What questions do you have for FCC CIO David Bray?

[benbalter]

With the exception of some GIS datasets, the FCC open source presence has been relatively sparse compared to some other agencies. Any plans to take a more active role in the open source community such as open sourcing tools used internally to process the information behind some of the FCC's excellent open data efforts (so innovators can more easily consume the data) or open source tools used to tackle challenges common across government (so that other agencies don't have to reinvent the wheel)?

[feomike]

i tend to not compare to other agencies; we are not in a competition. we are in a delivery space. so in context, sure perhaps we have a somewhat comparatively limited space of repo's. in impact, i am not sure that argument holds true. we have this project https://github.com/fcc that has 50 or so contributors and quite a repos; and this project https://github.com/fccdata fewer members and fewer repos; however in both, we are showing the full transparency of from source to end product, which often includes code to presentation layer. i'd say these are reasonable examples of us people using our data to see how we came up w/ products. fwiw, most of these have come out of work in the strategic planning office. i am sure that some agencies are more mature, so not. one difference perhaps is that the stuff we are processing has impact in the $billions annually.

[empower-your-coders]

Great question @benbalter ... FCC's Geospatial Information Officer Mike Byrne has been actively involved with the Open Government efforts and he & I have had some great conversations on future directions. Mike (twitter: @byrne_tweets), do you want to add thoughts here?

I'd also like to recommend James Miller (twitter: @japanlawprof) who partnered with Mike to pioneer the FCC Speed Test app to also share his thoughts to?

Final shout-out to Andrew Wolf (twitter: @awolfe76) who's working on some impressive RWD websites with a longer term plan working to improve FCC.gov

EmpowerYourCoders

[lukefretwell]

Is the @FCC still hosting fcc.gov on Terremark? Or are you exploring another cloud?

Posting on behalf of @digiphile: https://twitter.com/digiphile/status/444293160043560961

[empower-your-coders]

Great question @lukefretwell (and Alex Howard twitter: @digiphile behind the scenes).

For the first part, news from 2013 http://news.centurylink.com/index.php?s=43&item=3080

With my arrival, we're now looking at all possibilities. We've also evaluated that it is really only a portion of fcc.gov that's on the cloud -- there is much work to be done for other subdomains that aren't in the cloud. With the Chairman's Process Reform document out for public comment -- we received a lot of feedback on fcc.gov

Once we get that feedback we hope develop a plan to work with the public, partners that frequently use FCC.gov, and our internal stakeholders to identify the best parts of the collage of different fcc.gov websites and subdomains and work to both more seamlessly improve search, usability, and accessibility across them and move them all to a cloud-based provider.

Hope this helps, and as always:

EmpowerYourCoders

[rosskarchner]

transition.fcc.gov has been online for a couple of years now-- is there a plan to shut it down?

[saracope]

FCC was the first .gov to contribute to WordPress (back in 2011), but it seems like participation in that open source community has been non-existent in the past several years. Any plans to jump back in there and update the FCC Faceted Search Widget or release other plugins? http://wordpress.org/plugins/faceted-search-widget/

[empower-your-coders]

@rosskarchner You're right, this too is something I inherited. From my listen and learning both externally and internally, we have a user base that likes parts of transition.fcc.gov -- a lot of feedback both on that site, reboot.fcc.gov, www.fcc.gov, and other subdomains has been received and continues to be received via the Chairman's Process Reform http://transition.fcc.gov/Daily_Releases/Daily_Business/2014/db0214/DA-14-199A2.pdf

It appears there are frequently-used parts with each of the different domains. Thus, using a combination of outreach to public, partners that frequently use FCC.gov, and our internal stakeholders -- combined with data-driven analytics how the different parts of the website are being used -- we hope to identify the best parts the website collage and work to both more seamlessly improve search, usability, and accessibility across them all.

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[empower-your-coders]

@saracope I'm a strong supporter of open source and contributing to the community. As I listen and learn from the needs of the Bureaus and Offices, and the 200+ legacy systems we need to modernize, we're started to develop plans aiming more on: (1) making more open FCC's data to the public and our partners, and (2) focusing on modular modernization for our different systems and apps. Where feasible and where there's interest, those module would be open source and shared with the community.

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[empower-your-coders]

I would like to thank @lukefretwell for instigating -- I mean initiating -- this #AMA chat.

(... back in my day all the cool kids used emacs, now it appears to be @github ...)

EmpowerYourCoders