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!
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[–] alexkobold 0 points 2 points 2 points (+2|-0) ago
Will your database be limited to US politicians?
Do you already have any code which is worth open-sourcing?
Will you be working on a feature that tries to determine whether a politician has contradicted themself on a topic?
[–] jsprogrammer [S] 0 points 1 point 1 point (+1|-0) ago (edited ago)
My initial focus would be US politicians as I am a US citizen and we have a very important election coming up. I do wish for this software to be usable by everyone, for their own local politics.
All of the code I write is open source and almost (I try to push on commit, but sometimes I forget) all of it is available at github. I had begun prototyping a "Where Is Your Congressperson?" UI to explore some ideas. I also started early design and prototype work on a presidential primary fantasy league. Neither of these projects are documented for the public, so I offer my apologies in advance!
My ideal setup would be that anyone could launch such a system with incredible ease. I have spent some time working to be able to launch systems across most cloud providers [Note: You will not be able to launch anything from the web interface due to the proxies required to workaround Docker and CoreOS's lack of CORS-enabled API endpoints not currently running; also, the project is not feature complete (though, I have launched 900+ machine clusters with it)].