just like Google web search crawls web pages. Crawlers don't immediately update, they take time to find new information.
Today, we're rolling out improvements to All for Good that will help solve this problem and improve search quality for users. The biggest change, which you won't see directly, is that our search engine is now powered by
SOLR
, an incredible open source project that will allow us to provide higher quality and more up-to-date opportunities. Nonprofits should start seeing their opportunities indexed faster, and users should see more relevant and complete results.
We're also making searching easier by launching categories. When you go to All for Good, you now have the option to search by categories of listings in addition to keywords, making it easier to find opportunities you're interested in. Categorization is just the first of several features we'll be adding in the coming months to help you find interesting ways to give back to your community.
We hope you'll try out
All for Good
and participate in a service activity this summer. If you're interested in helping others do good, you can get involved in All for Good by contributing to our
source code
, developing an application with our
API
, or embedding the
All for Good gadget
on your web site or blog.
Posted by Leon Palm and Eric Hysen, Public Sector Team
Labels
2012
4 Screens to Victory
4STV
ads
advertising
case studies
caucuses
Civic Technology
Congress
data
debates
Digital Playbook
election results
Elections
engineering
events
Fellows
Florida
France
gadgets
Google AdWords
Google Elections
Google India. Know your candidates
Google trends
Google+
Google+ Hangouts
GOP
guest posts
hacking
Hangouts On Air
horserace
How do I vote?
India
Indonesia
iowa
Livestream
media partnerships
mobile
moderator
New Hampshire
New York
nyc
open
open data
OSCON
PDF
Politics & Elections Blog
polling
President
research
South Carolina
Spanish. google.com/elections
State of the Union
surveys
trends
trendspotters
video
Voter Information Tool
voters
Voting
YouTube
YouTube for Government
Archive
2016
Sep
Aug
Jul
Jan
2015
Nov
Oct
Jun
May
Apr
2014
Oct
Sep
May
Apr
Mar
Feb
Jan
2013
Dec
Nov
Sep
Jun
Apr
Mar
Feb
2012
Dec
Nov
Oct
Sep
Aug
Jul
Jun
May
Apr
Mar
Feb
Jan
2011
Dec
Nov
Oct
Sep
Aug
Jul
Jun
May
Mar
2010
Dec
Nov
Sep
Aug
Jun
May
Apr
Mar
Jan
2009
Nov
Oct
Sep
Aug
Jul
Jun
Feed
Google
on
Follow @googlepolitics
Calling All Google Politics Trendspotters!
Spot a political, issue or campaign search trend on the web that we should feature?
Submit Your Trends Here
