I am a programmer who has spent the last three years prototyping, studying, and thinking about what software we need.
There is a lot of software that is just now becoming possible to build and I have been extremely excited to be exploring just some of those possibilities. One thing that has challenged me has been trying to determine which projects are the most important, so that I could focus my effort on them. Additionally, running at the scale required (~350 million people in the US and ~8 billion people worldwide [though only about half currently have Internet access]) presents many challenges that do not have many well-known solutions. Much of my last year-and-a-half has been spent searching, finding, researching, and creating tools that might allow the software I have been envisioning to be created and distributed.
At the top of my list of must have software is a publicly-owned, -built, -supported, and -maintained database of everything our leaders have ever said or done that has been recorded. The database will be web-accessible, so that anyone can quickly and easily access and search the entire known-history of a politician. Using technologies that have just become available to the web, anyone will be able to contribute live audio and/or video streams to the database as well.
There is a lot to think about with this project and I look forward to having many discussions about it. Ask me anything!
~~Edit: my comment votes and replies have been rate limited since starting this AMA. My apologies if I don't get a timely response to you, it is only because I can't :/~~
Edit2: I've been able to make some more responses ~~(though I cannot vote on comments for ~23 more hours apparently)~~. If I'm not responding to you, there is a good chance it is because I am rate limited and waiting to be able to submit my response.
~~Edit3: I'm going to try to get some sleep. I'll be back when I'm up!~~
Edit4: I'm back and responding~~, but rate-limited again~~. I will get to your question soon!
view the rest of the comments →
[–] ashekchum 1 point 4 points 5 points (+5|-1) ago
What are you going to do about storage?
What progress have you made in the 3 years you've worked on it, cause it dosen't sound like much?
A feature that would be nice is searching speaches so could quary John Bohner and the work Bonner to hear about Bohners bonner from Bohner, or something like that.
[–] jsprogrammer [S] 0 points 7 points 7 points (+7|-0) ago
I think the best initial approach will be to leave storage to the current major players (eg. YouTube). The first iteration would be a database of metadata and links to the content. This would drastically reduce the cost and complexity of the project, while allowing the benefit of using highly available, existing systems.
I have not been working on this specific project for three years. I have prototyped out some of the interface and worked on some data models. I have also been spending time working on other, not necessarily related, projects that I feel are also important. Many of these projects share common problems (mainly, the entire stack; from the back-end services, to network engineering, to front-end development). I have a pretty decent base project for web front-end work built up now, where I can easily begin development on new projects or prototypes in a near state-of-the-art environment. Additionally, I have been working on tools to launch and run everything necessary to host these projects on any of the cloud providers or, really, any collection of networked Linux machines.
I think searching is a must. C-SPAN already provides some transcripts and I think YouTube does too, but I think human editable transcripts will also be required. I know that similar systems already exist. Shows like The Daily Show record television channels 24/7 to record and search through the media to find their content. The awesome thing about what we can do on the web now, is that anyone with a web browser will effectively be able to run their own Daily Show, incorporating existing media and live streams...all in a browser...broadcasted all over the world.
[–] ashekchum 0 points 7 points 7 points (+7|-0) ago
Such a system would require the hoster to be impartial, hasn't YouTube proven that incorrect recently if they removed a link then you would need a backup to reupload it while that backup dosen't need to be weblinked it still means that you would need to have access to some storage. Running a search algorithim for terms would likly require at the least the trasnscripts to be hosted on your site for proccessing speed.
Really what you need is funding, maybe kickstarter/go fund me? But you would need a demo system working before then.
[–] WhiteRonin 0 points 2 points 2 points (+2|-0) ago
So what is your stack? And what languages are you using?
I'm a partical type of guy and hate Google like interviews ;-)
[–] [deleted] ago