We are now working with the Ohio State Legislature on an LWB implementation. Similar in scope to the Kansas State Legislature's KLISS system that was the backdrop to the series of posts titled What is a Legislature?
The Ohio system has a very strong focus on machine readable data formats and Web feeds which is a very exciting aspect of the project.
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These days, I mostly post my tech musings on Linkedin. https://www.linkedin.com/in/seanmcgrath/
Monday, June 18, 2012
Thursday, May 31, 2012
Authenticity and the Law
I find myself disagreeing with Sunlight Foundation. Worrying about authenticity is not a "red herring". It is profoundly important and critical if we are to move to paperless legislative processes and "born digital" law corpora.
It really is not all that complicated once you take a pragmatic approach to it. Sadly, there is much confusion and mis-information around digital signatures and crypto and the very meaning of the term "authenticity"...
There is no technological silver bullet here. What Congress needs is a Legislative Enterprise Architecture that is designed from the get-go to enable authentication not just of XML but of all promulgated artifacts. Doing that has a lot more to do with provenance than anything else and provenance is something you embed at the heart of your Legislative Enterprise Architecture.
It really is not all that complicated once you take a pragmatic approach to it. Sadly, there is much confusion and mis-information around digital signatures and crypto and the very meaning of the term "authenticity"...
There is no technological silver bullet here. What Congress needs is a Legislative Enterprise Architecture that is designed from the get-go to enable authentication not just of XML but of all promulgated artifacts. Doing that has a lot more to do with provenance than anything else and provenance is something you embed at the heart of your Legislative Enterprise Architecture.
Wednesday, May 16, 2012
Rational..but uncoordinated
Subway structures for example. Fascinating. Many interesting real world systems we try to model with software are rational-but-uncoordinated.
Monday, May 14, 2012
Monday, May 07, 2012
Monday, April 30, 2012
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.
Monday, April 09, 2012
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.
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.
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