The civil servants who are responsible for creating govinfo.gov deserve some praise for publishing a truly massive amount of information in an accurate, reliable, and developer-friendly way. (I know them. They are hard-working people!) Also worth noting that these things don't just happen on their own. Dozens of advocates outside of the government (myself included) have advocated for these sorts of things to come about for decades, and they're always in danger of disappearing if advocates and other users of the data don't continually demonstrate to decision-makers the importance of it.
Indeed. One thing I would really like to see and frankly, it is needed with urgency is a Twitter clone strictly for Gov use. Hosted, maintained and managed by US Gov. It can be used by local fire departments to federally appointed officials and politicians alike.
The idea that Twitter, a private company, requires me to provide them personal information (phone number and OTP verification), to sell ads and to access, sometimes exclusively hosted Gov content needs to end. Politicians won’t use it, for that a new law is required. I really don’t want Elon vs Elizabeth Warren bullshit. Politicians need to be shamed into submission.
It’s really interesting to hear this - because I spend a lot of time in rooms with emergency managers who ask “how can we meet people where they are to get the message out?”
What you are describing sounds a lot like an emergency weather radio - if you live in the US and don’t have one, please get one. It is reliable, fast, fault tolerant and easy to “tune” for the alerts that are relevant for you. Also - they carry non-weather alerts for terror attacks or other events.
Something similar for the digital space would be amazing . It’s an idea that was knocked around when FirstNet was created in the 700mhz space, but never really had legs.
It would be great, but will never happen because of the nature of modern reporting and PR.
Generally speaking, any communication coming out of a Federal agency has been run through exec, counsel, public information office, and security at a minimum. At the state and local level, that includes plastering the executive’s name in anything good. (ie “Governor Dingleberry announced today that the sun will rise in the east tommorrow.”)
Additionally, civil servants can only be punished for doing their jobs. There is literally no upside for the people who know what they are talking about to speak.
Honestly, Twitter in some ways has been a benefit. In the 90s, you had to take a leap of fate that a rando congressman was a lunatic, fascist, moron, etc. (ie. The guy is a dentist, how dumb could he be?) Now, like the proverbial vegans, they tell you.
You have to open everything in new tabs. Most navigation that would happen inside of their SPA gets cancelled when you close the login box that it prompts.
> sometimes exclusively hosted Gov content needs to end.
but then do you somehow draw a line somewhere arbitrarily on internet access as the requirement that the citizens have to privately provide for themselves? You currently have to pay for it, and if you don't, you also don't get access to the exclusively hosted gov content on the net.
Of course, i'm exaggerating, since the ISP "should" not have the ability to censor this content.
I think for important announcements, channels such as radio or emergency broadcasts is the way to go. For discussions and other political content, the gov should not mandate a specific place for it - and leave it up to the people's choices.
Small world, maybe our paths crossed! I had the pleasure of working with the govinfo team from 2015-2017 as they were rolling out the beta and finalizing the migration from the old fdsys.gov. Truly great folks that are passionate about maintaining government information and making it as accessible as possible.
I should note that the government does a lot of stuff. If you have a cause you feel strongly about, whichever side, it's worth taking some time to understand which ones you can actually (at least theoretically) have a direct impact over, and that's generally in the regulatory arena, or administrative law arena. Agencies don't make laws, they pass rules and regulations, and those that adds legal obligations to pre-existing ones in a substantive way are subject ot note and commentary under the Administrative Procedures Act. This means you, even if you're not an American citizen but have some sort of interest at stake, can and should voice your concerns. It's in fact one of the only ways the average person can at least reach the decision makers that were not elected and don't owe their jobs to anyone but the president.
In those cases, the specific site to follow would be https://www.regulations.gov/ and the api docs are at https://open.gsa.gov/api/regulationsgov/ and at least most administrations (last one excepted, although they didn't seem to have anyone on staff in the executive branch who was familiar with the APA to begin with) are pretty good about at least reading, if not agreeing - sometimes cruelly and sometimes nonsensically - to your comments.
It's good to see what the government is doing, but in a sense if you want change, that's already too late. Focus on the regulatory aspects of things, and you can make a real difference, possibly. The CFR feed on the RSS page shows how regulations are routinely promulgated, and it's not an ideological thing necessarily: DHS/ICE is an agency just like the FDA or EPA. Rules are, after all, rules.
Great start hope to see it continue.
My ideal is an ICS for elections and deadlines, especially down to the local level. Knowing deadlines for registration, absentee mailing, and actual elections on my calendar would be great.
Chicago seemed to have one but I haven't seen a single event on the calendar since I added it to my Google Calendar sometime in 2020.
I can't remember the URL for the life of me, but there was a website that was doing this, at the international level, for multiple democracies. Last I remember, the site stopped updating - it was a volunteer led effort.
It would be awesome to have a single place that has both history and the upcoming elections. Ideally, this should be done by the government, as they are in the best position to do so. Second best would be some kind of volunteer led effort. It is a ton of work though, to keep the information accurate and current
The bills proposed by legislators are published in open data (thanks to years of advocacy by myself and others, but that's another story). If you want to read it and know who proposed it, this information has been readily available on the Internet since 1995. If you want to do some data mining, the data has been readily available to download in XML for about 5-10 years from Congress itself and for the decade before that from govtrack.us. If you're not doing the data mining already, that is about you and not about the availability of the data.
If someone put you in charge, you probably would not know how to do the thing you're imagining. (For example, "classified" doesn't really apply to Congress. That's an executive branch thing. So you're already on the wrong track.) Don't fool yourself that it's just a matter of having a bright idea that's the difference between the world as it is and the world as you want it.
I want more too - I want state level stuff promoted more -
I want rss for each city/county council member and state level office - not just what they voted on, but what is coming up - also who has given them money, and who has had meetings with them.
Meta-comment: I recently got into RSS so I’m pretty biased but I love the format and it seems like there’s a bit of a RSS renaissance going on with a bunch of recent articles promoting it and people sharing their experiences etc. Is that just wishful thinking on my part?
I like RSS and Atom a lot, so I say this with a heavy heart: I don't think there's a real RSS renaissance going on. It's just one of the early-aughts standards that HN pines for and loves promoting think-pieces about, in part because it allows us to all put rose-tinted glasses on and pretend that the Internet isn't a hellscape of our own design.
See also: IRC, which I also like, but whose demise is fully complete. RSS isn't quite as dead as IRC, but it's on the way out.
Hard disagree. As Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram become increasingly ad-laden and non-chronological, the real value of RSS becomes more and more obvious. I may exist on the fringe as someone who doesn't use any non-HN social media, but I know several businesses in my city that have cropped up in the last 2 or 3 years that basically only pushed out information on Facebook and Instagram. Since those services don't guarantee that your posts will ever make it to followers, much less in a timely fashion, those businesses have really struggled when they have to announce things day-of, or even the day before something happens (closing due to snow, or a party; changing their hours; removing something from the menu due to a supply chain problem; etc.). I've seen a lot of these businesses die, and I suspect Facebook and Instagram contribute. It's not that RSS would save these businesses. But it is true that if you build castles on the sand of another company, you have nobody to blame when your castle collapses.
I don't think we actually disagree: there's plenty of "real value" in RSS, real value that I extract both as a user (I use newsboat[1]) and a producer (I maintain an Atom feed for my blog).
The problem isn't that RSS isn't good or useful, it's that it doesn't fit into the incentive structures that we've bought into. An Internet in which RSS thrives is not one in which John Q. Programmer makes 250k a year at Facebook or Google.
I can't speak for myself (I don't listen to that many podcasts), but my friends who do seem to do so mostly through Apple's Podcast app, Spotify, or a similar service.
RSS might be providing the syndication under the hood to these services, but it's firmly an implementation detail at this point and not a thriving protocol/community in its own right. Which isn't to say that I want it to fail or be replaced with something else, either!
Yeah, I provide an Atom feed for my blog. It has about ~100 subscribers across a few different RSS subscription services, and I get a few hundred independent RSS client requests a week. Don't get me wrong: it all works really well, and I like providing it! But it's a very small fraction of my overall traffic, and other bloggers I've spoken to have indicated the same.
How do you tell, technically speaking, that someone is subscribed to your feed? Is it logging requests of the RSS feed url somehow?
Doesnt Feedly, for one, aggregate RSS subscriptions for all of its users? If I were subscribed to your blog through Feedly, would you see me as an individual subscriber, or all of your Feedly subscribers as one subscriber? If so, I imagine this would deflate your numbers.
I'm not sure it is a community in the sense that you or your friends would recognize, but it is there. I use AntennaPod, and it relies quite a lot on RSS and Atom feeds, as do other podcast apps.. Submitting your podcast to major services like Apple iTunes using RSS is not a mere implementation detail, but a de facto standard.
I spend a lot of time on IRC, including in some of the chats for some of the largest OSS projects. I even still run my own social channel and maintain a bouncer for myself and friends!
Pockets of activity don't mean that IRC as a whole isn't dead, the same way that the Pope doesn't make Latin a living language.
IRC has quite a few active users which is not what I'd call "dead". It's true that it's not as ubiquitous as it used to be, but it certainly still fills a certain niche.
I'm one of those active users. Perhaps "dead-end" is more accurate; I'll be on it until the networks I'm on turn off, but newcomers are a rarity these days.
Is that how most people are currently following podcasts? I listen to a lot of podcasts, but I hate to admit that I do this mainly through YouTube and sometimes Spotify, maybe Podbean. It's been many years since I subscribed to an RSS feed using a podcast app.
The UK Gov site has an RSS feed for every other countries travel requirements. Its insane how open/easy it is to subscribe to a ordered relevant collection of information.
I'd argue that accessible sites are realising its benefits.
One of my pet peeves is that .gov, .edu, .whatnot often refer to US government, US education, and US whatnot. That's less than 5% of actual internet users.
And then there's .com, which mostly refers to global commerce!
Interesting example, because it’s now UTC in name. GMT officially (and, as far as I can see, also practically, for quite a while now) only refers to the actual time zone itself and is not used in the offset anymore.
They even compromised on the acronym, being neither the English (“Coordinated Universal Time”, CUT), nor the French proposal (“Temp Universel Coordonné”, TUC).
I think Aaron Swartz would appreciate RSS being used for government transparency, but it is ironic that the same government that bullied him to death is now embracing RSS.
This is not really a fair picture of history. The folks at the Government Publishing Office who decided to use RSS have really no connection to Swartz's prosecutors and probably were using RSS before the prosecution. (This is also not a government "embracing" RSS. It's one website. And it's been there for a long time.)
You’re right. I didn’t think it through. Although I stand by the first part. Aaron would be gratified to see this page. Since you point out it’s been there a long time, maybe he did see this page.
Public entities goading their (captive) audiences into private social media for "updates" is an abomination that has been inexplicably normalized. Activating RSS feeds for direct interaction with their constituencies is the least one would expect from such publicly funded entities.
Still, one can only applaud the brave souls that buck the trend and restore a sense that there is light at the end of this long and dark tunnel we live through.
I have a large collection of RSS feeds that I assembled by visiting various government websites. I wish I had found this site sooner, but they are missing a lot of other government feeds. I would also suggest using Newsboat when reading all the news. https://github.com/newsboat/newsboat
So I was browsing contracts for my local town. There was a contract to a specific company that sells cleaning equipment. Is there anyway to drill down even further and find out the exact items that were purchased from the company? It seems like we do not get detailed information past who got the money which if you think about it is too general because there are so many small firms with generic names.
Maybe its just the engineer in me but I would love to trace the money spent down to the roll of toilet paper.
Something has got to change because we are spending ourselves to collapse. Where is all this money going?
Followed a few links to find this recent change to the New Mexico state constitution. What are the politics behind this?
> PROPOSING AN AMENDMENT TO ARTICLE 4, SECTION 1 OF THE
CONSTITUTION OF NEW MEXICO TO PROVIDE THAT A LAW ENACTED BY THE
LEGISLATURE MAY BE REPEALED BY RESOLUTIONS OF THREE-FOURTHS OF
THE COUNTIES IN THE STATE EXPRESSING OBJECTION TO THE LAW AND
ASSENTING TO ITS REPEAL.
It seems to put counties above people, akin to the federal electoral college, senate, and allocation of representatives. So, at the very least, it is antidemocratic.
There are 33 counties in NM. The smallest 75% of counties have 572,637 residents, about 27% of the overall state[0]. So, it's pretty bad if you care about representative democracies.
