We just got wind of an RFP from the Office of the Law Revision Counsel (LRC) which manages the US Code -- the codified version of our federal public laws. You should think about it as an opportunity. This is an opportunity for smart developers and designers to do something amazing. The LRC is asking for someone to:
Continue readingThe Recovery.gov Technical Proposal
Here's the proposal that was released by the Recovery board on Friday. Lots of redactions, but it should serve two purposes-- one, to let us see what they're working on, and two, to let us figure out how to write these proposals.
Continue readingOur FEC Testimony
I went in to testify last week on how the FEC can improve their website. Their hearing was actually the first to be streamed live on the Internet. I'm hoping we can get a recording up soon.
It went well. The commissioners were very amenable to feedback and heard what we had to say. I delivered all your comments, and they were receptive to all of them. Primarily in my own testimony I talked to the FEC about how they should spend less time making maps and more time making bulk data available in extensible formats, and that they should hire a New Media Director to carry the ball on this stuff and make sure it happens.
Continue readingHow do we Redesign FCC.gov?
Our next goal in our redesigning the government series is to do the FCC website. Check it out. According to archive.org, the last time the site underwent a redesign was in August/September of 2001. The site is long overdue for an overhaul. When we started kicking around the idea of doing the FCC website, we talked to a few folks about it and we think that unlike any other mock redesign we've done, we're going to open the process and have community help drive this.
Continue readingDjango hits the big 1.1
Django 1.1 is out! We're big fans of Django.
Continue readingOur Fifth Judge
I'm happy to announce our fifth and final judge in Apps for America 2 the Data.gov Challenge: Cyrus Krohn. Cyrus the Director of Local Programming at Microsoft and former Director of the Republican National Committee's e-Campaign Division during the 2008 election cycle. He was Slate magazine's first employee and launched the groundbreaking webzine in 1996. He brings a unique perspective of having both worked in politics, and worked with local data. We're happy to have him participating as the fifth and final judge.
So, there you have it-- you can follow all the judges on twitter, too:
Continue readingFEC Hearing tomorrow
I'm going to testify to the FEC about your ideas that you came up with on how the FEC can improve their website. There'll be live audio of the event and you can tune in around 2pm Eastern for the remarks, or tune in to the whole thing if you'd like starting in the morning. Thank you for all the comments and hopefully we'll be able to help the FEC make some real changes. I'll let you know how it goes when I get back.
Continue readingWe won the Google/O’Reilly Open Source Awards
Last night at the Google Open Source awards, I won the "Best Community Builder" award on behalf on Sunlight Labs. While my name is at the top, I think that's a mistake-- I'm the "best community builder" because we have the best community.
This is only the beginning. In six months we've been able to do some amazing things-- 47 applications have been designed and inspired by our community, and developers are starting to wake up and realize that they're the key to making our government accountable, accessible and responsible. In a few months when Apps for America 2 is complete, with your hard work we'll have more applications that we can then use as justification to the government to release more data and make it easier for developers to work on the outside and on the inside.
Congratulations to you all!
Continue readingRecovery.gov contract coming this week, board says
In a post today at Sunlight's Real Time Investigations, I report that the General Services Administration has promised to provide online a censored version of its $9.5 million contract with Smartronix, Inc. for the redesign of Recovery.gov.
The contract had been withheld, the Recovery and Transparency Board had said, pending a "protest period" where losing bidders on the contract could cry foul.
Two companies put in unsuccessful proposals and neither filed complaints, and the board chairman said last week that it would release the contract to pre-empt public records requests from watchdog groups--a recourse that could seem ironic for a board founded on transparency. (Incidentally, Sunlight had filed already filed a FOIA request for it the prior week.)
Sunlight Labs and its citizen-coder community worked on drafting our own proposal, you'll recall, on the project that eventually turned into the shrouded contract (worth more than $18 million if it's extended).
We turned our efforts elsewhere after it became clear that, due to a lack of time, resources and fluency in bureaucracy, submitting a bid would be a shooting for something we'd never win.
Perhaps the only conceivable benefit to submitting a futile proposal--and Sunlight would have to be a subcontractor in all this, not being on the approved-contractor list--would be the retention of petitioning rights. Any written petition from a losing bidder would have immediately stalled the contract--despite its urgent deadlines--until it could be considered, barring a special exception. What does a petition entail?
Continue readingVA projects suspended after IT Dashboard ratings
Forty-five troubled Veterans Affairs Department projects have been suspended as a result of the Office of Management and the Budget's IT Dashboard. The newly launched Web site collects data on technology contracts as reported by agencies and provides it to the public along with visualizations, such as red bars indicating late or over-cost products, to aid officials and citizens in spotting wasteful spending and contract abuse.
Some projects' ratings were so bad that as VA administrators were preparing the metrics for the OMB, they spotted the projects and suspended them before they ever appeared as red flags on the IT Dashboard site. One project was 17 months behind schedule.
Government watchdogs were pleased that the IT Dashboard project has already led to real instances of accountability, though the fact that the problematic VA contracts were spotted only when statistics were required by another agency suggested a lack of contract oversight at some agencies.
But the IT Dashboard shows that many more contracts with abysmal ratings are still in place.
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