WHAT
Asking Government to create advanced permalinks on a paragraph level to all public government documents
WHY
To make Government more accessible to the average citizen.
To make it easy to create citations on blogs and sites like wikipedia that do not break over time.
To make issues easily searchable with a unique identifier.
So that we can aggregate pro and con responses on an issue.
Currently, many government documents are provided only in PDF format, which makes it impossible to link to a specific page or paragraph.
HOW
It is pretty simple, actually:
- An easy-to-deploy archival server that can take page snapshots
- Hosts all permalinks
- Could be hosted by the agency or a third party
- Allows other parties to replicate the data
- Easy integration solution:
- Include on each page that works with the archival server to take snapshots as pages change
- The Javascript walks through the HTML DOM to add permalinks to each paragraph
- Long-term integration solution:
- CMS pushes changes directly to the archival server
- CMS integrates the archival server's permalinks directly into HTML
- Mark up documents using sectional anchor tags to create nice URLs 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 programers 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 illistrate the demand.
We are asking various propertary 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.
Specific to RECOVERY.GOV
Recovery.gov is done in Drupal. All websites that are done in CMS's generate "pretty" urls. We would take advantage of that to create these "beautiful" URLs. Our Drupal experts tells us the cost is insignificant (<50k) and it would help many nongovernmental websites as well to become web citable because Drupal is Open Source and all updates can be shared!
Visit http://citability.pbworks.com/Drupal to see our notes on a Drupal implementation for this concept.
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