Ok. So I’ve been out of the loop lately and let me just say from the get-go that I’m thrilled that not only did you guys keep the lights on in my absence but kept the radio cranking, the beer on ice and vent-o-system venting. So thanks. It’s great to know that the WB keeps on rollin’ even when I’m not around. So where have I been, exactly?

Well, busy would be an understatement. So let’s go chronologically here.

On February 3rd, Matt announces that he’s running for US Senate. This wasn’t really a major surprise to me but it does have a certain amount of impact on both my personal and professional life and the timing is a bit rough considering that the first two weeks of February are slated to be an absolute full-on sprint for me and some of my IT staff at the statehouse. So anyway, I’m psyched Matt’s running. It will be a learning experience for me.

Also on the 3rd, Christopher Fowler (my lead programmer) and I did a state-wide presentation on our latest-and-greatest piece of programming creativity: Rssonate (pronounced resonate and brilliantly named by Dan Meuse who never gets any credit for the great name so, well, there you go Dan). Rssonate is just about the most difficult thing in the world to explain to people. It makes Einstein’s Theory of Relativity seem like a recipe for boiling water (which, i guess at some level it is, but I’m not going to get all Alton Brown on you here). Rssonate opens up the state’s databases to raw sql queries from the citizens and dumps the output as RSS or XML. Try putting that in a press release ;-) The plain-english press release is here.

The state-wide demo was particularly grueling since we were holed up at the statehouse til pretty late the night before actually getting the code to work. Thankfully we had some help from Joe Alba who blew me away with his SQL chops and XML parsing-prowess. Joe works for ri.gov and it felt great to have people from very different parts of the state working together on something of this magnitude.

One of the great things about Rssonate is that it allows for data from the Secretary of State’s databases to be syndicated to other websites. To wit: for our demonstration we had a clerk from the City of Providence come up on stage and file a meeting notice through our office’s Open Meetings website. When she hit the ‘Submit’ button on the webpage, the open meeting data was sent to our database and (here’s where the folks in the room got it) the posting also i immediately showed up on the City of Providence’s website. So we’ve got this ‘file once with our office and the data is instantly available everywhere’ thing going on, and what’s even more amazing is that people actually understand the somewhat complicated path the data is taking from points a-z. You can read more about our role in the state’s Web Data Sharing initiative at the Ri.gov REX page. Oh, also, we released Rssonate on the GOCC site, so check it out if you want..

Anyway, at the demo, we sort of laid it all on the line and rolled the dice with the code we’d finished up a few hours earlier and things went well. And I went home and slept for about 36 hours and woke up with an insane cold. Just in time to get ready to prep for my presentation up at LinuxWorld in Boston.

LinuxWorld was a whirlwind. I only went up for the day I was slated to present and I wish I had more time since I hardly got to walk around at all and instead spent most of the day in meetings and press events, but it was still a blast. We started the day with a media breakfast where I presented on RI’s Open Source initiatives along side some way more qualified people. You can read about that at the new GOCC weblog I setup. After the presentation, we did some press conference events where someone made the mistake of putting me in a roomful of reporters with a microphone in front of me. You can read about it in Information Week, or Search Enterprise Linux or The Boston Herald.

Rssonate does things for government transparency that can (and I believe, will) change the way citizens interact with their government. When I think about the power of Rssonate and the ability of the GOCC to get other governments to use that tool for free, the possibilities seem almost endless. So it’s been an exhausting couple of weeks but I wouldn’t really have traded any of it. I’m a lucky bastard who wakes up everyday believing to my very core that I’m making the world a better place to live in. And so, I got that going for me ;-)