Introducing GovPix, An Open Source App For Data.Gov Mashups

Sometimes, the simple ideas can be the most useful ones.

With this in mind, I’ve built GovPix, a GPL licensed application that takes simple queries like names and zip codes and renders the image of the Congressional representative who is the closest match.

The source code is at Github. If you already have App Engine installed, there’s no configuration needed to get the app running on your SDK server.

A couple notes:

• The search is still a little buggy. For instance, look at the response to Mrs.Clinton.

• The original plan for this app was to do more image manipulation and integrate additional Open Gov APIs, but since App Engine doesn’t currently support PIL, I’ll have to be extra creative if I want to add these features.

This app is a work in progress, so let me know if you have a suggestion for how I can improve it.