Month: June 2009

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RFP: Enhanced Code of Federal Regulations Needs Your Help

This RFP is a call for assistance from librarians and other civic-minded individuals. In 2008, Public.Resource.Org, with the assistance of a variety of parties including the Sunlight Foundation, GovTrack.US, Stanford University, and Google, purchased a bulk feed of the Code of Federal Regulations, a product sold by the Government Printing Office.[1] This RFP details the second stage of this program.

via RFP: Enhanced Code of Federal Regulations – Open Government | Google Groups.

What Carl and the folks at public.resource.org want to do is create version of the CFR that will pull all the various technical standards that are included by reference into the an online version of the CFR, actually including the standards in the body of the CFR. And they’re looking for help from the library community. If you can help Carl and p.r.o get these standards, let him know. Remember that by including the standards through reference, they become part of the CFR and should be available to the public.

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SCOTUS Wants to Bring Web Site In-House

In a burst of reinvention, though, the high court is asking Congressional appropriators for about $800,000 to take the site in-house (in chamber?) and give it a good overhaul. The Government Printing Office established the site in 2000, and has been running it ever since.

The court has increasingly been doing its own Web production, and in its request to Congress, it noted a rather astonishing mark of success: a “100 percent increase” in hits, to almost 19 million in January 2009, compared with January 2008.

via Supreme Court Plans a Web Overhaul – The Lede Blog – NYTimes.com.

Sounds like an excellent idea, so long as the money is well spent. May be worth the Court’s time to take a look at some of the other sites that are serving their opinions to get ideas and ask for help.

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Almost.at: Real Time Events, As Tweeted By The People Who Are Actually There

[O]ne of the conventions Twitter users have adopted to associate their tweets with a certain event — the hash tag — can be an incredibly inefficient way to spread what’s actually going on. This is because Twitter users have grown accustomed to tagging any tweet somehow related to an event with its corresponding hashtag, even when they aren’t actually attending. This helps spur conversation, but it becomes much harder to weed out the news from the noise, and occasionally leads to propagation of false information. Almost.at, a very slick web application built by freelance iPhone developer David Cann, may be the answer to this problem.

via Almost.at: Real Time Events, As Tweeted By The People Who Are Actually There.

As advertised, almost.at looks like a great way to track live events that are being covered on twitter.  Personally I’ve found twitter to be real handy for “attending” events.  By tracking hash tags and making use of @replies I’ve been able to follow along and even participate presentations at various events.  It even includes a feature allowing you to suggest events, which should be handy for little conferences like CALIcon.