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January 21, 2004
RSS For President
Steve Gillmor has an intriguing piece that talks about the DeanChannel and its use by the Dean campaign to create a montage of news stories about the candidate on election day in Iowa:
Take Dave Winer's Channel Dean as an example. For the Blogerati crowd, this is no big deal÷an RSS aggregation feed compiled by one campaign's editorial board. For those who've mastered the non-trivial task of choosing and downloading an RSS newsreader, the feed was a quick way of absorbing one campaign's take on the confusing, fast-moving messages of the caucus denouement. For the RSS-oblivious, it may be seen as a wake-up call down the road.From RSS for President
Referenced Wed Jan 21 2004 22:15:10 GMT-0700
The article also mentions the impasse on DeanChannel over Dave Winer's posting of a public quote by Dean that some people in the campaign would have rather not had on their site. You live by the sword, you die by the sword. You can't take the advantages of the Internet without buying off on the honesty that has to go with it for it to work for you.
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Open Source eVoting
Scott Ritchie, a California college student has proposed bringing open source eVoting software from Austrailia and modifying it to meet the demands of the California Secretary of State.
Ritchie, a 19-year-old political science and math student at the University of California at Davis, told the panel that he was launching the nonprofit Open Vote Foundation, which plans to modify the Australian code to meet California election standards and offer it free to any voting vendors that want to implement it in their systems.From Wired News: Open-Source E-Voting Heads West
Referenced Wed Jan 21 2004 14:59:22 GMT-0700
California Secretary of State Kevin Shelley has mandated that a voter-verified paper audit trail, or VVPAT, must be included with all e-voting machines by July 2006. Ritchie proposes making modifications to the Australian software to meet these demands.
I'm not familiar with the feature set of the Australian software, but one of the things most people don't realize about voting software is that its not just about voting machines. Ballot preparation is a much bigger job for election offices than most people would expect and the system that prepares the ballot has to be able to provision the voting machines in a reliable, trustworthy, and efficient manner.
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iProvo Approved
The Provo City Council approved the bonding package for iProvo, an ambitious fiber to the home project. There's an article by Arthur Brady on UtahPolitics.org about the council meeting.
To me, the choice is as important and momentous as the decision to create and interstate highway system in the 1950's. The railroads were monopolies and were only too happy to carry people's goods, but on the railroad's terms. The interstate highway system changed that. Before the 1950's, long haul transportation was solely the domain of the railroads. Now anyone with a little capital can start a transportation company (just buy a truck).
The current situation in last mile connectivity is very similar. Comcast and Qwest are all too happy to carry your data, but only on their terms. Qwest is almost paternalistic: we'll decide how much bandwidth you need and give it to you when you're ready. Networks like iProvo have the promise to change that. My fear is that they'll emulate their closed cousins and place unneeded and stifling restrictions that will limit their ability to provide a breeding ground for broadband innovation.
In any event, I'm happy to see iProvo going forward and hope for similar success for Utopia.