Many months ago, my friend Tim Hwang told me that he’d like to see an API created for corporate registrations, because that would enable all kinds of interesting things. Tim runs the semi-serious Robot Robot & Hwang, a legal startup that aspires to be a law firm run entirely in software. I’ve been chewing over this idea …
Category Archives: Tech
A Virginia campaign finance API.
Last year, I wrote here that I was working on an open-source campaign finance parser for Virginia State Board of Elections data. Thanks to the good work of the folks at the SBE, who are making enormous advances in opening up their data, I’ve been able to make some great progress on this recently. That …
New site, new datasets.
Since creating Richmond Sunlight and Virginia Decoded, I’ve been building up a public trove of datasets about Virginia government: legislative video, the court system’s definitions of legal terms, court rulings, all registered dangerous dogs, etc. But they’re all scattered about on different websites. A couple of years ago, I slapped together a quick site to …
$500 speech transcription bounty claimed.
It took just 27 hours for the $500 speech transcription bounty to be claimed. Aaron Williamson produced youtube-transcription, a Python-based pair of scripts that upload video to YouTube and download the resulting machine-generated transcripts of speech. It took me longer to find the time to test it out than it did for Aaron to write …
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$500 bounty for a speech transcription program.
The world needs an API to automatically generate transcript captions for videos. I am offering a $500 bounty for a program that does this via YouTube’s built-in machine transcription functionality. It should work in approximately this manner: Accepts a manifest that lists one or more video URLs and other metadata fields. The manifest may be …
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Request for Awesome.
I was lucky enough to spend last week at the Aspen Institute, attending the annual Forum on Communications and Society. Thirty-odd of us spent four days talking about how to make government more open and more innovative. The guest list will leave reasonable people wondering how I got invited—Madeline Albright, Toomas Hendrik Ilves (the President …
New Virginia Decoded features.
Since March, my 9–5 job has been building The State Decoded, software based on my Virginia Decoded site. Although it would be fun to have spent all of this time adding new features to Virginia Decoded, most of it has been spent adapting the software to support a wide variety of legal structures. I released …
Sunlight Foundation “OpenGov Champion.”
The Sunlight Foundation has put together a very kind mini-documentary about my open government technology work. (I can’t see that any of its contents will come as news to anybody who reads this blog.) It was fun to participate in the making of it, and it was a joy to watch filmmakers Tiina Knuutila and …
Congress declines to let people download copies of bills.
From the U.S. House Committee on Appropriations comes their annual report on spending on the legislature, this one for the 2012–2013 fiscal year. It includes this gem of a section (on pages 17–18) on proposed spending to let people download copies of bills: During the hearings this year, the Committee heard testimony on the dissemination …
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Opening up Virginia campaign finance data with Saberva.
With the Virginia State Board of Elections starting to provide bulk campaign finance data, a whole new world of data has opened up, and I intend to make the most of it. Although the esteemed Virginia Public Access Project has long provided this information (laboriously cleaned up and displayed in a user-friendly fashion), it’s useful …
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