ReadWriteWeb

Three years ago, the Washington Metropolitan Area Transit Authority looked lost, and so did many of its riders.

Those who hadn't memorized Metro's schedules had to employ its persnickety Trip Planner, a clunky Web form that not only won't let you click on a map to specify your location but also chokes on cities, states, Zip codes and even commas if you add them to a street address. Meanwhile, other U.S. cities had enjoyed transit directions from sites like Google Maps since at least 2005. But not DC.

This week at the OSCON conference, a group of vendors has banded together to form the Open Cloud Initiative in the attempt to coalesce a collection of open source standards, requirements, products and services. Unlike earlier open cloud efforts, this one is community driven (although with more of a legal tone) rather than coming from vendors.

More than two years after President Obama's memorandum on his open government initiative, thousands of public authorities and organizations worldwide have embraced the main idea behind it. Opening up data and making them publicly available on the Web has been recognized as a key to fostering transparency and collaboration within public administrations and with citizens.

From census data, to cadastrial maps, everyday a new data set pop ups on the Web, as a quick glance at the #opendata hashtag on Twitter shows.

There's an exhibit on display at the Museum of the City of New York currently, a series of photographs that chronicle some of the history of food carts in the Big Apple. It's an interesting retrospective, a way to think about the "then and now" - the immigrant experience, our changing (and unchanging) dietary habits, the history of New York.

The exhibit made for a great backdrop this evening for the official launch party for HistoryPin, a website that aims to link our personal family histories and photographic records with a larger story and to pin those photos and stories to Google Maps.

Who was here, what was here before us? Where were our families? What did their world look like? What artifacts remain, and how can we connect these cultural remnants to people and places today? These questions can uncover a wealth of information of both personal and cultural value.

HistoryPin has been in beta for a year, a creation of the U.K. non-profit We Are What We Do. HistoryPin officially launches today with the release of its Android app. (An iPhone app is on its way.) The site and the app let you view the history of a particular location, by taking historical photos and pinning them, as the name suggests, to Google Maps. You can also contribute their own photos - both present-day and family heritage photos - to the site.

Yesterday we reported that Vivek Kundra, the first CIO of the U.S. federal government, will leave his post for a fellowship at Harvard. Kundra lead the Data.gov open data project which suffered a massive budget cut, and the White House's cloud computing initiatives.

With the leader of two banner projects for both open data and cloud computing moving on, what does that mean for the future of these technologies?

Yesterday we reported that Data.gov and several other Web-based public data outlets may be closed as a result of proposed budget cuts. The Sunlight Foundation is trying to save these sites you can learn more about that here.

But as Clive Thompson points out in an article for Wired, these public data sites were never living up to their promise or potential in the first place. "Bureaucrats still snooze atop mountains of public data, with no political imperative to release it," Thompson writes. "It's not something senators and congresspeople fret about while nursing martinis with lobbyists."

What could both save Data.gov and make it more useful? Thompson suggests that we hammer home the potential open data has for job creation.

Max Ogden is a developer living in San Francisco. He's a Code for America fellow and one of the founding developers of Couchappspora, an open source social network built with Apache CouchDB.

This is the second half of our interview. Part one can be found here. In this half we focus on Couchappspora, Ogden's open source social networking project.

Max Ogden is a developer living in San Francisco. He's a Code for America fellow and one of the founding developers of Couchappspora, an open source social network built with Apache CouchDB.

I recently talked to him about his Code for America fellowship, how he got started programming, CouchDB and much more. Tune in next week for part two of the interview.

The National Archives and Records Administration launches an Online Public Access prototype today, making available to the public millions of digitized government records. The effort is part of the National Archives' plan to provide better online services and better access to historical government documents.

The Online Public Access prototype provides access to and information about the National Archives' records. It is a centralized mean to search and display information from multiple National Archives resources. "People have asked us for a Google-like search," says the National Archives' Pam Wright, "which I think this really provides."

We've been on something of a contest kick here, so let's continue the trend. The World Bank is sponsoring the $15,000 Apps for Development contest. The World Bank launched its Open Data Initiative in April, 2010 and it's offering cash prizes to the developers who can make best use of the data.

The World Bank has been harshly criticized by non-governmental organizations, but this could be a good opportunity to for developers with ideas to do some good while making some money.