krues8dr

Sorry, I just want to bring this into perspective - right now Congress can't use open source software on the whole because it's considered a "gift" (since they're not paying for it). So the Rules committee is the one that has to rule that OSS is allowable at all, thus the Wordpress example. It's not Wordpress in particular that's at stake here.

But yeah, for what we're talking about here, CKAN, DKAN, etc make more sense.

Why can Congress piss away billions of dollars on bullshit, but they can't pay a dedicated team to deal with their technology issues?

To be fair, the executive branch has created two funded organizations to this effect, in the form of 18F and USDS. Both have been rather successful in the brief time they've been around (about a year)

Keep in mind that a lot of the data produced by the House and Senate is highly-structured data, with lots and lots of nesting. This means that either you have to have ridiculously overcomplicated JSON (inline nodes are painful), or you have to cram XML inside of your JSON, and really nobody wants that. We all love JSON, but sometimes it's really not the best fit for the job. Having dealt with this data a lot, I can say it's probably not worth it for anything aside from document metadata here.