Just a gentle reminder: we hope you can come to today's WedTech and help us figure out how to recover the peoples' data from the state government's web site. The SFComplex. Today (Wed, April 6) @ 12:15 p.m.
-tom johnson ============================================================= Friends: There was some press hoopla in mid-Jauary around the introduction of the www.sunshineportalnm.com The site was, we were told, supposed to let the citizens of New Mexico have great access to the doings of the state government. Unfortunately, the site's design and programming is such that it is not even half a loaf, long sought in politics, but a very, VERY thin slice in a very large loaf. For starters, (1) the site's opening page lacks any sort of search engine and subsequent pages don't seem to reach out to any meta data or relational data bases; (a) the site's taxonomy is silo-ism to the head-scratching extreme, and (3) should one find what appears to be a sought-after document, that document is only available as a PDF file. Consequently, the citizens of New Mexico are being double taxed: first, we have paid >$300k for a site which is of minimal value in terms of finding sought-after documents and second, if you find that PDF file you have to: (a) extract the data, (b) clean the data after OCR-ing and (c) put it into a word processor, spreadsheet, database or GIS application to begin any sort of analysis. (All of this is because we have no way to find appropriate files in the original format of creation.) Ah, but it's possible solutions are at hand. My friend David Collins -- one of the few reporters (formerly at The New Mexican) who knows a bit from a byte or a bite -- has been wrestling for two weeks with trying to suck data out of the NM state government's so-called "transparency site," the www.sunshineportalnm.com <http://www.sunshineportalnm.com/> And he has made impressive progress. David has turned up some apps and FFox add-ons that are coming pretty close to pulling the data off the site and getting that data into a form appropriate for analysis. But while he is getting close, there are still challenges that require the insights of experienced Flash, JavaScript and Adobe Air programmers to actually retrieve the data in formats conducive to analysis. We will hold this WedTech on Wednesday, April 6 from 12:15 (so the ABQ crowd can make the train north) until 1:15+ at the SFComplex. We will quickly lay out the site's problems, then discuss progress thus far and conclude with an open plea for suggestions as to how we can make the SunshinePortal truly functional for the citizens/taxpayers of New Mexico. Please join us on Wednesday this week at the Santa Fe Complex. Tom Johnson -- ========================================== J. T. Johnson Institute for Analytic Journalism -- Santa Fe, NM USA www.analyticjournalism.com 505.577.6482(c) 505.473.9646(h) http://www.jtjohnson.com [email protected] ==========================================
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