philipashlock

30 years after HTML was invented to support accessibility and collaboration for research and academia and the same day the White House released their new accessibility guidance which happens to be the first time they've published formal new policy natively has HTML rather than PDF - https://www.whitehouse.gov/omb/management/ofcio/m-24-08-stre...

This is awesome, thanks for sharing! For those interested here are some similar recent or upcoming efforts to encourage more participatory and generative civic engagement:

Speculative fiction + civics

- https://open.usa.gov/national-action-plan/5/pilot-new-forms-...

Art x Climate

- https://www.globalchange.gov/content/art-x-climate-project-f...

- https://www.forbes.com/sites/evaamsen/2023/07/27/the-art-fea...

Here's some background on the simple open source project used for data reporting on the SDGs co-developed by the US, UK, and some other countries - https://open-sdg.org/blog/2021-01-09-open-sdg-origins/

Ecological and resource extractive debt is not magic, they have limits and externalities that most financial systems don't fully account for in their balance sheets.

I use PhotoStructure for local management on external hard drives, BackBlaze for offsite backup, and a combination of Flickr and Google Photos for sharing the highlights.

Bingo! See https://www.zdnet.com/article/government-shutdown-tls-certif...

For examples of the risk of unmaintained government websites, just see https://www.zdnet.com/article/government-shutdown-tls-certif...

Also note that Data.gov was participating in a Bug Bounty program through HackerOne which means it was actively encouraging people to find vulnerabilities but is no longer able to respond to them - https://hackerone.com/tts

Here's the official statement:

“As data.gov is not a static site, it requires staff monitoring and maintenance to be online,” a GSA spokesperson told FedScoop in a statement. “Because personnel that monitor and maintain the site are currently furloughed, data.gov redirects to usa.gov. The decision to take data.gov offline is consistent with previous funding lapse practices.”

Via https://www.fedscoop.com/data-gov-open-data-offline-shutdown...

See https://designsystem.digital.gov

The main place to explore spending data is https://www.usaspending.gov/#/download_center/ and https://datalab.usaspending.gov

Let me know what you can't find or request via https://www.data.gov/data-request/

We're working on it, but it's not a data transparency problem, it's a governance problem

Current activity on GitHub, eg:

https://github.com/gsa/datagov-deploy

https://github.com/ViderumGlobal/datagov-ckan-cloud-provisio...

@danso thanks for the feedback on data.gov. I'm part of the small (3 person) team that helps to manage it. If you have a moment to chat I'll see if I can reach out to you to see if you'd be interested in participating in some more in-depth user research in the future. Folks can also always leave feedback via email, github, twitter, and other means - https://www.data.gov/contact

The Federal Data Strategy will also be opening up for comments again in October - https://strategy.data.gov/feedback/

Data.gov and Federal agencies use the same metadata standard (DCAT) that Google Dataset Search is using so much of our metadata is also being syndicated there.

Technology Transformation Service (GSA, U.S. Government) | Web developer (frontend or full stack) | REMOTE or Onsite (DC, San Francisco, NYC, Chicago) | Must be U.S. Citizen or National | Full-Time | $103,672 to $134,776

We're hiring a developer to help support efforts to solicit and analyze public feedback on government service delivery.

Applications are due Friday November 10, 2017 11:59pm Eastern. For more details and to apply go to https://18f.gsa.gov/join/feedback-analytics-engineer-gs15/?u...

This position sits within the Data & Analytics Portfolio (Data.gov, Digital Analytics Program, Feedback Analytics) in the Office of Products and Programs - a sibling of 18F within the Technology Transformation Service at GSA.

https://www.gsa.gov/tts

Data.gov is also coordinating with Archive.org and similar efforts to have a more systematic comprehensive archiving approach. More info should be available soon at http://www.data.gov/developers/harvesting and https://archive.org/details/data_gov

For those interested in running for office in your area, https://www.runforoffice.org is a great resource to find open positions and get you started. I'm not affiliated with them, just think they're a great cause.

For what it's worth, OMB is overseeing the Executive Order that requires agencies to compile these inventories. You can find more background at:

- https://project-open-data.cio.gov/

- http://www.digitalgov.gov/resources/how-to-get-your-open-dat...

And you can see how agencies are currently performing at http://labs.data.gov/dashboard/offices

Can you point to some examples or links for the .zzz files you mentioned?

I know this is an alpha release, but it's invitation only with the invitation being "help us shape the future of our network"

All of which comes across as being much less open and decentralized than the current web.

Even if the technology itself is more distributed than the common standards we're all using now, this sounds more like a walled garden than a truly open network.

AOL with Tor. Yay.

There's actually already work being done much like what you describe and it involved the first two rounds of Presidential Innovation Fellows - both to help shape the policy and to facilitate implementation. I'm referring to Project Open Data (http://project-open-data.github.io/) which is backed by an Executive Order to get every major federal agency to catalog all their data assets including those that are not and cannot be public. This full inventory is referred to as the Enterprise Data Inventory (EDI) while the portion of that covering anything that should legally be public is called the Public Data Listing (PDL). Every agency subject to this law is required to post their public listing in a standardized json file at the root of their agency website. The PDL is not only meant to point to datasets that are already publicly available, but it also requires agencies to list datasets that should be public, but have not yet been released or are not yet online. The datasets that are not legally meant to be public must be included in the EDI, but it's up to the discretion of the agency whether they want to list any in their public PDL. Some agencies have been doing that though. Otherwise, the full EDI with an accounting of all non-public datasets will really only be overseen by the White House Office of Manage and Budget and it's up to them to determine what kind of information they'll release about the EDI's they receive from agencies.

As agencies continue to release their Public Data Listings you should be able to find metrics about this at https://www.data.gov/metrics In the future that site should also include metrics like the number of unreleased datasets listed in their PDL data.json file.

Thanks for pointing this out. We've updated the highlighted dataset to something that is better maintained, but if you find other problems please do ticket them on github (https://github.com/GSA/data.gov/issues)

These kinds of issues will improve as a new approach to listing datasets is implemented. This is currently underway and is described on Project Open Data - http://project-open-data.github.io/implementation-guide/

We're also working on some basic automated tests to ensure listings have the correct MIME type (which is incorrect far too often) and that URLs aren't 404s or redirects or HTML pages rather than raw data.

For those interested, please do consider applying for the open position - https://www.usajobs.gov/GetJob/ViewDetails/363324500

I'll do my best to answer any questions about the position and the process of applying.

Thanks, that's flattering. I'm happy to try to answer any questions about this position as best as I can. You'd be working with me.

I also try to stay in #data.gov on irc.freenode.net, but haven't really promoted it so it's usually just me.

There's also a thread for this on Reddit: http://www.reddit.com/r/webdev/comments/1o2ijo/learning_from...

Even though there are half as many upvotes on Reddit right now, it seems to be driving most of the new traffic

Another victim of success? ;) http://www.theguardian.com/technology/gamesblog/2013/oct/09/...

I would guess it's likely to be produced internally, but much less likely to be public. That said, if there's demand and there's enough good reporting, it seems reasonable to expect something worth reading.

For those wanting deeper technical analysis around the problems and building off of some of the arguments Clay made about procurement, check out https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6518739

You might also be interested in SparkleShare which replicates the functionality of Dropbox using Git http://sparkleshare.org/

There's also the US Government's Github including the White House:

* White House: https://github.com/WhiteHouse

* Other Federal Agencies: http://gsa.github.com/federal-open-source-repos/

Some state and local ones are listed at:

* http://wiki.civiccommons.org/Public_Software_Repositories

I have a basic app that does this using GeoServer, it's pretty simple and all open source. See http://beta.democracymap.org

It's also worth noting that Congress is threatening to cut the budget for the project that tracks overspending on IT projects - the IT Dashboard. While the IT Dashboard tool was properly open sourced and the codebase is doing well out in the wild, the continued use of it for the Federal Government isn't totally free, but the very small budget required to keep something like this running can prevent spending hundreds of millions of dollars on excessive IT projects.

For more info on budget cuts that could effect projects like the IT Dashboard, see: http://sunlightfoundation.com/blog/2011/11/16/crunch-time-in...

For information on the open source IT Dashboard project, see: http://civiccommons.org/2011/05/it-dashboard-six-weeks-in/

We hope the traditional procurement story will be improved with the help of Civic Commons, an organization which is very much aimed at leveling the playing field for government software. We want to make it easier for more developers and smart spry development shops to work on software projects for government. We want to give open source the same exposure as proprietary software and generally facilitate software co-creation and reuse across government to make sure things don't get paid for more times than they need to. You can learn more about us at http://civiccommons.org

The Civic Commons marketplace is currently still in closed beta, but it will be opening up very soon. Please sign-up: http://marketplace.civiccommon...