[andrewcarpenter]

I'm one of the developers on the Federal Register 2.0 project. Thanks for the great comments; we'd love feedback on how to improve the API or the site in general. In addition to the API client, the whole site is open source and on GitHub: https://github.com/criticaljuncture/fr2

[keane]

A beautiful website designed for usability, an API for exporting public data, an open source website available on Github, and feedback through Tender Support; this is by far the greatest .gov I have ever seen. Thank you for your hard work!

I'm absolutely blown away. If all government websites (especially http://usaspending.gov, http://data.gov, http://itdashboard.gov, http://federalreporting.gov, http://recovery.gov) were this well designed I might start to think that the government was finally catching up.

Can you explain more about your team? Are you an outside company working on contract or are you federal employees? What process and team structure allowed the Federal Register site to be developed like this when so many other .govs are backwards and languishing? How can other federal websites follow your lead?

[andrewcarpenter]

Thank you (and everyone) for your kind words.

We're a team of three SF developers (Dave Augustine, Bob Burbach, and myself) working on FederalRegister.gov in our spare time (we have day jobs at airbnb.com and wested.org).

Two years ago we entered a developer competition run by the Sunlight Foundation to use content from the newly-released data.gov clearinghouse to build an open source application; we created http://GovPulse.us, and took second place; traffic grew and we kept working on the site.

Six months later, the Government Printing Office and the Office of the Federal Register contacted us; they wanted to know if we could take GovPulse and expand on it to create a new face for the Federal Register. We jumped at the opportunity, quickly formed a company, and got to work. Last July we launched Federal Register 2.0 and we've been iterating on it ever since.

It's hard to say what the lessons are; but we're definitely not typical government contractors. Largely I think it comes down to having the right people in the agencies who really want to make change, and having strong leadership from above encouraging such change. And I don't think its surprising that the Office of the Federal Register is on the cutting edge for openness--the Federal Register is one of the earliest and most important open-government institutions; and when trying to cut through red tape it doesn't hurt to have a staff comprised largely of regulatory lawyers.

[arihersh]

I add to what everyone has said here and elsewhere: terrific work. I would love to discuss with you guys adding a commenting component to meaningfully organize public comments, particularly on proposed rules.

I am a lawyer with a tech background and had ~10 years of experience with (comments on) Federal Rulemaking at the Natural Resources Defense Council. State of the art is still often hundreds of printouts of electronically submitted comments.

[adanto6840]

I am blown away by how impressive & awesome this is.

And that is on both sides of the coin: implementation itself looks to be very solid (Rails, JSONP, yay!) AND the concept itself is amazing to me. We get 'our' apps (and data) in a format that is open for us to not only use but to contribute to and improve upon!

I definitely hope to see more of this type of stuff in the future...

[jseliger]

Any chance you're going to work on Grants.gov? It's a perpetual problem for my family's business; we do grant writing for nonprofit and public agencies, and dealing with Grants.gov is a perpetual pain.

For examples of what I'm talking about, see http://blog.seliger.com/2008/03/27/grantsgov-lurches-into-th... and http://blog.seliger.com/2009/04/24/from-the-department-of-no... .

[andrewcarpenter]

No, right now we're just doing our best for the Federal Register. But we're love to help out any agency that's interested!

[epaga]

Just a quick heads up: 404 on "About Us" link on the "Tutorials, History, and Statistics" page. Also, the "User Information" link there gives me a certificate warning in Firefox.

But otherwise: great site, really exciting to see stuff like this happening.

[andrewcarpenter]

Thanks! Those should be fixed now.

[epaga]

Yup works great now. Impressive stuff, guys.

[temphn]

The project is awesome and kudos for that.

It's a little scary, though, that we need an API to list all the federal agencies and rules. Take a look at this:

http://api.federalregister.gov/v1/agencies.json

Grep gives a count of 551 federal agencies. Wow. Each one with millions to billions in annual budget. It'd be interesting to start cross referencing this versus budget and media coverage. You could identify things like "the most well-funded agency you've never heard of".

http://api.federalregister.gov/v1/articles.json

And that list seems to give every new federal rule published in the last day. At 9am Eastern, looks like we already have 20 new federal rules, applicable to every man, woman, and child in the US. Surely some people are now violating laws that just entered effect today. And the amazing thing is that a rule is actually a pretty high bar to clear, much harder to get than a simple guidance document.

[adestefan]

The second link is not all rules, it also includes notices. There are certain actions that require a notice be issued to the Federal Register when taken by a government entity. There are probably more notices than rules for a given day.