Great open government initiative: disclosed.ca

I learned about a great open government initiative while at YAPC::NA 2009: disclosed.ca. Disclosed scrapes data about federal contracts from the dozens of websites representing Canadian public agencies and organizations (like the Canada Revenue Agency and the Correctional Service of Canada).

The information is aggregated, graphed, linked, and made searchable. It's a wonderful tool and a perfect example of the one, eternal, true API: automated web scraping with Perl :)

Are there similar projects for other nations? Anyone know about similar data sources for America?

Hooray for Melody

Mark Stosberg has a great post about the fork of Movable Type and why it's important to both the Perl community and the world.

Once I have my own server running again, I hope to be running it myself :)

http://mark.stosberg.com/blog/2009/06/movable-type-fork-is-an-opportunity-to-harness-cpan.html

Kubuntu items now in Ubuntu USA shop

Despite rather high shipping prices, you can finally purchase Kubuntu stuff in the Ubuntu shop! Previously, these artifacts of kubuntu cuteness were available only to international shoppers.

https://usshop.ubuntu.com/category.php?catid=7

I bought 3 sheets of the stickers and am considering a t-shirt.

Ohlho

"The Open Source Network"

I found this today while poking through some open source projects relevant to my independent study. It seems like a great idea! I just signed up - I'm nathanielksmith - and I'm pretty impressed with it. Check it out! http://www.ohloh.net/

I like the idea of specialized social networks (see http://bridge-builders.ning.com/ ); networks geared towards one particular purpose. Facebook works as a gossip / catching up / picture sharing platform fine, but when I want to connect about open source software (to people I don't know in real life) I want to go somewhere else; similarly when I want to brainstorm about religious pluralism.

The Power of Thin Clients

Mark Stosberg recently posted a great letter to the Richmond, IN community schools system about leveraging linux-based thin-client labs to cut costs and bring quality software to students. I couldn't be more enthusiastic!

I used to think the best thing to do with aging hardware was to build your own cluster, run BCCD on it, and climb the ranks of folding at home. But fixing them up as thin client machines for donating to schools and other community labs is a more immediately useful solution.

Now I wonder if this same architecture could be used on Earlham's campus?

Earlham Bike Cooperative

The Earlham Bike Cooperative, a pro-bono student run bike "shop" on the campus of Earlham College, has a new web presence. Check them out at:

http://socrates.cs.earlham.edu/ebc

The Antonio Pizzigati Prize for Software in the Public Interest

Another good finding while doing thesis research. From their front page:

Good deeds do get rewarded! If you know someone who’s been toiling in the open source vineyards, developing software that’s helping nonprofits succeed, check out the Tides Foundation Pizzigati Prize, a $10,000 annual award for outstanding contributions to software in the public interest.

Very nice and realistic. I hope there are more prizes like this out there!