GIS in eDemocracy

My slides from last weeks MAGIC conference are now online at http://oits.ks.gov/kito/gis/ses/presentations_2012.htm My talk was on GIS in eDemocracy and in particular, bringing the power of GeoInformatics "under the dome" in Legislatures/Parliaments.

Avoiding bugs in code

Its really very simple. It goes like this:

1 - the more code you write, the more likely there are to be bugs in it.

2 - Inverting (1) we have : the less code you have, the less bugs you have.

3 - When programming, it is good to avoid bugs. Therefore, following (2), write less code.

How to get the job done but write less code? Spend more time in *design*. What is the minimum amount of new (and therefore buggy in unpredictable ways) code you can write to get the job done.

Programming is Haiku, not Victorian Novel.

Yes, its art. But there is a science to the art.

Good programmers write less code. They take the time to ensure they are brief in their code expression.

There is no more important skill in software engineering in my opinion. Its all about the code you *dont* have to write.

ROIs for GIS

Over the last couple of years I have become increasingly involved in GIS and applying it to legislative informatics and legal/regulatory content in general.

Its great to see ROI case studies like this one from King County on the Web.

I first found out about the King County case study at last years URISA conference.

Oh, and on the subject of GIS, I will be speaking at the MAGIC conference later this month on GIS in the context of eDemocracy.

They don't make kids like they used to

Amazing isn't it. Kids have no fear of technology. Skip the packaging, skip the casing, expose the guts of it, keep the price low and this happens.

I thought I was out on the edge with my Sinclair Spectrum 1k model but I was clearly a complete wuss by today's standards.

Authentication of legal materials - how hard can it be?

Wow. Two minutes after I post about UELMA I get asked "how hard can it be?". A flavor of the issues that must be addressed can be found here.

UELMA and authentication

I see that three US states have introduced UELMA (Uniform Electronic Legal Materials Act) bills.

That is great but the hard work begins once these bills make it and government agencies (executive, judicial, legislative) grapple with the realities of the "how".

The good news is that it is doable but it involves - in my opinion - looking at the problem from the perspective of provenance aware storage combined with point-in-time, permanent URLs. That necessitates looking at the problem from an end-to-end "enterprise architecture" view of Legislative Informatics. No bolt-on at the end of your law-making process will be good enough to stand up to judicial tests of authenticity in my opinion.

LWB goes to great lengths to preserve provenance and provide point-in-time citation precisely to enable legislation like UELMA to be complied with.

Brilliant, obviously

Leonard Cohen