Ask HN: What Would you want in a government API?

#1

Post by rrhyne » Tue, Jan 20, 2009, 7:00 PM UTC

I'm marveling over the new whitehouse.gov and thinking that the government should have an API. I imagine it would create a thousands of government jobs, boost every sector of hardware sales, foster the creation of thousands of start ups and bring accountability and transparency to government, among other things. I'd say my first request would be this function:

getEveryDollarSpent, which would accept as parameters paidTo, authorizedBy, minDollars, maxDollars, dateFrom and dateTo.

What's yours?

Re: Ask HN: What Would you want in a government API?

#2

Post by Shamiq » Tue, Jan 20, 2009, 7:07 PM UTC

I'm all for accountability, but I also think added bureaucracy is a waste of money. Someone has to pay for these new jobs, and I can't tell whether this will return more than it costs to set up.

Re: Ask HN: What Would you want in a government API?

#3

Post by jonursenbach » Tue, Jan 20, 2009, 7:15 PM UTC

I vote for the API equivalent of "svn blame".

Re: Ask HN: What Would you want in a government API?

#4

Post by rrhyne » Tue, Jan 20, 2009, 7:18 PM UTC

Shamiq wrote: post #2

I'm all for accountability, but I also think added bureaucracy is a waste of money. Someone has to pay for these new jobs, and I can't tell whether this will return more than it costs to set up.

No problem. We can specify all properties are read only, that way we avoid any added bureaucracy.

Re: Ask HN: What Would you want in a government API?

#5

Post by jcarbaugh » Tue, Jan 20, 2009, 7:18 PM UTC

This isn't quite getEveryDollarSpent, but check out http://usaspending.gov/. The site tracks all federal contracting dollars spent. It has an API and a fairly detailed set of data.

Rather than one giant government API, we will probably see each agency slowly create more meaningful ways to get at their data. I expect there to be some exciting open data initiatives from the Obama administration.

Re: Ask HN: What Would you want in a government API?

#6

Post by rrhyne » Tue, Jan 20, 2009, 7:23 PM UTC

jcarbaugh wrote: post #5

This isn't quite getEveryDollarSpent, but check out http://usaspending.gov/ . The site tracks all federal contracting dollars spent. It has an API and a fairly detailed set of data. Rather than one giant government API, we will probably see each agency slowly create more meaningful ways to get at their data. I expect there to be some exciting open data initiatives from the Obama administration.

Great link!

Re: Ask HN: What Would you want in a government API?

#7

Post by gaius » Tue, Jan 20, 2009, 7:27 PM UTC

shutdown()

Re: Ask HN: What Would you want in a government API?

#8

Post by diN0bot » Tue, Jan 20, 2009, 7:28 PM UTC

i'd be glad to have an API at all. right now, if you want to get donation reports on attempted congressional members you have to go to d.c. in person and individual print each report on their printer and pay for it. it is effectively impossible for any one to accomplish without thousands of dollars plus hundreds of hours. oh yeah, and the reports are images, so then you have to translate them into data.

the more APIs the better. definitely tracking money is vital, since we've all come to assume the government is in evil corp's pocket.

Re: Ask HN: What Would you want in a government API?

#9

Post by jhancock » Tue, Jan 20, 2009, 7:49 PM UTC

Shamiq wrote: post #2

I'm all for accountability, but I also think added bureaucracy is a waste of money. Someone has to pay for these new jobs, and I can't tell whether this will return more than it costs to set up.

the way I read it, the OP's "new jobs" would be jobs created in the private sector by people making use of the data. I don't think he was referring to the cost of creating the API itself.

The API could be created as a F/OSS project and be done with that line item ;).

Re: Ask HN: What Would you want in a government API?

#10

Post by jhancock » Tue, Jan 20, 2009, 7:50 PM UTC

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