- Ypulse Conference — conference on marketing to youth with technology, from the very savvy Anastasia Goodstein who runs the interesting Ypulse blog on youth culture that I’ve raved about before. Register with the code RADAR for a 10% discount (thanks, Anastasia!).
- Government in the Global Village — departing post by the NZ CIO (and Kiwi Foo Camper) Laurence Millar. The principles here are applicable to almost every nation. We need to recognise the network effects of opening up government data in a form that means others can access it. Economic value is created by businesses building innovative new services using government data. Public value is created by enabling a richer and deeper understanding and dialogue among interested individuals about what the data tells us about our lives.[…] The legal, policy, and moral position is clear – New Zealanders own the data, having paid for its collection through taxes. These “problems” will all be solved by the community, and our role as government is to give priority to this. These efforts are stuff that matters. See also Google adds search to public data.
- Children’s Arduino Workshop (Makezine) — video of three eleven-year old girls working on an Arduino project, and should be inspiration to anyone who has ever wanted to work on hardware projects with kids. Whoever did it succeeded in making it fun! (via followr on Twitter)
- With YQL Execute, The Internet Becomes Your Database — YQL is a query language for Yahoo! data sources, and now they’ve added a server-side Javascript way to import your own web page’s tables into YQL. YQL and Pipes are turning into very interesting pieces of infrastructure (e.g., Museum Pipes blog). (via Simon Willison and straup on delicious)
"transparency" entries
Four short links: 30 Apr 2009
Youth, Government, Tween Arduino Hackers, and Table Slurpage
Four short links: 14 Apr 2009
Open data, lean startups, RSS-as-newspaper, and a design call to arms:
- OpenSecrets Goes Open Data — The following data sets, along with a user guide, resource tables and other documentation, are now available in CSV format (comma-separated values, for easy importing) through OpenSecrets.org’s Action Center […] : CAMPAIGN FINANCE: 195 million records dating to the 1989-1990 election cycle, tracking campaign fundraising and spending by candidates for federal office, as well as political parties and political action committees; LOBBYING: 3.5 million records on federal lobbyists, their clients, their fees and the issues they reported working on, dating to 1998; PERSONAL FINANCES: Reports from members of Congress and the executive branch that detail their personal assets, liabilities and transactions in 2004 through 2007; 527 ORGANIZATIONS: Electronically filed financial records beginning in the 2004 election cycle for the shadowy issue-advocacy groups known as 527s.
- The Lean Startup Presentation at Web 2.0 — with audio. I’ve raved about Eric Ries blog before.
- Times — an RSS feedreader with a newspaper’s layout. News reading can be improved and newspapers are in the middle of dying, so it makes sense that someone would try a face transplant. I’m not convinced that the newspaper’s front page is the model for perfect news delivery, although I do love the ultimate in dense news layouts: Arts & Letters Daily. (via joshua’s delicious feed)
- Designing Through a Depression (NY Times blog) — exhortation to work on stuff that matters. This rethinking needs to come not just from designers but from the manufacturers, companies and other clients who decide what products and projects will be produced. There’s no excuse not to examine and re-examine what’s made, how it’s manufactured, what materials are used (and which are recyclable), what benefit it’s giving the consumer (or lack thereof) and what contribution, if any, it’s making to anything other than landfill. I believe recessions are when good things flourish.
W. David Stephenson on the Federal CIO: Vivek Kundra
W David Stephenson discusses his experiences with the new Federal CIO: Vivek Kundra. Stephenson talks about his experiences working as a consultant for Kundra in the DC government and he outlines what we can expect from Kundra during his tenure as Federal CIO in the OMB.
The Paradox of Transparency
In his memo on transparency and open government, President Barack Obama made a down payment on his transparency promise by hiring Vivek Kundra, the CTO of Washington D.C., for the new post of government CIO. Kundra’s visionary application of technology to the procurement process had attracted national attention, and with recovery.gov the centerpiece of his plans to give the public a view into how stimulus money was being spent, it looked like we were off to a good start. Then reality intervened.
Vivek Kundra: Federal CIO in His Own Words
This article contains several audio excerpts and transcripts from Vivek Kundra's first conference call as the newly appointed Federal CIO. After weeks of speculation it was formally announced today that President Obama has appointed Kundra, who had previously been serving as the CTO for Washington D.C.. In his previous position, Kundra pushed the boundaries of Information Technology and set the standard for transparency and accountability adopting Google Apps as a collaboration platform, video taping vendor interactions, and instituting a rigorous regime of metrics and accountability for government contracts.