The White House just open sourced their first Github repo (opens in new tab)

I submitted a pull request that tones down the hyperbole somewhat: https://github.com/WhiteHouse/petition/pull/5

I sense it's essential for them to keep the project focused on the software. Partly what makes this interesting is managing the partisan nature of discourse. That's a unique non-functional requirement here.

It's a good test for Github as a collaboration platform.

Is "recent history" the last four years? Because you're right. Out of 1 administration, they are one of the most secretive and most aggressive. How about that.

*if anyone wants to contest this, please read "no apologies" authored by Willard mitt Romney or just look at his tax returns

Anyway, rejecting pull requests with patronizing responses is hardly uncommon on Github.

http://rlv.zcache.com/cute_mustache_octopus_sticker-p2177152...

2008: Rag tag, understaffed, throw them into the deep end working on rewarding projects that made small strides toward advancing the infrastructure of technology in politics and bring widespread public attention that gave hope for burgeoning markets and a space for competition. A new frontier! Technological solutions for campaigns and the American people!

2012: Best and the brightest fighting to uphold the principles, ideals, and best practices of all veins of the technology industry but they only actually let them do their jobs in order to give lip service to what got those young talented people so excited and what got them there in the first place, and they only let them do it if there's a blatantly obvious way to save face if it backfires, or in a subtly insulting way.

Its a beat down for uppity youngsters who thought they might be able to, I don't know, start a business, or run for office, or provide solutions in the political realm. Technology in politics is a victim of its own success. Politicos don't see technology as way to connect with people and do their jobs better. They see it as stealing their thunder because they don't know how to control it yet. They don't understand the rules so everyone, down to the president himself seems to be spending more time playing whack-a-potential-political-zuck than doing their own job. The only thing we can hope that that eventually they'll be spending so much time preventing technology workers in politics from doing their job that they won't have enough time to screw over voters as much.

It looks like we're at or just barely over the 50% mark in favor of legalizing marijuana here in Washington, but there's a lot of moneyed interests (e.g. medical marijuana sellers) who are doing their best to kill the initiative.

Please note that I don't smoke pot. I might if it's legalized in the state, but choose not to because, among other reasons, it helps fund narco-terrorism.

Link: http://www.usatoday.com/yourlife/health/medical/pediatrics/2...

However, repeated studies and surveys show that it is easier for teens to get certain drugs, including pot, than it is for them to get cigarettes or alcohol. This make sense considering someone mandated by law to check for id is selling it to them, oppose to another teen selling them unchecked, non taxed pot without doing so.

Link: http://blog.norml.org/2009/08/28/study-says-its-easier-for-t...

While this thread may be about the white house's code base, hear this; don't put your github account near this. You may think it could be harmless, but they could be collecting your account names. After all we are all just dangerous computer hackers!

Link: http://www.channel4.com/news/hackers-are-more-dangerous-than...

Disclaimer: Just my opinion.

I am having a hard time finding a model for (or even discussion about) what happens when government works have been derived from copyrighted material. Anyone know of another example?

But I'm assuming that since there is no copyright to the additions, from a copyright point of view it's essentially equivalent to the software from which it's derived.

[1] https://www.gnu.org/licenses/gpl-faq.html#RequiredToClaimCop...

Also FWIW, the petition namespace on d.o is already occupied, perhaps that is blocking the release on d.o?

But seriously, what'd you expect? The financial industry lost its place as the American poster boy, so the politicians needed something new with which to pretend they're relevant.

Besides, don't be such a buzz kill. Everyone gets laid at the Whitehouse. Everyone.

I created a webapp where a user can author a form (with several different kinds of fields), then it syncs with a mobile app that downloads the forms and allows for data collecting.CouchDB supports synchronizing with a server very easily and already has mobile support to. If/when the user changes the number of fields in the webapp, starting to collect that data makes it very trivial... no need to schema 'alter' statements in the server and synced back to the sqlite db in the phone. It all runs couch and it "just works".

Mind you, I am very skeptical about NoSQL in general, but for this particular example, for the first time in my life, I saw a clear advantage.

- when JSON is the native language of your application, certain NoSQL implementations are beneficial. The value/need for this is changing with more RDBMS introductions of JSON datatypes.

- speed/ease of development/familiarity - sqlite is easy to set up and maintain for small installations/projects, so is mongo or couch or redis - fairly straightforward tradeoff

- leveraging other platforms. Quick example might be wanting to take advantage of Amazon Dynamo or SimpleDB. Sure, RDS is right there too and scales in a similar elastic fashion, but Dynamo especially feels much, MUCH more hands off in terms of redundancy and application design. We use Dynamo since day 1 of its release (we transitioned from mongoDB to Dynamo with 1 day of work) and have not looked back. In our particular project I cannot conceive of how or why we would want to use an RDBMS, it does not fit the task.

I'm not advocating for NoSQL over RDBMS in any given, or especially all, situations. But there are plenty of reasons to select nosql-based implementations.

Also, when I don't feel like dealing with the OR impedance mismatch.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Object-relational_impedance_mis...

Personally I have used it to speed up development. It allows very fast iterations early on and integrates much more nicely with most languages then a SQL based solution. Also its a lot faster the MySQL.

http://cyrve.com/mongodb

edit: Data stored in Drupal is way normalized, and read from a hell of a lot more than it's written to. I think in this case, when they weren't using it for general field storage, but just petitions and signatures which consist of endless names and links to user pages, the data was naturally denormalized enough. Nothing in that usecase would take more than three, maybe four joins. All it's doing in that case is just making upgrades difficult.

I can see the benefits of using something like NoSQL for temporary datastores (in memory only), but MySQL can function just fine as a key->value store as well to the best of my understanding.

So who developed THOMAS?

Right now the influence of this app is zero, so we don't have these problems. It's just a marketing dog-and-pony show where they can say "Look we're actually responding to people's questions" but the answers are extremely vague nothings and you have no idea if the President / Cabinet / anyone with real authority even reads the petitions that have 6- or 7-digit signature counts, let alone acting on them.