Given just how innovative the new Obama administration is in terms of using technology to bring US politics into the 21st century, it’s notable that it’s the Republicans who are the first US party to launch a real open web API. You can now see the new Anywhere API over at the Republicans’ US Congress site: gop.gov/api. As they describe:
Congress Facebook is a new mashup that combines 11 different web APIs that wants “to make Congress more accountable and transparent”. The app tracks a lot of data for each member: voting records, FEC reports, Campaign Finance summary, their opinions on the issues, and even their state’s federal spending reports. The design of the site is basic, but the it’s data rich. And among other things, it’s an entry in a contest we reported on last month Sunlight Labs’ Apps for America contest.
One of the big debates these days when it comes to cloud computing center around portability and interoperatbilty between providers. That is, if you build an application on Amazon’s EC2 or Google’s AppEngine or Force.com, or store your data on Box.net or Amazon’s S3, how hard is it to port your application or move your data to another cloud provider? If you develop on a given platform, how locked-in, or not, are you? And beyond that, could developers benefit from having standardized APIs to develop to without having to learn a new model and interface each time. As you’d expect, there’s no easy answer to this.
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