[HN Gopher] RSS Feeds about what the Government is doing
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RSS Feeds about what the Government is doing
Author : pizza
Score : 117 points
Date : 2022-01-09 19:52 UTC (3 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.govinfo.gov)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.govinfo.gov)
| jimz wrote:
| I should note that the government does a lot of stuff. If you
| have a cause you feel strongly about, whichever side, it's worth
| taking some time to understand which ones you can actually (at
| least theoretically) have a direct impact over, and that's
| generally in the regulatory arena, or administrative law arena.
| Agencies don't make laws, they pass rules and regulations, and
| those that adds legal obligations to pre-existing ones in a
| substantive way are subject ot note and commentary under the
| Administrative Procedures Act. This means you, even if you're not
| an American citizen but have some sort of interest at stake, can
| and should voice your concerns. It's in fact one of the only ways
| the average person can at least reach the decision makers that
| were not elected and don't owe their jobs to anyone but the
| president.
|
| In those cases, the specific site to follow would be
| https://www.regulations.gov/ and the api docs are at
| https://open.gsa.gov/api/regulationsgov/ and at least most
| administrations (last one excepted, although they didn't seem to
| have anyone on staff in the executive branch who was familiar
| with the APA to begin with) are pretty good about at least
| reading, if not agreeing - sometimes cruelly and sometimes
| nonsensically - to your comments.
|
| It's good to see what the government is doing, but in a sense if
| you want change, that's already too late. Focus on the regulatory
| aspects of things, and you can make a real difference, possibly.
| The CFR feed on the RSS page shows how regulations are routinely
| promulgated, and it's not an ideological thing necessarily:
| DHS/ICE is an agency just like the FDA or EPA. Rules are, after
| all, rules.
| sorenjan wrote:
| American* government.
| bpodgursky wrote:
| Yes, you can tell by the .gov
| unglaublich wrote:
| One of my pet peeves is that .gov, .edu, .whatnot often refer
| to US government, US education, and US whatnot. That's less
| than 5% of actual internet users. And then there's .com,
| which mostly refers to global commerce!
| [deleted]
| gaganyaan wrote:
| Not to be flippant, but it's the perk of inventing
| something. See also: GMT
| anyfoo wrote:
| Interesting example, because it's now UTC in name. GMT
| officially (and, as far as I can see, also practically,
| for quite a while now) only refers to the actual time
| zone itself and is not used in the offset anymore.
|
| They even compromised on the acronym, being neither the
| English ("Coordinated Universal Time", CUT), nor the
| French proposal ("Temp Universel Coordonne", TUC).
| smitty1e wrote:
| I want more.
|
| Give me a public, read-only Git repo with elected officials able
| to commit to the various branches.
|
| Then we can mine the metadata for a better picture of what the
| Congrescritters are getting up to.
| joshdata wrote:
| The bills proposed by legislators are published in open data
| (thanks to years of advocacy by myself and others, but that's
| another story). If you want to read it and know who proposed
| it, this information has been readily available on the Internet
| since 1995. If you want to do some data mining, the data has
| been readily available to download in XML for about 5-10 years
| from Congress itself and for the decade before that from
| govtrack.us. If you're not doing the data mining already, that
| is about you and not about the availability of the data.
| ohashi wrote:
| Is there a publicly accessible view where people can see
| bills, how they've changed and who proposed the changes then?
| nojito wrote:
| https://www.govtrack.us/
| Larrikin wrote:
| Great start hope to see it continue. My ideal is an ICS for
| elections and deadlines, especially down to the local level.
| Knowing deadlines for registration, absentee mailing, and actual
| elections on my calendar would be great.
|
| Chicago seemed to have one but I haven't seen a single event on
| the calendar since I added it to my Google Calendar sometime in
| 2020.
| gennarro wrote:
| You can also check out sites like https://ofr.report and fccid.io
| which make these sorts of things a little easier to parse.
| stevesearer wrote:
| I'm working on re-publishing the city council meeting minutes
| from my city into a more readable and searchable format that will
| use RSS.
|
| Right now there is no way to know how my city council member
| votes on anything without manually looking through PDFs.
|
| I think there is a lot of room for innovation in this area.
| joshdata wrote:
| Great!
| luvz2code wrote:
| Does anyone maintain a list of popular RSS feeds related to tech
| ?
| ghastmaster wrote:
| Supplimental; Federal Reserve RSS feeds:
|
| https://www.federalreserve.gov/feeds/feeds.htm
| lovecg wrote:
| Meta-comment: I recently got into RSS so I'm pretty biased but I
| love the format and it seems like there's a bit of a RSS
| renaissance going on with a bunch of recent articles promoting it
| and people sharing their experiences etc. Is that just wishful
| thinking on my part?
| moritonal wrote:
| The UK Gov site has an RSS feed for every other countries
| travel requirements. Its insane how open/easy it is to
| subscribe to a ordered relevant collection of information.
|
| I'd argue that accessible sites are realising its benefits.
| woodruffw wrote:
| I like RSS and Atom a lot, so I say this with a heavy heart: I
| don't think there's a real RSS renaissance going on. It's just
| one of the early-aughts standards that HN pines for and loves
| promoting think-pieces about, in part because it allows us to
| all put rose-tinted glasses on and pretend that the Internet
| isn't a hellscape of our own design.
|
| See also: IRC, which I also like, but whose demise is fully
| complete. RSS isn't quite as dead as IRC, but it's on the way
| out.
| donio wrote:
| If you include podcasts then RSS is probably used more today
| than ever before.
| ravenstine wrote:
| Is that how most people are currently following podcasts? I
| listen to a lot of podcasts, but I hate to admit that I do
| this mainly through YouTube and sometimes Spotify, maybe
| Podbean. It's been many years since I subscribed to an RSS
| feed using a podcast app.
| rendall wrote:
| I use podcast addict. RSS is how to do it.
| nsv wrote:
| IRC has quite a few active users which is not what I'd call
| "dead". It's true that it's not as ubiquitous as it used to
| be, but it certainly still fills a certain niche.
| JSavageOne wrote:
| > it's on the way out.
|
| I disagree. RSS is still the standard for following podcasts
| yetanother-1 wrote:
| It used to be the standard format to follow any thing from
| websites to blogs anew news... etc.
| dimgl wrote:
| I highly, highly doubt that. I think the average consumer
| of podcasts is using some kind of Apple/Google app to
| follow them.
| woodruffw wrote:
| I can't speak for myself (I don't listen to that many
| podcasts), but my friends who do seem to do so mostly
| through Apple's Podcast app, Spotify, or a similar service.
|
| RSS might be providing the syndication under the hood to
| these services, but it's firmly an implementation detail at
| this point and not a thriving protocol/community in its own
| right. Which isn't to say that I want it to fail or be
| replaced with something else, either!
| rendall wrote:
| If you want to host a blog or a podcast on your own site,
| RSS is the only way anyone can subscribe as far as I
| know. Could do newsletter, I suppose.
| woodruffw wrote:
| Yeah, I provide an Atom feed for my blog. It has about
| ~100 subscribers across a few different RSS subscription
| services, and I get a few hundred independent RSS client
| requests a week. Don't get me wrong: it all works really
| well, and I like providing it! But it's a very small
| fraction of my overall traffic, and other bloggers I've
| spoken to have indicated the same.
| colordrops wrote:
| Many big OSS software projects host chat on IRC, e.g. Linux,
| NixOS, Neovim, OPNsense, sway
| woodruffw wrote:
| I spend a lot of time on IRC, including in some of the
| chats for some of the largest OSS projects. I even still
| run my own social channel and maintain a bouncer for myself
| and friends!
|
| Pockets of activity don't mean that IRC as a whole isn't
| dead, the same way that the Pope doesn't make Latin a
| living language.
| 6510 wrote:
| > I spend a lot of time on IRC
|
| I pronounce the end of the discussion!
| joshdata wrote:
| 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.
| sunjester wrote:
| I have a large collection of RSS feeds that I assembled by
| visiting various government websites. I wish I had found this
| site sooner, but they are missing a lot of other government
| feeds. I would also suggest using Newsboat when reading all the
| news. https://github.com/newsboat/newsboat
| gigatexal wrote:
| I love this. This is a good step towards governmental
| transparency.
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(page generated 2022-01-09 23:00 UTC)