As you probably know, our theme for Freebase Hack Day is Open Government. Here’s an overview of where we stand with government and political information in Freebase, and what you can do with it.

For starters, there’s our Government domain, part of the Freebase Commons. This is a structured collection of information about 64,000 topics, ranging from politicians to parties and offices and titles. A number of people have been building their own domains around this structure. Take a look at these United Kingdom and Brazilian examples.

Jeff’s recently updated our election schema, too. Previously we were modeling elections at the race/contest level, but now we are able to handle general elections and the like. Take a look at next week’s US elections or the recent Canadian federal election. Of course, as this schema is new, we encourage you to help fill out the properties as much as you can.

There’s plenty of political activity outside of the Government commons, too. For example, one of our summer interns, Ben, has created additional politics-related domains such as Endorsements and Politican conventions. If you’d like to do something similar we could help you with setting up a domain and loading data on Hack Day.

Hack Day’s not limited to Freebase, though. There are plenty of other services out there to help us build mashups of Freebase data against other information. For example, the New York Times recently announced their campaign finance API, and you could use this, in conjunction with Freebase’s own API, to answer questions like who donates more money to the Democrats or Republicans: graduates of Harvard, Yale, or Stanford?

And, of course, open government isn’t limited to Western-style multi-party democracy. Is anyone up to taking on the task of getting information about the Burmese, Saudi, or Cuban governments into Freebase?

If you’d like to come join us on Hack Day to work on Open Government, sign up here.