Contact:

Silona Bonewald

(512) 750-9220

silona@gmail.com

Citability Codeathon -- April 9 - 11

Brought to you by Microsoft and The League of Technical Voters

Microsoft Corporation

5404 Wisconsin Ave, Suite 700 

Chevy Chase, MD 20814

(301) 771-8000

Metro: Friendship Heights

Improving Government Accountability Through Technology

Washington, DC -- The League of Technical Voters is pairing with Microsoft to make the government's online information more accessible to the public.

Through the Citability project, computer programmers are developing the online tools necessary to ensure all online information is readily available and easily referenced. By using advanced permalinks as citations, users can point to specific parts of government documents. Permalinks allow for stable, long-term reference points to documents, prohibiting deletion of important information, and allowing for a better flow of information online.

"Pages without permalinks are not stable," said League of Technical Voters founder Silona Bonewald. "There's no guarantee that the information will be there when you come back, or when whoever you sent there gets there, which makes it unreliable. Permalinks will link not only to each clause in a document, but to each version of each clause."

Microsoft is hosting a weekend-long codeathon April 9 - 11 for programmers who want to be on the forefront of developing the online tools that will allow any government entity to easily become citable on the internet.

"This gives us a way of doing citations on the web," Bonewald said. "We want to be able to cite every legal document, regulation, bill, or any other government document. It helps academia for research, and it helps make the government more transparent. Citations make information more useful."

Over the course of the 48-hour codeathon, programmers will develop open source tools to bring the Citability project to fruition, and will then have the opportunity to showcase those tools to government members. All projects must be open source, universal and for a non-profit organization. Projects will largely be chosen and started pre-event through our online wiki at http://dccodeathon.pbworks.com/Project.

Citations can be as broad as linking to paragraphs within policies or as precise as line-by-line links to items in a budget. The goal of Citability is to make this kind of government accessibility free.

"Citability does not have to be expensive to be feasible," Bonewald said. "Making this free for government entities removes the hurdle of expense. When you remove the cost, it removes barriers to implementation."

Event Details

7 p.m. to 10 p.m., Friday, April 9 -  Keyword "Interop" and team creation for the weekend. Overview of citability architecture that we will jointly fill out.

8 a.m. Saturday, April 10 - 4 p.m. Sunday, April 11 - Brainstorming, designing and coding.

4 p.m. - 6 p.m., Sunday, April 11 - Programmer project demonstration. Will be videocast.

More information and other resources:

 League of Technical Voters: www.leagueoftechnicalvoters.com

Learn more about Citability at http://citability.pbworks.com/Onepager or www.citability.org

Watch a video about the importance of Citability http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ccDORj0syyE