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This version was saved 14 years, 7 months ago View current version     Page history
Saved by Silona Bonewald
on August 12, 2009 at 1:56:33 pm
 

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.
  • Improve the civic discourse surrounding government websites.

 

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.

 

Specific to RECOVERY.GOV

Recovery.gov is done in Drupal.  Many websites that are done in CMS tools 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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