DAdanso·Jun 2, 2014
It's really encouraging to see that there's someone in the U.S. gov't who not only cares about open source and the associated effects of transparency, but has some practical experience* in it.
The openFDA website is built on Jekyll (https://github.com/FDA/open.fda.gov) and its API is powered with Python and Node.js (https://github.com/FDA/openfda)...It's not just the framework/current-tooling that is nice, but that such systems use open, readable formats (such as Markdown for the web pages).
The current administration has always paid lip-service toward open-source...they won't satisfy people who think "open source" and "government" means hand over just about everything...but they're doing a good job making inroads on the parts of the U.S. data interfaces that were well-intended, but so obfuscated by poor design that it was a job in itself
Read the rest
to parse/scrape their sites.
(FDA has always had really exhaustive dumps of their data...strewn about their legacy site...the API isn't as interesting to me as the documentation for the API and the pipeline of data)
* I don't want to just slag on Drupal...but Drupal was what Obama's head tech officer wanted in place, and to their credit, they did open-source parts of their custom Drupal modules...which were not particularly useful, because of the particulars of Drupal's module system and its quickly changing API...nevermind being only useful for other Drupal installations. But a lot of credit has to go to the U.S. gov't for pivoting off of Drupal to a mix of WordPress, Jekyll, and even node.js sites with less coupled components. It's been only about two or so years since Data.gov open-sourced its Drupal components before promptly switching to WordPress and CKAN modules...considering how a non-significant number of the fed sites are built on 12+ year-old code...the turnaround in the U.S. gov's stack is pretty amazing...(when it's not attempted on a service-critical site, such as healthcare.gov)