Carl MalamudHack 5: Enforce ODF By Proxy (2006)

10 Government Hacks — Slides From a Talk at OSCON 2006 [[ Hack 6 >>

Government MIS can be really clueless (and, in a few instances, takes your breath away with how good they can be). In my world of vaporware hacks to government I'd love to see, I imagine a Firefox extension that detects any proprietary format in a .gov URL and talks to a backend proxy running tools like docvert to convert-on-the-fly and store the doc for the next user. Government rarely provides even minimal security (https URLs, MD5 signatures on documents, signed email, etc.., etc...), so one could add value to lots of government data by signing on their behalf.

The "movies", btw, are really slides for a presentation. So, this one resolves best if you use the 1024x768 version. If you don't want to bother, all I did was search for the Word Perfect files in .gov, but a search of Word docs is probably a better example.

This item is part of the collection: Internet Governance

Producer: Carl Malamud
Audio/Visual: sound, color

Creative Commons license: Attribution

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Support for this project was provided by the Center for American Progress, ISC, and Stichting NLnet.