ComputerWorld interviewed James Allen, the IT manager at the Federal Election Commission (FEC), a month ago and reposted it yesterday. One line in the interview really stood out to me:

We have a T1 line to the Senate so they can file their reports securely and quickly.

After the data has been cleared by our analysts — and we have a 48-hour turnaround time — we post it on the public Web site.

Emphasis added. The Senate does not require the electronic filing of campaign finance reports and most reports, including ours, show that the lack of electronic filing causes gaps in disclosure. Since every office uses the software necessary to file electronically (the last office to use noncompliant software was that of retired Sen. Paul Sarbanes) and the Senate maintains a T1 line directly connected to the FEC, how many Senate offices actually file electronically?

Voluntary filing is allowed, even encouraged. FEC rules also state that, “Once a committee begins to file its reports electronically, on a voluntary basis, it must continue to file electronically for the remainder of the calendar year unless the Commission determines that extraordinary and unforeseeable circumstances make continued electronic filing impractical.”

You can read the rest of the interview here.

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Doc Searls, author and Senior Editor of the blog Linux Journal, interviews Sunlight’s Greg Elin in an article about open source in politics and government. Here are the choice parts from Greg describing Sunlight’s work, the data that backs it up, and the future of it all:

Almost all of our projects and funded projects are open source — though sometimes our code is a bit hacked so it takes a while to release it. Nearly every group I know is completely invested in open source: MySQL, PostgreSQL, Apache… The frameworks are being rapidly adopted: Rails, Django, Symfony…

The work I’m most interested in these days is dynamic-scripting — what I think about as “flow-and-go” data sets instead of what Jeff Jonas coined as “rack-and-stack” data sets. Dynamic scripting is Unix pipes! That is, every application does input and output. We leave the world of databases-make-reports and enter the world of RSS-flows-in and RSS-flows-out.

Two examples of flow. A Sunlight database, LouisDB.com, scrapes the Congressional Daily Record daily, transforming it into XML. Garrett Schure (Sunlight Labs developer) and Josh Ruihley did a word count algorithm on the Congressional Record to come up with Congress’ “Word of the Day” and the microsite http://capitolwords.org — which goes back to 2001 and has an RSS feed, API, and a widget people can put on their site. Louisdb.com makes it easier to search the Congressional Record — and now there’s a script boiling it down into tweetable content that others can use, too. Second example, from MySociety: TheyWorkForYou. It provides profiles of what Members are doing in Parliament by parsing the Parliament’s daily record and votes. Lastly, many sites rely on the work of Josh Tauber’s http://govtrack.us b/c. Josh scrapes all sorts of data on bills in Congress and transforms it into XML. Josh’s data is open and so also is his code. It’s a tremendous contribution.
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Programmers and technologists who grew up with the web and with open source have been entering the political and e-government arena the past several years bringing with them the tools and practices of open source and Web 2.0. They are collaborating with — and sometimes competing with — existing technologists who were often activists who learned spreadsheets and databases and desktop publishing and then the web to communicate their message. So we are seeing a geek-i-fication of everything from campaigns to good government groups to government itself. More open source. More frameworks. More collaborative communication among individual developers. It’s uneven, it’s bumpy, but it is definitely happening. The tipping point has occurred now in politics and government — the question remains only where the tree is going to land.

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My Sunlight colleague, John Wonderlich, has a gift for finding interesting government web pages. This week he found the schedule of GPO’s data system upgrade. John notes, “we should be at least somewhat familiar with their plans.”

He understates.

The page (excerpted in screenshot) may just be a release schedule, but release schedules are big deals in the software and hardware world. Release schedules for Vista, OS X, iPhone, and Wii are major new stories. Fortunes rise and fall around releases. Accordingly, massive coordination occurs between those releasing platforms and those offering products for those platforms. The goal? Launch with impressive benefits for end-users.

Government is increasingly viewable as a kind of operating system for democracy, markets, and civil society. It’s great to see GPO doing a very OS-like thing and announcing their upgrade schedule for their piece of GovOS 09.

Publishing release schedules would be a great thing for us at the Sunlight Foundation to do, too. In many areas we in the Open Government Data community function like the platform “vendors” for GovOS that we are. But we could do more. (So could governments.) We could start planning and coordinating around platform release schedules the same way software and game companies do for major hardware and operating systems upgrades. We could starting regularly scheduled conference calls discussing the next couple of years worth of GovOS Releases. We could, internally and as a community, start timing our own releases of products and services with related GovOS releases and upgrades and thereby provide impressive benefits to our end-users, American citizens.

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Via the always great info aesthetics, Michael Wesch, a Kansas State professor, has created a new video. He waxes inspirational about such familiar topics as reference structure, ontology, freeform categorization, tagging, crowd sourcing, Digg, and netvibes. This video introduces the concepts behind the new ways in which the Internet is becoming useful, using the forms in which information is presented in order to present information (making for a productive combination of form and content, much like the phenomena he describes).

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