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DC Code-a-thon for government citability needs coders AND librarians
Calling all 21st century librarians: the fine folks at Citability and the League of Technical Voters Project are organizing a weekend code-a-thon in Washington DC April 9th – 11th. The goal is to create open source tools aimed at improving government accessibility and accountability. But you don’t have to be a coder to participate. They’re also looking for librarians! Now’s your chance to put your govt information skills toward an amazing project.
If you live in Washington DC area, please Sign up for the DC Code-a-thon today Join with lots of smart people working hard and having fun for the great cause of govt transparency!
White House site goes open source!
Today, the White House Web site (whitehouse.gov) switched to the [w:open source] Drupal platform — the same software running FGI! I’m glad they made the shift. It’s one thing to talk about transparency the way the Obama administration has done, it’s another to use tools imbued with openness and transparency in order to get to that goal.
White House opens Web site programming to public
By PHILIP ELLIOTT
The Associated Press
Saturday, October 24, 2009
[tip ‘o the hat to Chris Messina!]
Free E-Book on Copyright
Cory Doctorow, co-editor at boingboing.net, Fellow for the Electronic Frontier Foundation, and contributor to Wired, Popular Science, the New York Times, etc., has published a book called Content: Selected Essays on Technology, Creativity, Copyright, and the Future of the Future and it’s available for download on his website…for free! Cory is an advocate of the Creative Commons organization, using some of their licenses for his own books.
Here is an excerpt:
Back in 1985, the Senate was ready to clobber the music industry for exposing America’s impressionable youngsters to sex, drugs, and rock-and-roll. Today, the Attorney General is proposing to give the RIAA legal tools to attack people who attempt infringement.
Through most of America’s history, the U.S. government has been at odds with the entertainment giants, treating them as purveyors of filth. But not anymore: today, the U.S. Trade Rep is using America’s political clout to force Russia to institute police inspections of its CD presses. (Savor the irony: post-Soviet Russia forgoes its hard-won freedom of the press to protect Disney and Universal!)
How did entertainment go from trenchcoat pervert to top trade priority? I blame the “Information Economy.”
No one really knows what “Information Economy” means, but by the early ’90s, we knew it was coming…
Open source: How e-voting should be done
“In 2002, Congress passed the Help America Vote Act in response to the hanging-chad debacle of Florida’s 2000 presidential elections. The act’s main thrust was to provide money to states to replace outdated punch-card- and lever-based voting systems with optical-scan or touchscreen models. The act largely accomplished that goal, filling the coffers of closed source voting system manufacturers. In doing so, the act may have inadvertently placed the country in a worse situation….”
“Current U.S. policy ensures that e-voting remains in the hands of very few proprietary vendors…. But the key to securing e-voting resides in making its systems open source.”
- Open source: How e-voting should be done, by Paul Venezia, IDG News Service, InfoWorld, October 27, 2008.
CA Sec of State wants open source e-voting systems
Last week, at the Technology Review‘s Emerging Technologies Conference held at MIT, there was a panel on electronic voting systems in which CA Secretary of State Debra Bowen participated — along with Moderator Jason Pontin, Editor in Chief, Technology Review; Doug Chapin, Director, electionline.org; Ronald L. Rivest, Professor of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science, MIT; and Pamela Smith, President, Verified Voting Foundation. You may remember that in 2007, Bowen ordered a complete top-to-bottom review of voting systems in CA. I’m really glad to see a top-level politician sitting on a panel of cutting edge technologists and really, really glad to hear that top-level politician advocate for [w:Open-source software].
Now, I’m not saying the open source is the end all and be all solution to the myriad issues facing e-voting (see Bev harris’ Black Box Voting for more on those issues); but it’s great to see that Bowen at least gets that open source software is at least part of the solution. We’ve been saying that for quite some time. For a complete wrapup of the panel see Lucas Mearian’s ComputerWorld blog
One method of addressing software issues associated with the vast majority of proprietary e-voting applications out there is to move to using open source, especially for applications residing on optical scanners, which have been particularly troublesom. The concern is that IT administrators can’t look at the software to correct errors or tweak it for a particular county’s needs. Open source would go a long ways to disclosing problems associated with today’s propretary e-voting applications, Bowen said.
[Thanks /.]
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