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Comment by joshdata | Hacker News Reader

The civil servants who are responsible for creating govinfo.gov deserve some praise for publishing a truly massive amount of information in an accurate, reliable, and developer-friendly way. (I know them. They are hard-working people!) Also worth noting that these things don't just happen on their own. Dozens of advocates outside of the government (myself included) have advocated for these sorts of things to come about for decades, and they're always in danger of disappearing if advocates and other users of the data don't continually demonstrate to decision-makers the importance of it.

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Indeed. One thing I would really like to see and frankly, it is needed with urgency is a Twitter clone strictly for Gov use. Hosted, maintained and managed by US Gov. It can be used by local fire departments to federally appointed officials and politicians alike.

The idea that Twitter, a private company, requires me to provide them personal information (phone number and OTP verification), to sell ads and to access, sometimes exclusively hosted Gov content needs to end. Politicians won’t use it, for that a new law is required. I really don’t want Elon vs Elizabeth Warren bullshit. Politicians need to be shamed into submission.

It’s really interesting to hear this - because I spend a lot of time in rooms with emergency managers who ask “how can we meet people where they are to get the message out?”

What you are describing sounds a lot like an emergency weather radio - if you live in the US and don’t have one, please get one. It is reliable, fast, fault tolerant and easy to “tune” for the alerts that are relevant for you. Also - they carry non-weather alerts for terror attacks or other events.

Something similar for the digital space would be amazing . It’s an idea that was knocked around when FirstNet was created in the 700mhz space, but never really had legs.

It would be great, but will never happen because of the nature of modern reporting and PR.

Generally speaking, any communication coming out of a Federal agency has been run through exec, counsel, public information office, and security at a minimum. At the state and local level, that includes plastering the executive’s name in anything good. (ie “Governor Dingleberry announced today that the sun will rise in the east tommorrow.”)

Additionally, civil servants can only be punished for doing their jobs. There is literally no upside for the people who know what they are talking about to speak.

Honestly, Twitter in some ways has been a benefit. In the 90s, you had to take a leap of fate that a rando congressman was a lunatic, fascist, moron, etc. (ie. The guy is a dentist, how dumb could he be?) Now, like the proverbial vegans, they tell you.

Does Twitter block some content when you’re not logged in?

You have to open everything in new tabs. Most navigation that would happen inside of their SPA gets cancelled when you close the login box that it prompts.

Perhaps a userscript exists that fixes that? Or even a browser extension? Seems like a reasonable use case for these things.

Yes, on mobile it doesn’t let you follow to other tweets or timelines aside from the page you landed on.

> sometimes exclusively hosted Gov content needs to end.

but then do you somehow draw a line somewhere arbitrarily on internet access as the requirement that the citizens have to privately provide for themselves? You currently have to pay for it, and if you don't, you also don't get access to the exclusively hosted gov content on the net.

Of course, i'm exaggerating, since the ISP "should" not have the ability to censor this content.

I think for important announcements, channels such as radio or emergency broadcasts is the way to go. For discussions and other political content, the gov should not mandate a specific place for it - and leave it up to the people's choices.

This… and make it decentralized so that it’s true public SMS/alert and not reliant on crappy gov infrastructure

Small world, maybe our paths crossed! I had the pleasure of working with the govinfo team from 2015-2017 as they were rolling out the beta and finalizing the migration from the old fdsys.gov. Truly great folks that are passionate about maintaining government information and making it as accessible as possible.

Thanks for your work! (If our paths crossed you would have known me as the persistent guy at GovTrack asking for bill status XML over and over. :) )

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