The State of Rhode Island is publishing large amounts of government data via an API that is easy to hack, and they're looking for feedback from developers on how to improve it.
It is simply unacceptable at this point in history that a citizen can use web services to track the movies he is renting, the weather around his house, and the books he's recently purchased but cannot as easily monitor data regarding the quality of his drinking water, legislation or regulations that will directly impact his work or personal life, what contracts are currently available to bid on for his state, or what crimes have recently occurred on his street.
As a step towards resolving this dissonance, the Rhode Island Office of the Secretary of the State has released GovTracker Services to provide RESTful access to public information. We hope that this set of web services is adopted by the developer community and is a step towards an era of community-developed applications that make it as easy for citizens to interact with their government as it is for them to interact with the rest of the networked world. With input from the developer community we look to add additional services and make the existing ones even better. You can reach us at rssonate@sec.state.ri.us.
(Thanks, Zack!)
