I just learned that the folks at data.gov want the public to help plan the future of data.gov. To participate go to http://datagov.ideascale.com/. (FT EPA’s Mary McCaffery and the W3C eGov Interest Groups list serve)
The government is awash with acronyms. New acronyms are created daily. Acronyms create a barrier to understanding if they cannot be easily resolved, where easy = universal and universal = URL. There are many online dictionaries with entries that are found in Web searches. However, these return results only in highly formatted, not-well-formed HTML thatRead… Read more »
by Sophicity At the end of April 2009, a computer hacker managed to steal over 8.2 million personal records from the State of Virginia’s Prescription Monitoring Program, containing information such as social security and driver’s license numbers. Along with the stolen data, the hacker reportedly erased all of the State’s database backups, leaving no wayRead… Read more »
This is a revision of an email I sent to a colleague. Some names will be redacted because I’m not sure if they would like to be posted here. K, I’m sharing this with Mark Patrick at Joint Staff because he’s a smart guy and may have some good stuff to say. He lives ECMRead… Read more »
In an October 9th article in the New Republic, Lawrence Lessig authored an important critique of the transparency movement. Primarily asking the questions – transparency is all fine and good, but what is the end? Lessig’s article and a related article by Jill Lepore in The New Yorker point out that the rush to transparencyRead… Read more »
Note that this post is a cross post from my blog, http://sleepisoptional.wordpress.com/2009/10/09/legislink-org-legislative-links-made-readable/ Finding legislative materials is often have the battle of staying informed on what law makers are doing. Sites like opencongress.org and govtrack.us are aimed at making congressional information more accessible and do a good job at achieving this goal. A new project, legislink.org,Read… Read more »
Hi, everyone, Before coming to government, I served as a college financial aid director. After moving to DC, I spent eight years surrounded by large financial aid data sets, doing risk analysis and providing decision support based on the myriad records that colleges had submitted to the Department in order to administer aid to theirRead… Read more »
There’s a lot being written about Gov 2.0 these days. Much of it is repetitive or otherwise easily ignored. SOme of it purports to have the easy answers. SOme of the best just raises the interesting questions. There were a couple of interesting questions raised in the “What Gov 2.0 is making me think” postRead… Read more »
In addition to publishing downloadable data and open interfaces, government needs to learn from successful commercial websites and bring their “Deep Web” data to the surface. I have posted some thoughts on this on my personal blog: Do You See Spiders? Making Government Data Truly Open I’d appreciate feedback, either here or in my blogRead… Read more »
If interested in open data, read this interesting paper by Joshua Tauberer who runs the congressional transparency website GovTrack.us, with help from Gunnar Hellekson (RedHat, Inc.).This is version 1.1 dated 7/20/2009 Dr D.C.Misra