As a guy who likes his SEIs and campaign funding quarterlies, I must say that I was enthused at this news. However, the site appears down. I hope that this is a technical issue, and not the elected or would-be elected grousing over transparency. We'll see, I guess. Let us know if it comes back up!

Posted by It's Frank | reply to this comment
February 19, 2008 8:44 am

As a software guy I find it surprising that local governments aren't yet collaborating on free, open source software projects that would not only modernize but also cut costs for local governments. Open source software is analogous to recipes in cooking, except the recipes are fine tuned by all of the chefs and the food is free.

Posted by KirkH | reply to this comment
February 19, 2008 10:11 am

kirkh, reducing expenses is not in the governments vocabularies. They are not rewarded for efficiencies and they surely are not going to do anything which might threaten their kingdoms. Wallstreet will use open source, Google will build a multi billion dollar business using it and same for Amazon.com but our cash strapped city won't even use the number one web server, apache. Instead, it's happy as a clam paying Microsoft for buggy, bloated, and slow licenses for permission to use the software. There's possibly millions of dollars which could be used for new hardware or other computer related services but instead, it keeps going to Microsoft. And that's not even considering the sharing of the recipes as kirkh mentioned. Once governments start building on open source software, other governments merely need to customize the software for their specific needs.

Posted by bill | reply to this comment
June 13, 2008 8:47 pm

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