The civic hacking community is diverse and has no particular home. As a result, there are a number of communities and mail lists on various subjects related to the broader theme. Join in the discussions!
The Community Centers
Mail Lists: Our community converges on two similar mail lists. The Sunlight Labs list is a mail list both for the development within Sunlight Labs and for coders working on related projects. PoliParsers is a group for people working in the trenches with political data to share what they're up to (run by Aaron Swartz).
Chat: Folks also hang out on the IRC channel #transparency on irc.freenode.net. Web Interface. What's IRC?
Blogs: Planet oGosh! is a blog aggregator collecting the blog posts from around the net on open government open source hacking (oGosh) and government transparency. It's hosted here on HackingCongress.
Facebook: Open Government Open Source Hacking (aka "oGosh") is a Facebook Group run by Josh Tauberer.
Events: Upcoming Transparency Events lists upcoming DC-area, technology and transparency themed events, maintained on the OpenCongress wiki.
Policy and Discussion Lists
These lists are for high-level discussion and for networking the government and good-government worlds.
The Open House Project and The Open Senate Project are policy-oriented projects of the Sunlight Foundation that aim to work with Congress in advancing their use of technology in the interests of transparency. They share a mail list. The bipartisan collaborative of policy wonks, technologists, government staff, librarians, bloggers advocate for straightforward technological reforms to make access to government information more meaningfully accessible to the public.
The OpenGovData group is for broad policy-level discussion of data openness issues (beyond the U.S. federal level).
The Independent Government Observers Task Force mail list, springing from a conference in 2008, has been used to discuss open government data especially for judicial and municipal data.
Transparency Camp was a conference in early 2009 run by the Sunlight Foundation that brought together several hundred developers and government staff to discuss civic technology at an "unconference". Sunlight is now also hosting regular breakfasts in their office in D.C. The conference has a spin-off mail list.
Government 2.0 Club is a national organization that brings together leading thinkers from government, academia and industry to share ideas and solutions for leveraging social media tools and Web 2.0 technologies to create a more collaborate, efficient and effective government — Government 2.0.
Transparency Bloggers: A space for citizen journalists and bloggers interested in promoting transparency and government 2.0.
Other Coding-oriented Lists
These lists are for coders.
The three mail lists at theinfo.org: This is a site for large data sets and the people who love them: the scrapers and crawlers who collect them ("get" list), the academics and geeks who process them ("process" list), the designers and artists who visualize them ("view" list).
GovTrack.us mail list is for discussion about GovTrack.us and related projects.
