Since it’s Sunshine Week, I figured I should stop obsessively polishing Virginia Decoded and just make it public. So here it is. What is it? Think Richmond Sunlight, but for the whole Code of Virginia, rather than just the bills proposed each year. So why not use the official website for the code? Look at …
Category Archives: Tech
I’m speaking at tomorrow’s Jefferson Jackson event in Richmond.
I don’t normally mention my public speaking engagements, but tomorrow I’ve got one that’s free, open to the public, and liable to be of general interest. Tomorrow is the Democratic Party of Virginia’s Jefferson Jackson Dinner, the party’s big annual event. As a part of the day’s activities, I’m speaking on a panel with former …
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I seem to have this website.
I publicly launched Richmond Sunlight five years ago this week. Upon its launch I gave it to the Virginia Interfaith Center for Public Policy because, as I wrote, “they’re non-partisan, they have an attention span longer than a housefly, and they have access to resources that I don’t.” I concluded: “I’ll run it for them …
“Your ideas are intriguing to me, and I wish to subscribe to your newsletter.”
There was a moment in an episode of The Simpsons (“Mountain of Madness”), that aired back in 1997, that I’ve mentally revisited every so often over the past decade: In transcript form: Homer: So, Mr. Burns is gonna make us all go on a stupid corporate retreat up in the mountains to learn about teamwork. …
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More on my White House adventure.
I mentioned in June that I’d gotten an award from the White House. Now they’re promoting it on their website. On the “Champions of Change” site—that’s the award that I got—they’re featuring the sixteen of us who received awards on that occasion, all in the realm of open data technology. I was in awfully good …
The merits of government apps contests.
On O’Reilly Radar, Andy Oram makes this important point about apps contests: It’s now widely recognized that most of the apps produced by government challenges are quickly abandoned. None of the apps that won awards at the original government challenge–Vivek Kundra’s celebrated Apps for Democracy contest in Washington, DC–still exist. He went on to explain …
My new adventure: The State Decoded.
A little project that I started a year ago now has been eating up a lot of my time, especially in the past eight months or so. I decided that, as Richmond Sunlight improves the display of legislation, I should create a new site to improve the display of the state code. It could hardly …
Creating an API for the commonwealth.
In perhaps a misguided effort, I started work a few months ago to create a site to round up all of the APIs for government data in Virginia. That inglorious website is Open Virginia. It’s easy to catalog all of them, because right now, I know of exactly two: Richmond Sunlight’s legislative API and my …
McDonnell on open government.
Gov. McDonnell, on open government: “I’ve long been an advocate of putting our full budget, all our legislation, a number of things about state government online in an easy to download, easy to access fashion,” the governor said. Really? I mean, if that’s true, that’s great, but it’s news to me. If there has been …
Commenting bug fixed.
A few people have complained that they write a comment here, and it’s denied with a “comments are closed” message. Which must be infuriating, having invested time in writing something, and then having it be lost to the ether. I’ve eliminated the plugin that I was using to prevent spam, and now I’m fighting spam …