The open source enterprise wiki company that powers Mozilla's Tower of Babel is announcing that the Deki platform is now powering the Washington Posts' new site, WhoRunsGov.com.
WhoRunsGov aims to harness the collective intelligence of Washington Post contributors, the general public, and dynamically generated content for a comprehensive view of each of the powerful people that make up our government. At the core of the site is roughly 250 profiles that include pertinent information, an at a glance overview that includes available contact information, a more complete write-up on the official's political path, voting records, key associates, and related news across the web.
Users can opt to add to the discussion with their own comment, create new profiles, select to watch a particular person, or print out the related pages. Profiled politicians can also participate and add biographical details to their pages in their own words. The site also has a daily news blog, called The Plum Line, authored by Greg Sargent.
With Deki behind the scenes, WhoRunsGov combines the traditional features of a wiki with powerful integration and aggregation additives. WhoRunsGov is positioned to pull in relevant content on officials from external sources, like Google News, and reverse syndicate the site's knowledge base to external blogs and forums.
Given the capabilities of MindTouch's Deki platform to query data from web services natively and provide contextually relevant information based on disparate data services, we have to wonder if this will further propagate the growing trend of transparency in governments, by providing the public with easy access to information that is normally difficult to attain. We also wonder if the Washinton Post will open up the extensive Deki API to allow for other parties to take the WhoRunsGov data and slice it in even more meaningful ways. We certainly hope so.
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