Rick Sincere covers a legislative proposal to launch a state budget website. If the website is to be truly useful, every last stitch of the data has to be exportable in a standardized, automatable fashion (XML would be the ideal format, CSV a distant second) in the same manner that Richmond Sunlight gathers its data and resyndicates it. I don’t care how much money the state spends on such a website, the free market is going to produce something better. I’d make sure of it.
Comments are closed.
According to one of the speakers at Tuesday’s news conference, a private organization called OMB Watch has created the programming tools that can be used to create a fully searchable database of budgets at any level — federal, state, or local. OMB Watch is making the software available for free to any entity that chooses to use it.
That doesn’t mean that another organization — for-profit or non-profit — can’t improve the product in the future.