Healthcare.gov: The Innovative Development of a .gov Website
In October, the healthcare.gov website will be the site millions of Americans use to choose their health insurance. The new site has been built in public for months, iteratively created on Github using cutting edge open-source technologies. Healthcare.gov is the rarest of birds: a next-generation website that also happens to be a .gov. It will use Jekyll, which allows developers to build a static website from dynamic components. This will make the website faster and more efficient. A fascinating story! Continue reading
State Agency Databases Activity Report 7/7/2013
While we haven't posted a report for awhile, activity has been buzzing at the State Agency Databases project at http://wikis.ala.org/godort/index.php/State_Agency_Databases. For a full listing of the activity for the past two weeks, visit http://tinyurl.com/statedbs14d. Here are some highlights: DATABASES ADDED DELAWARE (John Stevenson) Delaware Public Archives Collection Gateway - Search indexes of some of the public collections by name or keyword. Collection descriptions are added or updated quarterly. GEORGIA (Chris Sharpe) Wage and Salary Survey - Search the results of the most recent three years the DCA Wage and Salary Survey. Information includes the pay range, number of full time employees, and the number of hours worked each week for over 160 different local government jobs. MASSACHUSETTS (Jennifer Ekblaw) Continue reading
ALA draft resolutions dealing with govt documents. Tell your ALA Councilor to support #ALA2013
There are several draft ALA resolutions having to do with government information kicking around ALA 2013 annual conference. While there's still a way to go before these resolutions are passed by ALA Council, I thought folks might be interested enough in these to grab their nearest ALA Councilor and tell them to vote for these resolutions in support of free government information, open government and transparency. They're important to both libraries AND the public!! I've heard that the Social Responsibilities Round Table (SRRT) has 2 resolutions dealing with Bradley Manning, Edward Snowden and the importance of whistleblowers to open government and the democratic process. But I haven't yet seen the text for these two. Continue reading
Labor Does More With Less: 175 datasets, 1 API
Labor Does More With Less on Streaming Data, By Joseph Marks, NextGov (June 25, 2013).
When the White House directed agencies to make at least two data services available through a streaming process known as application programming interfaces in 2012, most tech and transparency savvy agencies focused on releasing as many APIs as they could. The Health and Human Services Department, for example, released 61 APIs connecting to 61 datasets. The Labor Department took a different tack, releasing 175 datasets through a single API.Continue reading
Who Pays for Access and Preservation?
July 1, 2013 / 2 Comments on Who Pays for Access and Preservation?
A recent battle in the California Legislature over public records has a lesson for all of us who work with government information. A story in the Los Angeles Times sums up the issue exactly: "In the end it wasn’t really about public records or the people’s right to see them. It was about money." Continue reading →
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