Silona Bonewald
Silona is the founder of the League of Technical Voters. She is a large scale systems architect that started creating bleeding edge political software as far back as 1989. She founded a political software startup in 1994 called Electtech that designed a system similar to Voter Vault and Catalyst. She founded an ISP in 1996. In 1998, Silona transitioned to large internet systems work including e-commerce and content management systems for fortune 500 companies and also some work in the gaming industry. Today, Silona believes that open data and the mutual ownership of data is key to balancing the changing forces in society. She is part of a number of initiatives along these lines, including Citability.org and OpenBanking. She also enjoys throwing large parties at SXSW and once helped convince the Make team to do a Maker Faire in her hometown of Austin, Texas. For navel gazing, silona blogs at silona.org.
Stop fishing and start feasting: How citable public documents will change your life
Putting government documents and data online is a great step towards making our government process more transparent to the people it serves, but in many ways simply making the material available is like serving someone dinner by giving them a pond full of fish. The pond is huge and the poor dinner guest doesn't have any tools. Worse, they're only looking for one particular bass, and every time someone sends them to where they last saw the fish it's long gone.