Introducing FedThread: Opening the Federal Register

Today we are rolling out FedThread, a new way of interacting with the Federal Register. It’s the latest civic technology project from our team at Princeton’s Center for Information Technology Policy.

The Federal Register is “[t]he official daily publication for rules, proposed rules, and notices of Federal agencies and organizations, as well as executive orders and other presidential documents.” It’s published by the U.S. government, five days a week. The Federal Register tells citizens what their government is doing, in a lot more detail than the news media do.

FedThread makes the Federal Register more open and accessible. FedThread gives users:

• collaborative annotation: Users can attach a note to any paragraph of the Federal Register; a conversation thread hangs off of every paragraph.
• advanced search: Users can search the Federal Register (going back to 2000) on full text, by date, agency, and other fields.
• customized feeds: Any search can be turned into an RSS feed. The resulting feed will include any new items that match the search query. Feeds can be delivered by email as well.

I think FedThread is a nice tool, but what’s most amazing to me is that the whole project took only ten days to create. Ten days ago we had no code, no HTML, no plan, not even a block diagram on a whiteboard. Today we launched a pretty good service.

How was this possible? Three things enabled it.

First, government provided the necessary data, for bulk download, in a format (XML) that’s easy for software to handle. This let us acquire and manipulate the underlying data (Federal Register contents) quickly. Folks at the Government Printing Office, National Archives and Records Administration, and Office of Science and Technology Policy all helped to make this possible. The roll-out of the government’s XML-based Federal Register site today is a significant step forward.

Second, we had great tools, such as Linux, Apache, MySql, Python, Django, jQuery, Datejs, and lxml. These tools are capable, flexible, and free, and they fit together in useful ways. More than once we faced a challenging engineering problem, only to find an existing tool that did almost exactly what we needed. When we needed a tool for managing inline discussion threads within a document, Adrian Holovaty, Jacob Kaplan-Moss and Jack Slocum graciously let us use their code from djangobook.com, which served as the basis for our system. Tools like these help small teams build big projects quickly.

Third, we have a amazing team. A project like this needs people who are super-smart, tireless, have great engineering judgment, and know how to work as a team. Joe Calandrino, Ari Feldman, Harlan Yu, and Bill Zeller all did fantastic work building the site. We set an insane schedule — at the start we guessed we had a 50% chance of having anything at all ready by today — and they raced ahead of the schedule, to the point that we expanded the project’s scope more than once. Great job, guys! Now please get some sleep.

We hope FedThread is a useful tool that brings more people into contact with the operations of their government — one small step in a larger trend of using technology to make government more transparent.