WHAT
Urge governments to publish granular permalinks for all documents on their websites.
WHY
- Enable citizens to reliably cite government websites on their personal blogs, on public sites like Wikipedia, or elsewhere.
- Provide unique identifiers that enable aggregation of citations.
- Make the civic discourse surrounding government websites more discoverable.
HOW
- An easy-to-deploy archival server that can take page snapshots
- Hosts all permalinks
- Could be hosted by the agency or a third party
- Uses a software version-control tool as the primary database
- Allows other parties to replicate the data
- Likely an easy install of a Linux server distribution with the archival tools included
- Quick and easy integration solution
- Include Javascript on each page that ensures the archival server takes snapshots as each page changes
- The Javascript also walks through the HTML DOM to add permalinks to each paragraph
- The "easy integration" method works with even static HTML
- Long-term integration solution
- Option one
- CMS pushes changes directly to the archival server
- CMS integrates the archival server's permalinks directly into HTML
- Most streamlined option
- Option two
- A proxy server (base on Squid/Varnish?) that pushes changed content to the archival server
- The proxy server modifies the content passing through it to add permalinks to the HTML
- Works with any CMS and even static HTML
- More accessible
- No Javascript required
- Broadly applicable integration model (text filtering/formatting plugin) that works with even basic blog and CMS tools
- Mark up documents using paragraph/sectional anchor tags to create nice anchors that go directly to the correct paragraph
- Permalinks are human-readable URLs with timestamps, document ID, and an an anchor to the section/paragraph
WHEN
- We are fund-raising to both hire programmers to write the tools and to have codeathons where programmers donate their time to write Open Source tools they believe in.
- We are recruiting different levels of government implementation one agency at a time. Your support on http://citability.org will illustrate the demand.
- We are asking various proprietary software vendors to implement this standard in their software products.
WHERE
- Http://citability.org - sign up and show your support
- http://citability.pbworks.com - to help promote or to feedback on the internal standards we are suggesting. We are talking various implementations in different software to backups and server failover settings.