March 28th, 2011 | by Derek Willis | published in API, Data, Presentations
If you’re in D.C. on April 12 and are interested in government records, you may want to consider attending the Media Access to Government Information Conference (MAGIC) being held at National Archives building on Pennsylvania Ave. I’ll be one of the panelists there, but don’t let that dissuade you; there are far brighter people who [...]
March 11th, 2011 | by Derek Willis | published in Data
At the invitation of David Karger and his team at MIT, I’ve been playing around with the WordPress plugin for Exhibit to do some basic data visualizations on this blog. I got a chance to meet and talk to Karger in Raleigh last month and hear about his work on Exhibit and other projects. Here’s [...]
March 6th, 2011 | by Derek Willis | published in Data, Journalism
Anthony DeBarros of USA Today and I talked about APIs at this year’s CAR conference in Raleigh. We got a lot of “Web people”, to use a lame expression, in the audience. If you’re a reporter who works with data, why should you care? The simple answer is that APIs are an extension of what [...]
September 14th, 2010 | by Derek Willis | published in Data, FOIA
I wasn’t going to respond to Ellen Miller‘s comments on my previous post, mostly because I thought I had said what I wanted to. But now that O’Reilly has picked up on things, I figure it might be worth one last attempt on my part. Your experience, of course, may argue against that. Ellen writes: [...]
September 11th, 2010 | by Derek Willis | published in Data, FOIA
There’s been a bit of discussion lately in the open government community about how to assess federal government efforts at meaningful transparency. Of the stuff I’ve heard and read, I tend to come down on the side of Gunnar Hellekson, who writes that the Sunlight Foundation (a frequent and leading voice on transparency) has “dangerously [...]