Group Notes Sunday

on the drive over

microformats background

Inverting assumptions:

• Solve small specific problems rather than big problems. Lots of simple problems to solve on the Web, focus on those rather than the big hard problems.
• Research existing data publishing behaviors and data formats, and then base designs directly on that research, rather than inventing new technologies for new spaces. (difference in focus).
• Re-use existing vocabularies where possible, rather than inventing your own vocabulary/language (in contrast to XML culture).
• Provide a solution to marking up data in existing web pages, rather than asking publishers to create machine-only side files in a new format.
• Solutions accessible to the millions of hypertext web authors out there, rather than just programmers.

Sample data representation problems solve by microformats:

• people
• events
• reviews
• topics/tags

Basics of open publishing

• Publish HTML, not proprietary document formats like MS Word .docs or PDFs.
• Publish on the public Web.
• Publish at permanent URLs that do not change.
• Preferably publish at URLs 70 characters or shorter, such references are more robust.
• Markup each heading and paragraph with unique local fragment identifiers.

group summaries

Illuminated Budget resonated with a lot of folks. Reference to finely crafted medieval documents / manuscripts.

Note: Per Silona's request, Tantek bought http://illuminatedbudget.com/ and http://illuminatedbudget.net/ and http://illuminatedbudget.us , all of which currently redirect to this wiki.

Silona also bought illuminatedbudget.org ILLUMINATEDGOVT.COM ILLUMINATEDFEDERALBUDGET.COM ILLUMINATEDFEDERALBUDGET.NET ILLUMINATEDFEDERALBUDGET.ORG ILLUMINATEDGOVT.ORG

Need stories of usage - use cases.

Much Thanks to Silona, Taylor, Betty Sue for the workshop.

Following bills over time.

Campaign finance reform affects everything.

the project is similar in shape to the human genome project: analyzing and discovering recombinant power molecules.

a taxonomy of power; multiple toppings on the pizza of a bill; who got their onions on the bill passed who didn't. and what do they want next year?

intrigues political and social classes . betty sue. how to intrigue a large group to work on this tool. like decoding the genome of the honey bee; a tool to tell you how to recombine these elements .first best case would be the environment. a practical amateur chemistry kit for recombining power and remixing power, a mashup, from known constituent elements.

reverse engineering the budget from the embedded political power elements.

if this tool does not give people a way to get a handle on the levers of power in new ways, people in single units and in aggregate, then it really hasn't done anything. illuminating a budget without making it a tool for citizens to change the balance of power is not success. Kevin Jones power tool for the people

a document like abbot suger's document around st. denis. viagra for citizenship

Betty Sue, Sharon, Tim Kevin

separate discussion groups

technology folks

Provide a list of simple requirements for either building or buying systems for publishing this information.

Requirements for open data publication:

• Publish HTML, not proprietary document formats like MS Word .docs or PDFs.
• Publish on the public Web.
• Publish at permanent URLs that do not change.
• Preferably publish at URLs 70 characters or shorter, such references are more robust.
• Markup each heading and paragraph with unique local fragment identifiers.

Raw data acquisition

Annotation

Reporting & Presentation

Data Model - data interface

Presentations

Meta Data Generation

Persistent identity

Reputation - organization - constituent

Moderation

Polling

one system vs. enabling systems across the web

Convert existing data to the standard as described by the requirements for open data publication.

...

data sources

Josh and Lou

Gather all the data that's out there, structured, unstructured, building stories: see Data Sources.

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