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Open Government at GoGaRoCo |
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.