I'm Brady Forrest.

Welcome to Ignite.

We're going to have a fun hour for you to cap off

your day here at Google IO.

It's going to be unlike any other session that you were

in, in that is not heavily scripted.

It is a bunch of people coming together that share their

ideas and passions.

As mentioned, I'm Brady Forrest.

I am with O'Reilly, and many, many years ago, I start now

many years ago, I started Ignite.

I also run Radar and do a bunch of other conferences.

About 3 years ago, my friend, Bre Pettis and I wanted

a geek event for our friends in Seattle.

And we wanted a place where they could share their thoughts

and passions, but very quickly.

Because not everybody is that interesting!

And so, to do that, we set some constraints around it.

But we wanted to make it a safe place for them to do that.

We wanted to make it fun for the audience and so all along

those lines, we invented a torturous format.

And, we would ply the speakers with beer.

We would ply the audience with beer.

I apologize in advance.

We were unable to procure any for this session.

But each speaker gets just 20 slides, 15 seconds a slide,

for a total of 5 minutes.

The speakers are not in control of their slides entire time.

So, once they're up here, as you've seen me do, they

kind of tap dance as their slides change, and, in this

case, we have 10 talks.

We're going to be beginning with Clay Johnson, learning

about the ins and outs of DC, and we are going to be ending

with, "Where the Hell is Matt?" And "A Great

Dance Around the World".

If you want to Tweet about it, share your your thoughts on it,

look up information about this later, use the hash

tag, Ignite IO.

I won't be checking Twitter during this; I'll be too busy

hoping that Powerpoint doesn't crash just so you know.

If you've never heard of Ignite, Ignite's in over a

100 cities around the world.

It's spread far.

It's spread wide.

And if you want to throw your own, just let me know.

There are thousands of Ignite videos on line

at IgniteShow.com.

And it is super easy and fun to start.

You really just need to borrow a microphone and about 20

geeks, which I'm sure anyone here could round up.

Now, I'd like to welcome up our first speaker.

He is based in DC.

He's one of the people charged with basically trying to

make our government more transparent.

He does this through Sunlight Labs.

Please welcome up their CTO, Clay Johnson.

CLAY JOHNSON: How are you guys doing?

No, no, no no!

Come on!

This is Ignite!

This is Ignite!

That's what I'm talking about!

I'm Clay Johnson.

I direct Sunlight Lab at the Sunlight Foundation.

My primary job is fighting Zombies.

I fight Zombies in Washington DC, where a lot of

them get created.

And we work with government data.

And I need your help to fight these Zombies too.

Zombies, for the most part, are being generated by bad

information and bad access to information, generally

by people like this.

This is Glenn Beck and he is a Zombie producer.

Also Keith Olbermann, in the interest of partisanship,

is also a Zombie producer.

And other people who produce really commercial information.

It's like commercially process food.

This is Tyson's Any'Tizers.

They're Dippin' Twists.

Good for any time.

And I don't know what the fuck they're made out of, man!

And it's the same thing with information.

If you think about it information and food

are pretty similar.

They have these food chains, right?

So food goes from organic matter to vegetables, meats, to

people, and facts go data, to wire services, to bloggers

and distributors, people.

At the top of both of these food chains are Zombies!

And that's what we have to fix.

So what I do is, I fight Zombies.

What we do, is we get data out of government

to empower people.

Now here's a good example of some Zombies; Don't Steal

from Medicare to Support Socialized Medicine.

It's the equivalent of people saying "Brains.

Brains" So, we take this data, right?

This is every campaign contribution, not every one,

but this is a cobalt base file of every campaign contribution

that every member of Congress has ever received.

And we make it so that people can easily say, that hey, maybe

our health care system is messed up because of campaign

contributions and lobbyists and stuff like that, right?

So, this is TransparencyData.com where you

can easily get all of the Nelson's campaign contributions

at the State or Federal of level over the past 30 years

and you can get API.

You can do cool things with the it, like integrate it with

Gmail, so you can see who is contributing.

It does a look up for the sender of the email.

It also checks for lobbyists, so you can be aware registered

federal lobbyists that email you.

So, in 4000BC, writing was a trade secret of

a professional scribe.

It was locked up and not given to people.

And, I think something interesting has changed now.

Instead of writing, it's truth that's a trade secret of

professional scribes.

And, it's up to developers to really bust down that barrier,

because we have the power to change Washington, DC through

giving people better access to the truth.

Now these are currently truth-tellers.

They're called "Bloggers" Well, on

the left you have a Blogger, next the Blogger, and Social

Media Expert and, then you have a Marketing Consultant and some

dude who got poisoned with LSD or something like that.

But developers can tell the truth through code.

They can start using data to give people better access to

the truth and build tools like for transparency data or tools

on top of transparency data to give people access the

sane, rational thought.

You go to this web site here, the National Data Catalog, and

say hey, maybe a mine exploded and you wanted to see the mine

safety records of all of the United States.

You can get that data right here and start saying, hey

maybe Massey Energy isn't doing well by its employees, and

is killing its employees.

You can do the same thing with, say there's an oil spill.

You can see where people are getting their oil from, and

how much foreign oil we are actually dependent on.

Then you can start tying all this data together.

This is a web site that one of our grantees built called

LittleSis.com that allows people to tie alll this data

together, and build profiles.

It's a mandatory Facebook of influential people.

It's pretty awesome.

So.

That's a Zombie.

So these tools help you fight these people, and make it so

that your arms don't get chewed off by a pretty,

blue eyed Zombie.

So, one last thing, fighting Zombies makes you money.

GPS, weather, all kinds of data initiatives coming from

government have created massive economies, massive industries,

and this isn't just a social cause, it's something much

more significant than that.

So, thank you very much.

You guys have been great!

Let's hear it for Brady.

BRADY FORREST: And thank you very much, Clay.

And now we're going to move away from DC.

All the way back to Mountain Dew, and Seattle with the

former Googler, the woman behind the original

Web Master Central.

Please welcome up Vanessa Fox, a seeker of truth.

VANESSA FOX: Okay.

Thank you, Brady.

So, normally, we have these things in a pub, and you're

all drunk and its awesome, and I'm so much better.

But, so, since we're not in a pub today, we're going to find

out the meaning of life.

I checked Google first.

The meaning of life, of course, they say it's 42, which used to

be really awesome, but now with the movie coming out, a

few years ago, everyone knows the answer is 42.

If you do the Flicker search, you see that it's old hat.

So, we're not cool anymore to really know anymore

the answer 42.

But they also think the meaning of life is Google,

so that scared me.

So, I thought that I would look for the meaning of life on

Bing, because that's the decision engine.

Sorry Google.

They told me I should look for what's my dragon name, which

lead me to a site to find a dragon name for my dog,

horse, cat or child.

That was very disturbing.

I thought, perhaps that I instead, I would try Yahoo,

another search engine.

It told me to find the meaning of life on these

3 places, in this order.

And, the bible is the only one in lower case which I didn't

know exactly what that meant.

So I went to Twitter first and it actually pointed

me to Facebook.

And so, I thought, okay.

And the meaning of life is Robert Pattinson looks like

a foot, of Twilight fame.

I didn't think this was really leading me in the direction

I had been looking for.

So, I thought I'd do another search on Facebook, What's

the meaning of Life?

It told me to YouTube, back to Google, right?

The number 2 engine is YouTube.

This is what YouTube said that the meaning of life was.

This is actually disturbed me maybe just as much as Robert

Patterson looks like a foot.

So, I didn't learn the meaning of life, but what I did

learn was that people are crazy on the internet.

And, I was like, OK, maybe I'm just looking at

the wrong thing.

Maybe I just really need to know why are people on

the internet so crazy?

So, this is the next search that I did.

And, what I found was that this.

I do research a serious subject and what I found find is that

the author would like to shoot the pope, or would like to do

strange things to my unmentionable parts.

And also, by the way, why do all the crazy people

use the caps button?

And these things seem to be an equal interest to this person.

So, I thought, well, that's a good question?

So, why do all crazy people use caps on the internet?

And what I found was, does anyone have a good recipe

for a red velvet cake.

And, I was like, yeah, dude I love cake.

I ended on this site, which with a bunch of people in a

flame war about whether the Star Trek characters should

really be on the cake because really, was he a navigator?

And ended up with this guy saying, have you kissed a girl?

Turn off caps-lock on your computer.

So I thought I'm going to really go to the root of crazy

people and ask them what the meaning of life is, which of

course, lead me ChatRoulette.

Then, I looked into Chatroulette, and I was

like, you know, I'm not going after all.

I don't need know the meaning of life that bad.

So, instead that validated that people on the internet or crazy

but also the other thing, of course, is that we

all search, right?

You've all been searching, and you found that people

wanted to things to your unmentionable parts.