Here's two interesting questions from the Recovery.gov RFP Q&A we just posted. These questions were asked by people who are eligible to bid on the Recovery.gov RFP that we're presently creating a community bid for. The questions:
Continue readingQuestion 101: The requirements for XML firewall appear to have been copy/pasted from the IBM website (see http://www-01.ibm.com/software/integration/datapower/xs40/highlights.html). Is government looking biased towards an IBM solution for XML Firewall?
Answer 101: No, the government is not biased toward IBM or any vendor. The value of XML firewalls is technology dependent. The capability to provide XML firewalls is pervasive throughout industry and is proven to increase the security of Web Services. Technology descriptions were pulled from several Internet locations as a part of market research.
Question 103: The requirements for data Warehouse appear to have been copy/pasted from the IBM website (see http://www-01.ibm.com/software/data/infosphere/warehouse/enterprise-new.html). Is government biased to an IBM solution for data warehouse?
Answer 103: No, the government is not biased toward an IBM or any other vendors’ solution. Technology descriptions were pulled from several Internet locations as a part of market research.
Questions and Answers about Recovery.gov
We've just been given the answers to the questions posed to the Recovery board about the bid. We put them up on Scribd. Check it out
Continue readingBureau of Labor Statistics Data Available on Data.gov
The Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) Just added 35 new data sources to Data.gov. There's some really interesting data in there, including data on national compensation, work stoppages, employment and more. Great new data sources for your app.
Continue readingRecovery.gov 2.0 Bid Status Report
The Recovery.gov bid: What's happened so far
So we're busily cranking out ideas and materials for the Recovery.gov bid over on the labs wiki. I wanted to catch you all up on what's going on, and what we know so far.
Continue readingData.gov gets an update
For those of you keeping an eye on the ball, working hard on your Apps for America 2 entries, I've got some great news for you: Data.gov has given itself a slight upgrade, adding a bunch more feeds. To compensate, Data.gov has turned itself into three subcatalogs: A raw data catalog, a tool catalog and a geodata catalog.
By far and away, the Tool and Geodata catalogs exceed the Raw Data catalog, but we still don't have our 100,000 "feeds." We have 999 data sources in the Geodata Catalog, 999 data sources in the Tool Catalog, and 267 in the Raw Data Feeds catalog. These 999 numbers are troubling. Hopefully the software supports more than 1000 data feeds in each subcatalog.
Continue readingWE are going to bid on Recovery.gov
We've decided to do something crazy. On Tuesday afternoon, someone handed us a copy of the Recovery.gov 2.0 RFP and we thought: what if we try something truly radical here. What if we opened up the process of government contracting by bidding on this thing? We together-- not just we meaning The Sunlight Foundation-- are going to bid on redoing Recovery.gov to learn more about the process of government contracting, and to try and build what is perhaps the biggest federal transparency-related website.
Continue readingThe Future of Email Marketing? Twitter.
Gross over-simplification: In the realm of non-profits and campaigns, the world revolves around one thing: email marketing. It isn't blogging, it isn't "my.barackobama.com" or anything of the like-- basically, what people do as "campaign strategists" in the online world is come up with new and elaborate ways to ask you for your email address so that they can do one thing: ask you for money.
Email marketeers measure the effectiveness of this by tracking four key statistics:
Continue readingFun with Google Spreadsheets and Fusion Tables
Fun with Google Spreadsheets and Fusion Tables
I've been having a lot of fun with Google tools today, and I wanted to share. This morning I was interested in generating this pie chart from the data off of Data.gov in my last post but needed to get all the data out of the Data.gov Data Catalog first.
Google Spreadsheets actually makes this really easy -- if you know what you're doing:
Step 1: Create a new spreadsheet, and put this little line in a cell:
=importHtml("http://www.data.gov/catalog#raw","table",2)
Step 2: There is no step 2. You're done.
Cool huh? You've now got a spreadsheet of all the data in Data.gov. But that's not what I wanted-- what I wanted was a count of each data source by agency to see who was providing the most data. The answer here was Google's new Fusion Tables. In Fusion Tables, I can then take the data, create an aggregation and provide me the counts, imported from my Google Spreadsheet.
Easy data analysis without a lick of code.
Continue readingSurge of EPA data in Data.gov
Late afternoon yesterday, Data.gov went from 81 feeds to 261, and the EPA overtook the USGS for the agency providing the most data. The EPA added 180 new data files-- the Toxics Release Inventory data for each state and territory as well as for federal agencies for 2005, 2006 and 2007.
This data is interesting stuff-- dozens of CSV files (still in .exe compressed archives, ick) that speak to where corporations and government are managing toxic chemicals. There's lots of interesting data in there. But it isn't just a clear win-- this data is poorly documented byte delimited text files. While we do have some headers provided to get us started, but no real description of the actual files.
If you do end up working with this data for your [Apps for America 2: The Data.gov Challenge] entry, make some notes on how you parsed the data and let's create our own documentation for this data source.
Here's a breakdown of the data in Data.gov as of today:
Continue reading
Where are the Government Web Developers?
Where are the web developers in Government?
Are you a web developer who works for a non-defense related federal agency? Not a contractor, but actually employed by the Executive Branch of Government? If so, I'd like to meet you. Because I'm beginning to think you don't exist. USAJobs tends to agree with me, too. From what I'm able to gather, the entire federal government is hiring a total of 6 "IT Support Specialists," which look like cleverly disguised network administration jobs and "off the shelf software management" jobs.
To be specific, what I'm looking for is:
- A web developer (Someone who knows Python, ASP.NET, PHP, Django, Ruby on Rails, alongside HTML and CSS)
- Who doesn't work for a contracting firm, but is instead employed directly as a full time employee by a federal agency who
- Builds user facing federal websites, and
- Does not work for defense related agencies.
I've met strategists, managers, new media directors, bloggers, even "architects," but not a single developer. I've met lots of government contractors who work as developers as virtual FTEs for the Government. And granted, I don't have much contact with the Department of Defense-- I'm sure deep within that organization there are developers building software for the government that keeps us safe. But outside of defense, are there any? Do they exist? I've asked around, and nobody can seem to point me in the right direction.
If you know of any, point me in the right direction, and let me know why they seem so rare in the comments.
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