The Sunlight Foundation’s annual Transparency Camp provides an opportunity to share information on opengov technologies and policies. Transparency is a top issue for economic development incentive use and is one of the key elements of the Smart Incentives 4×4 framework.

The most recent Tcamp took place Sept. 11-12 in Washington, DC. You can see session information plus notes and links here. A few you might check out are:

  • Why & When Civic Hacking Succeeds, or Doesn’t
  • Open Budgets: Getting from Data to Decision-Making
  • Workshopping Municipal Barriers to Opening Data
  • Editorial Strategy: The Missing Link in Civic Data Tools – providing context and a storyline for the data
  • Embiggening Open Data Policies – What Works? – on the Sunlight Foundation’s work to help cities improve their open data policies through the What Works Cities Initiative.

The director of Washington, DC’s Office of Open Government closed the conference with comments on the city’s journey to greater transparency and accountability. A summary of her remarks is available via Technical.ly DC.

The open government movement has already altered expectations for data transparency from economic development organizations. We will continue to share what we learn on how to navigate this new terrain.

If you are interested in the topic, here are links to our blog posts from the 2013 and 2014 Transparency Camps.

You can also check out Data Transparency 2015, coming up next week in Washington, DC. This program will bring together government and technology company leaders who are “working to transform government information from disconnected documents into open data. These current changes promise to bring democratic accountability for citizens, data-driven management within government, and automated compliance for businesses.” 

TransparencyCamp “is an ‘unconference’ for opengov, an event where, every year, hundreds of people gather to share their knowledge about how to use new technologies and policies to make our government really work for the people – and to help people work smarter with our government.” TransparencyCamp is organized by the Sunlight Foundation