This is what I did for the White House from November–February—create Ethics.gov. I’ll have to write a lot more about that whole adventure, now that the site is public. In short, though, A++++ WOULD WORK THERE AGAIN. →
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Open source, procurement, and gov tech.
This is what I did for the White House from November–February—create Ethics.gov. I’ll have to write a lot more about that whole adventure, now that the site is public. In short, though, A++++ WOULD WORK THERE AGAIN. →
Comments are closed.
Well that’s going to look mighty nice on your resume. May take me a while to wade through that.
It’s yet another feather in your cap.
But I think people are going to find it not intuitive in terms of it’s purpose and information.
I think it needs a short FAQ to explain what it does and how to use it effectively.
As with all database applications… the data …how it is populated..and updated is EVERYTHING so we can be sure than if the GOP gets back in power, they’ll deep 6 this thing without hesitation!
Neat-o
The very first thing that I did with this thing was to search for “Your Mom.” The result is kind of hilarious and I suggest that you have a look.
Hint: Its a Ron Paul contributor.
I see that ‘John Doe’ has been granted access to the White House for meetings on at least two occasions. I think the Secret Service needs to get their act together.
…and there are 4 contributors to federal campaigns who list their occupation as ‘pimp.’
The White House, for various reasons, chooses not to disclose the identities of all visitors. It’s possible—and I don’t know this, I’m just speculating—that some of those visits, rather than being completely suppressed, are instead anonymized as “John Doe” (or, using the traditional spelling, “Jon Doe.”) Sadly, “Jane Roe” has fallen out of favor in the U.S. as a method of indicating an anonymous woman.
Larry, I can’t speak to political concerns, but my job here was creating a system that would be easily maintained. So, for each of these datasets, I wrote scripts that gather, organize, and scrub the information, so that it’s basically trivial to add to the website. FWIW, this is operated by the General Services Administration, with a staff that consists not of political appointees, but by civil servants. That said, I think it’s wholly possible that the next Republican administration will simply eliminate Data.gov, the president’s whole program of disclosing White House visitors, etc. (I hope I’m wrong, of course!)
Waldo – I’ve always heard a “Jane Doe” (rather than “Roe”) for an anonymous woman. Maybe that usage replaced the other one?
Also, congrats on the site!
Roe v. Wade, for “Jane Roe.”
Nicely done, Waldo. I’ve been looking at using Socrata — what’s your experience with it? If you were looking at displaying government data on the agency’s website, outside of data.gov , would you go with an implementation of Socrata?
I think I would go with Socrata in that scenario, Kaveh. The only trick with Socrata is that it’s of no use for XML, but for two-dimensional data (like CSV or single database tables) it’s great. It has a concept of “players”—JavaScript widgets that can be embedded in third-party websites to display the contents of a dataset. I liked that I could upload a dataset and then, magically, everything would be geocoded, be exportable in a half-dozen different formats, and have an API. In fact, I’ve already made a personal account, where I’ve uploaded a dataset of restaurant inspections for the Charlottesville area, and I think I’m going to FOIA all inspections for the state to host in there.