Hi, I’m Dave Augustine and I’m from San Francisco, California.
Hi, I’m Bob Burbach and I’m one of the developers working in San Francisco.
I’m Andrew Carpenter, one of the developers and we’re all coming to you via Skype.
We came across the Apps for America 2 contest.
I think we would all agree that we just entered it to have a project to do.
We had no idea really what the Federal Register was. Andrew found it and said, “Hey, look,
this looks like there’s a lot of important information.”
I’m Ray Mosley, director of the Federal Register.
The Federal Register Act signed by President Roosevelt said that we would keep all Americans
informed by publishing in the Federal Register each day the activities of the federal government.
In the printed edition it’s in a dense format, small print, difficult to read.
The Sunlight Foundation offered a competition to developers.
We were trying to make the Federal Register a first-class citizen of the web.
We thought the most familiar way to go about this would be to split it up into sections
like a newspaper would.
Now this is Federal Register 2.0 as it is on our new site.
It’s organized first by section, such as money, environment, world, science and technology,
business and industry, health and public welfare.
The pairing of citizens and government has really been pretty amazing from my point of
view.
This has been an enormous team effort that has required the expertise of computer technology
wizards as well as the editors on the staff of the Office of the Federal Register who
have done much of the grunt work.
I really believe that this will open up all kinds of collaboration around non-governmental
organizations and just public citizens.
You know, it’s been a fun trip. I would encourage anyone who’s, you know, watching
or sees this project to get involved, to go find a data set that you like, that you think
is important and build something around it.
