Open Tech

And Data for All

Cecille Isidro — Wed, 17 Jun 2009 22:35:00 -0400

The Obama administration's most radical idea may also be its geekiest: Make nearly every hidden government spreadsheet and buried statistic available online, all in one place. For anyone to see. Are you searching for a Food and Drug Administration report that used to be obtainable only through the Freedom of Information Act? Just a mouseclick away. Need National Institutes of Health studies and school testing scores? Click. Census data, nonclassified Defense Department specs, obscure Securities and Exchange Commission files, prison statistics? Click click. Click. Click.

iGov

Cecille Isidro — Wed, 07 Jan 2009 12:29:00 -0500

Barack Obama has said we need a "Google for government." It's a nice line, but what does it mean? Federal agencies have been online since the mid-'90s. Obama's first crack at a Google-for-government law led to USAspending.gov, a budget tracker that looked like everything else the feds had put up on the Web--until I saw one geek-speak phrase on the home page, so small I almost missed it: API Documentation. To understand its significance, let me tell you how I got subway schedules on my iPhone.

Open Tech and the Wireless Future

Wireless Future — Wed, 05 Sep 2007 12:28:00 -0400

We are living through a critical juncture in telecommunications history -- an era where fundamental changes in how we communicate are radically transforming civil society. Broadcast and spectrum regulations are often decades out of date with current technologies and decision-makers are woefully ignorant of the capabilities (or even existence) of better alternatives. Corporations utilize proprietary technologies to capture markets and lock consumers into expensive path dependencies. Telecommunications companies build centralized network architectures for command and control -- networks which function to create artificial scarcities and exorbitant prices.

This talk provides a glimpse into the world of open source, open architecture wireless technologies and discusses the ramifications for future telecommunications deployments.