Open Government @ GoGaRuCo
Eric Mill gave an inspiring talk at Golden Gate Ruby Conference. Below are my notes about it.
Innovative websites written in Rails and based off of open government data:
- http://datasf.org/showcase/
- http://www.nyc.gov/html/datamine/html/home/home.shtml
- http://data.dc.gov/
- http://www.appsfordemocracy.org/
- http://www.data.gov/
- http://flyontime.us/
- http://usaspending.gov/
- http://sunlightfoundation.com/clearspending/
- http://www.thomas.gov/
- http://www.govtrack.us/ — scrapes thomas
- http://www.opencongress.org/ — built off of govtrack.us, rails app
- inspired congress to publish votes in xml
- senate also puts out info in xml
- no where near all 50 states give out info
- sunlight is trying to make state apis the norm
- mongo db is necessary for it – like some states have only one house, not two
Federal Register – one of the more important publications of the government – rulemaking – public notices – chances to comment – published by the office of the public register
http://www.govpulse.us/ was one result of a contest – open source rails app on github, EC2 * it shows what is going on in your area * government contacted them and contracted the develpers * ditched some red tape * pushedthem to take risks * buy-in from the top of the agency * made something happen in 3 months…much faster than most gov projects * they cut their hours by 40% at regular jobs * result of their work: http://www.federalregister.gov/
Gov is seeing devs as their customers
America * first country to have a freedom of information act * all govs info is in the public domain * we have the freedom to set amazing examples – what we do matters – talk to other people
2010 census – machine readable, but have to get through 300 pages of pdf instructions – people have written ruby libraries around the data.
Posted by Liah on Wednesday, September 22, 2010