A New Opening for “Open”
John Sebes
I’m still feeling a bit stunned by recent events: the IRS has finally put us at the starting point that we had reasonably hoped to be at about 5 years ago. Since then, election tech dysfunction hasn’t gone away; U.S. election officials have less funding than ever to run elections; there are more requirements than ever for the use of technology in election-land; and there are more public expectations than ever of operational transparency of “open government” certainly including elections; and the for-profit tech sector does not offer election officials what they need.
So there’s more to do than we ever expected, and less time to do it in. For today, I want to re-state a focus on “open data” as the part of “open source” that’s used by “open gov” to provide “big data” for public transparency. Actually I don’t have anything new to say, having re-read previous posts:
It’s still the same. Information wants to be free, and in election land, there is lots of it that we need to see, in order to “trust but verify” that our elections are all that we hope them to be. I’m very happy that we now have a larger scope to work in, to deliver the open tech that’s needed.
— EJS