federal register 2.0

I don't know if this got discussed on here much yet, but I discovered
today via the Sunlight Foundation blog [1] that the Federal Register
2.0 site was recently released [2]. The Federal Register is one of the
most important government publications in the US, since it is the most
comprehensive publication of all the rules and regulations of the
various agencies that make up US federal government.

The new site is interesting to me for a few reasons:

- it uses opensource technologies (ruby, ruby on rails, mysql, sphinx,
nginx, apache2, varnish)
- the source code for the website itself is opensource, and available
to people to contribute changes/enhancements on github
- there is machine readable data available various flavors of xml
- there are permalinks for each entry in the Federal Register, which
incourages citability
- it is deployed in the cloud on Amazon's ec2/s3
- it was the result of an egov software contest organized by the
Sunlight Foundation

I wrote up some more of my thoughts in my blog [3], if you care to
comment here or there. If anyone from NARA, GPO or Sunlight Foundation
are reading, nice work!

//Ed

[1] http://sunlightlabs.com/blog/2010/meet-the-new-federal-register/
[2] http://www.federalregister.gov/
[3] http://inkdroid.org/journal/2010/07/27/federal-register-embraces-the-web-and-opensource/

Received on Tuesday, 27 July 2010 15:30:11 UTC