

Ask HN: What Would you want in a government API? - rrhyne

I'm marveling over the new whitehouse.gov and thinking that the government should have an API. I imagine it would create a thousands of government jobs, boost every sector of hardware sales, foster the creation of thousands of start ups and bring accountability and transparency to government, among other things. I'd say my first request would be this function:<p>getEveryDollarSpent, which would accept as parameters paidTo, authorizedBy, minDollars, maxDollars, dateFrom and dateTo.<p>What's yours?
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jcarbaugh
This isn't quite getEveryDollarSpent, but check out <http://usaspending.gov/>.
The site tracks all federal contracting dollars spent. It has an API and a
fairly detailed set of data.

Rather than one giant government API, we will probably see each agency slowly
create more meaningful ways to get at their data. I expect there to be some
exciting open data initiatives from the Obama administration.

~~~
ALee
jcarbaugh won't say this, but the Sunlight Foundation to which he works for is
pretty much pushing the government to adopt API standards. They were the folks
who were partially responsible for this great link among other amazing
products.

~~~
jcarbaugh
I've been outed! And there goes my plan to covertly push my radical government
transparency agenda. Damn you, ALee!

I've only been involved in this for a little under two years and it is amazing
to see how quickly the government has become interested in open data. There is
still a LONG way to go, but I think we are going to see some great things in
the coming years.

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lacker
How about letting me give the government my email, and then they could email
me instead of snail mail, or let me see government correspondence with me
online.

A friend of mine got a traffic ticket that he paid incorrectly, and had a
wrong address on file. A year later he got arrested during a random broken-
taillight stop with a ridiculous amount of late fees. He asked if he had any
other tickets outstanding, and they said they couldn't tell him - there was no
system for lookups like that. He could only make sure he had the right address
on file and wait for further mail. That's a pretty ridiculous system.

~~~
pavel_lishin
I don't know about e-mail - I've been locked out of several accounts, and have
had a few scary false-positives with my spam filter.

On the other hand, I doubt any spam is going to come from a .gov domain...

~~~
xenophanes
Email _in addition to what we have now_ would only help, even if 30% of the
emails sent weren't received.

~~~
Jebdm
I think the dangerous part is when _other_ people receive them.

------
smhinsey
I would like to see a "profile" style portal which can be linked to any
relevant Federal programs I am involved with, from Social Security to my tax
burdens with the IRS.

Primarily I would like this to be a single-service type situation where I can
choose to go paperless and conduct all correspondence electronically (if I
still need to send in the occasional signature such as you do when you e-file
your tax returns, so be it). I'd like to see timeline or email based metaphor
for interacting with this correspondence. It should include IRS, passport,
immigration, the entitlement programs, the VA, whatever your interactions with
the fed cover, it should cover.

There is no reason this couldn't share authentication with my state &
municipal governments as well. I would like to see a seamless portal for
interaction with government at all levels, while each level retains their own
autonomy of implementation. If this is 10 years out on the timeline, that is
fine, but I do want to see progress made. Start small if you must, but start.

------
jonursenbach
I vote for the API equivalent of "svn blame".

~~~
corentin
It would be easy to implement:

return (DEMOCRATS == current_administration) ? REPUBLICANS : DEMOCRATS;

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diN0bot
i'd be glad to have an API at all. right now, if you want to get donation
reports on attempted congressional members you have to go to d.c. in person
and individual print each report on their printer and _pay_ for it. it is
effectively impossible for any one to accomplish without thousands of dollars
plus hundreds of hours. oh yeah, and the reports are images, so then you have
to translate them into data.

the more APIs the better. definitely tracking money is vital, since we've all
come to assume the government is in evil corp's pocket.

------
gaius
shutdown()

~~~
corentin
I'd say it should be:

taxes shutdown()

but I have a feeling it would be void shutdown()...

------
ambition
I'd like to see citizens issued with official public/private cryptographic key
pairs. I think this would have the potential to hamper identity theft, enable
legally meaningful electronic signatures, and bring encrypted/authenticated
communication to the public.

~~~
olefoo
It could be like a driver's license for the internet, and a post office
franking mechanism at the same time.

Although seriously now would you want every blog comment tied to you with a
digital signature, provably yours forever?

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corentin
> I imagine it would create a thousands of government jobs, boost every sector
> of hardware sales, foster the creation of thousands of start ups and bring
> accountability and transparency to government, among other things.

The money you need to fund this stuff has to come from somewhere; hence
destroying thousands of non-government jobs, slowing down every other sector
of the economy and preventing the creation of thousands of startups.

------
jhancock
Full Text Search

~~~
pg
and permalinks.

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geuis
A congressional api. Pass either a lawmakers name and get their voting record.
Pass a zip code to get the lawmakers for your area. Pass a bill # to get
relevant data, etc

~~~
ontilt
Something like this?

[http://open.blogs.nytimes.com/2009/01/08/introducing-the-
con...](http://open.blogs.nytimes.com/2009/01/08/introducing-the-congress-
api/)

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parlin
A live feed of who gives funding to campaigns or any politician would be
great. Thanks.

What if ALL contributions were reported on a public twitter feed-ish service?
(and a timeline)

Oh, and an api for that data would be sweet too.

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Shamiq
I'm all for accountability, but I also think added bureaucracy is a waste of
money. Someone has to pay for these new jobs, and I can't tell whether this
will return more than it costs to set up.

~~~
jhancock
the way I read it, the OP's "new jobs" would be jobs created in the private
sector by people making use of the data. I don't think he was referring to the
cost of creating the API itself.

The API could be created as a F/OSS project and be done with that line item
;).

------
mooism2
At a different level of government, I'd like a real-time public transport api.
Tell me where all the buses and trains are right now, and let me make sense of
it for my website's visitors.

~~~
dfranke
For the bay area, this exists. <http://transit511.org>

~~~
mooism2
You mistyped the link? That seems to be a spam domain.

In London we have <http://journeyplanner.tfl.gov.uk> but there is no api and
the user interface is shoddy.

~~~
dfranke
I missed a dot. It should be <http://transit.511.org>. Past the edit deadline
unfortunately.

~~~
mooism2
Thanks.

There doesn't seem to be an api mentioned anywhere on that site. It appears to
be for end users only. Am I missing something?

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altrux
voting records, and USGS information would be nice too

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rokhayakebe
Law. Location. I want to search what the Law says about the keywords/phrase I
submit. This way next time a cop is trying to bs me, I can pull the phone, and
double check what's the law in regards to it.

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jderick
Before we worry about an API, how about some decent blogs?

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DanielBMarkham
bullshitMe, which takes as parameters my SSN and returns a load of political
crap geared especially for my demographic.

Could eliminate a lot of political grunt work and save money come the next
election. It would also provide excuses for practical things, like why the
potholes aren't fixed or the budget is still unbalanced.

I'm also all for simplifyAgency, which takes an Agency name and returns a list
of functions that the agency does. So I could call simplifiyAgency("IRS") and
receive a list of APIs the IRS exposes.

Or how about something extremely practical? Give us access to all of that GIS
and USGS data in a simple format. You know, the data that is in the public
domain but companies make a killing re-selling us.

------
time_management
You're already doing it wrong. Camel caps? Eww.

uglyAsFuckAndAlmostUnreadable -> fail. acceptable_using_underscores -> better.
using-hyphens-as-lisp-does -> great.

~~~
rrhyne
heh.

