On February 8th, Tim O’Reilly gave a keynote speech at the 2013 State of the Valley Conference in downtown San Jose, CA.
The event was sponsored by JointVentureSV.
Limor Fried asks President Obama about patents and tech
Last January, President Barack Obama participated in the first Presidential Google Plus Hangout. The hangout featured real questions from citizens, in real-time.
Last week, the White House hosting a second iteration, calling it a “fireside Hangout” in a nod to the fireside chats that President Franklin Roosevelt held in the 21st century.
President Obama was asked about gun violence, eliminating the penny, the best book to understand his political philosophy (“the writings of Lincoln), the Senate filibuster of Hagel & drones during the hangout. Notably, Limor Fried, the founder of Adafruit, asked him several questions focused on technology.
Worth watching @adafruit on the G+ Hangout with @barackobama bit.ly/139hwkc Patent reform, women in tech, programming in high school
— Tim O’Reilly (@timoreilly) February 19, 2013
You can watch the entire White House hangout at YouTube, WhiteHouse.gov or below:
Announcing We the People 2.0 and a White House Hackathon
With more than 5 million users, “We the People” want to be heard online.
Today, the White House announced a major upgrade to its We The People petition site.
There are several ways that this e-petition platform could be improved, which is always true if you think of open government being in beta. (That’s particularly true architects are improving a given government platform using citizen feedback).
Last August, the White House open sourced We The People on Github.
While the code hasn’t been repurposed by another national government yet, in the months since, they’ve continued to work on an API that would allow other petition services, like Avaaz, Change.org, 38 Degrees or SignOn, to tie into it.
In January, the White House released a snapshot of data about the nature and growth of the platform’s use but didn’t sharing open data about the Web analytics behind We The People as it changes. The upgrade could change that, as Nick Judd pointed out at TechPresident:
Beyond all the ways a developer could make use of the read API — tracking petitions that are removed, for instance, displaying brand-new petitions, or analyzing petitions and connecting ones with common characteristics like similar keywords — a write API would change that.
Such an API could also allow integration into Facebook or other social networking services, which could expand the reach and power of e-petitions, particularly if networks of people can be activated to engage in offline actions, like phone calls, in-person visits, demonstrations or votes.
This is genuinely good news for those trying to make sense of what’s happening there. It would be useful to have more than check-ins twice a year on use and to be able to see how long petitions have been open or how quickly they’ve passed a threshold.
Now, there’s a real chance that’s going to happen.
Today, the White House invited developers to come work on that vision at a hackathon held at the White House on Open Data Day, later this month.
If you want to participate in the White House hackathon, you’ll need to move quickly: the application period closes at 5 PM ET tomorrow, February 6th.
If more civic coders get involved in “hacking the government this month, some of the improvements might come sooner rather than later.
Throw Your Hat in the Ring for Round 2 of the Presidential Innovation Fellows Program | The White House
The White House is looking for a few (more) good men and women. A little under a year ago, US CTO Todd Park invited an inaugural class of Presidential Innovation Fellows to help government work better.
Today, he and US CIO Steven VanRoekel announced that they would be continuing and expanding the program: (Here’s a summary of their work to date.)
Important note: 18% of the first class of 18 fellows were women, a situation that did not sit well with observers like Merici Vinton. Park and Valerie Jarrett wrote today that they hope to improve on that record, “increasing the participation by those who have been historically under-represented, including women, African Americans, Latinos, Native Americans, and people with disabilities.”
Public service isn’t for everyone — and taking 6-12 months off from work or away from family is not possible for all either — but if you have relevant skills and are frustrated with government, this is a way to code the change you wish to see in the world.
“The idea of using government data to help consumers is not just aspirational. Open government data already plays an important role in existing apps and services that consumers can use today. Entrepreneurs have used government data to allow people to spot suspicious charges on their credit card bills, understand fees associated with their 401(k) plans, and receive advice on managing investments. In addition, entrepreneurs have used government data to help people obtain loans when they are starting up a small business. Government data that is being used to fuel these apps and services can be found in Treasury’s Finance Data Directory, an online resource for more than 50 key finance data sets published by Federal agencies.
As underscored by the enthusiasm and energy on display at Treasury’s working session, finance data sources stand to empower even more Americans to manage their finances and assert control over their financial lives. The event and Treasury’s broader Finance Data Initiative are key parts of this Administration’s ongoing work to catalyze innovation that harnesses the power of open data to improve thelives of Americans.”
-Nicholas Bramble, Presidential Innovation Fellow in the Office of Consumer Policy at the U.S. Department of the Treasury
-Nick Sinai is Senior Advisor to the U.S. Chief Technology Officer at OSTP
”
According to a new White House blog post on “Building Apps and Services for Financial Empowerment,” software developers and entrepreneurs who participated in a recent workshop will work on building prototypes for products or platforms that use finance data to “help Americans manage their finances plan for retirement, and make more effective
Their work is directly related to making dollars and sense of the open data economy, so I’ll be keeping an eye on these projects and seeing if any get traction.
Tim O’Reilly on the past and future of open computing
Today, Tim O’Reilly delivered a keynote address at the Open Compute Project Summit. Video of his talk and his presentation is embedded below.
Tim has extensively annotated each slide with his thoughts.
“…the very architecture of the Internet and the World Wide Web are shaped by open source”-Tim O’Reilly.
“Beyond elections, technology can improve everyday civic life: the way we connect, engage, access and act on critical government information. Worldwide, organizations are developing new ways to encourage more open and innovative societies. Google.org is supporting two of these leaders—the Sunlight Foundation and mySociety—and their work on tech solutions for civic innovation.
We are providing $2.1 million to the Sunlight Foundation to grow their programs for open government data, with a focus on making civic information for U.S. cities transparent, available, and useable. By opening up information at the city level for developers as well as citizens, Sunlight is creating opportunity for new ideas that can have an impact in local markets.
We are also supporting mySociety, providing $1.6 million to build a global platform to equip developers with tools and resources—such as open source code—to more easily and quickly launch new civic apps and services. This initiative can promote collaboration between civic-minded technologists, regardless of geography. For example, a civic app created in Finland might be easily replicated 9,000 miles away by a developer in Chile.
Both organizations are working to bring together a larger community—governments, developers, companies, nonprofits, and citizens—with an interest in improving societies. By creating these open platforms today, we can open doors to ambitious new solutions in the future.”-Matthew Stepka, VP, Google.org
” Official google.org Blog: Promoting civic innovation through technologyRIP, Aaron Swartz
Today, many people online are mourning the death of Aaron Swartz, 26, whose spirit burned bright and was extinguished far, far too early.
Open data of U.S. House legislation now available in bulk format
It’s a good week for open government in the United States Congress. On Tuesday, the Clerk of the House made House floor summaries available in bulk XML format. Today, the House of Representatives announced that it will make all of its legislation available for bulk download in a machine-readable format, XML, in cooperation with the U.S. Government Printing Office. As Nick Judd observes at TechPresident, such data is catnip for developers.
This change has been a long time coming, although more needs to be done to fully open the People’s House to the People. In April 2011, Speaker Boehner and Majority Leader Cantor sent a letter to the House Clerk regarding legislative data release. In September 2011, a live XML feed for the House floor went online. In September 2012, Congress launched a beta version of Congress.gov but failed to open the data.
“Thanks to GPO, all House bills for this Congress will be available in one XML file that can be downloaded by anyone,” said Speaker of the House John Boehner, in a statement at Speaker.gov. ”This is a win for every American who believes in open government. Making legislative data easier to use for third parties, developers, and anyone interested in how Congress is tackling current challenges is a priority for House leaders. We’re going to keep working to make the legislative process more transparent and to better connect lawmakers with the people we serve.”
In a post on Tuesday at Speaker.gov, Don Seymour, digital communications director for the Speaker of the House, detailed the progress made during the 112th Congress:
This project is the first of several to be rolled out in the 113th Congress that were coordinated or initiated by the Legislative Branch Bulk Data Task Force. The task force was created to expedite the process of providing bulk access to legislative information and to increase transparency for the American people. It includes the House Clerk, legislative branch agencies such as the Government Printing Office and Library of Congress, representatives from House leadership and key committees, and the House Chief Administrative Officer.
Open government is and has been a priority for House leaders. In fact, the Clerk began offering real-time updates on House floor proceedings in XML back in 2011. The feed of real-time information complemented HouseLive.gov, a new video streaming feature they set up for desktop and mobile devices. The House also began utilizing new low-cost video conferencing tools, streaming committee hearings online, working with developers and transparency advocates, and more.
As Speaker Boehner said, this is good news for every American. Despite the abysmal public perception of Congress, genuine institutional changes in the House of Representatives driven by the GOP embracing innovation and transparency have been happening over the last three years.
As Tim O’Reilly observed in 2011, the current leadership of the House on transparency is doing a better job than their predecessors. Jim Harper’s analysis of the government’s data publication process substantiates that progress. Writing at the Cato Institute, Jim Harper praised the House for this step forward:
I believe the public has an Internet-fueled expectation that they should understand what happens in Congress. It’s one explanation for rock-bottom esteem for government in opinion polls. Access to good data help produce better public understanding of what goes on in Washington and also, I believe, more felicitous policy outcomes—not only reduced demand for government, but better administered government in the areas the public wants it.”
…and offered some constructive criticism for improvement:
For now, this data is of limited use because it includes only House bills. The entire oeuvre of congressional bill-writers should be published the same way in the same place so that contrasts and comparisons can be drawn among House and Senate work. In short, why is the Senate not on board?
That I’ve been able to find, the XML is not well documented. What each of the technical codes means is understood by several people in Washington’s transparency community, but the idea is to make it available very broadly, so the documentation should be very strong. The information at xml.house.gov should be updated, tightened up, and made easily available to the people gathering bill data on FDsys.
The XML data structures put in bills are limited in terms of what they convey. There is rudimentary information about who introduced and cosponsored bills, what committees they were referred to, and other procedural information. That’s good. But the effects of bills—on agencies, existing law, programs, places—this is not available in machine-readable code. That would be great.
Josh Tauberer, the author of “Open Government Data,” added some caveat’s on the House’s move to bulk bill XML on his blog. Tauberer is the civic hacker behind Govtrack.us, which has been scraping and making legislative data more open for years.
In his comments, excerpted below, he notes that “there’s no new data here, and thus not the data that the bulk legislative data advocates have been asking for.” In other words, this is evolutionary change, not revolutionary change.
What we’re seeing with the bills bulk data project is how the wave of culture change is moving through government. Over the last two years the House Republican leadership has embraced open government in many ways (my 112th Congress recap | the new House floor feed). With this bills XML project, we’re seeing more legislative support agencies being involved in how the House does open government.
This isn’t a technical feat by any means, but it is a cultural feat. The House and GPO worked together to institutionalize a new way for the House to publish bulk data.
Because of the way Data.gov is managed in the executive branch, we’ve become accustomed to big announcements. The bills bulk data project and the other recent projects show that the House is taking a different approach, an incremental approach, to open government data: publish early and often, gather feedback, then go on to bigger projects. This is something open government advocates have been asking for.
As I mentioned, the tech side itself is not much. They took files they and the Library of Congress already make available (and in some sense already in bulk) and zipped them up into up to 16 ZIP files. (4 files now, but that will probably grow to 16 by the end of the Congress.) So there’s no new data here, and thus not the data that the bulk legislative data advocates have been asking for. But it’s on the road to that. The files involved in this project have the text of legislation but not bill status, which is what the bulk data advocates have been asking for.
As we head into 2013, here’s hoping that the United States Senate follows the lead of the House has taken making itself more accessible to the hundreds of millions of people its Senators represent around the country.
This post has been updated with new links and commentary.
