Saturday, April 3, 2010

Transparency Camp - Washington DC

I attended Transparency Camp in Washington DC last Saturday of March (it ran all weekend, but I had a prior engagement that I would have liked to skip to attend both days).

Over 200 people from all walks of life except Fortune 500 companies - non-profits, government, small business, citizens, local and state government.

The transparency drums are beating louder, and much has been accomplished over the last year since the inaugural camp. Of note, the Sunlight Foundation is leading on a lot of fronts - both from a policy positioning standpoint, and also harnessing many of the application developer community.

I talked to a number of people about my position on interoperable data - that the government needs to work on giving the data in real time and in a free, forward leaning (XML) format. The National Information Exchange Model group in DHS/DOJ has been moving this ball forward in government, and OASIS is one of the premiere organizations driving worldwide.

Common Alerting Protocol is key for real time alerting - its flexible, multi-lingual, geospatially capable, and adaptableto many situations. There are a number of other great standards coming behind it. CAP is used by NOAA, FCC, FEMA, many commercial vendors, and a host of other groups around the world - including Sri Lanka. CAP supports many types of warning devices - from computers to sirens to emergency activated radios.

Congrats to all who made Transparency Camp happen. With all the whining, gnashing of teeth, partisan positioning, it was great to see a group of people working to make something happen!!!!!

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