Out in the great state of Minnesota, the forward-thinking legislature there is attempting, by statute, to create an official position of state webmaster, so that there's one single point person who is responsible for maintaining and spreading public data on the web. The benefit of putting it into law: so that even should political power change, there's an established place in the bureaucracy for a data captain. But that, my friends, has folks with some of your bigger proprietary software companies a little anxious. Politics in Minnesota reports:

A bill for the innocuous-sounding purpose of establishing the position of state webmaster is reportedly attracting the nervous interest of high-tech lobbying interests, most notably Microsoft. The bill, which is being carried in the Legislature by Sen. Don Betzold and Rep. Phyllis Kahn, the chairs of the Senate and House State Government Finance committees, would create the position of state webmaster to oversee the development of coordinated, information-generous state government websites and to make the data presented there more readily accessible and useable for the public.

In short, what's making companies like Microsoft worried is that standardizing public data, as provided for in the bill, is but a slippery slope towards interoperability, which only ends in a pit of open-source software -- and away from locked packages of the sort that Microsoft sells.

As important as this legislative wrangling is for Minnesota's prospects of a getting an official public data master, it potentially has a much further reach. It's probably safe to predict that other states seeking to enshrine an open public data regime into state law would/will face a similar battle.

The Tea Party has gotten itself an iPhone app, reports the Hill's Hillicon Alley blog. It shows, based on geography, where your closest tea party event is being held or local chapter is meeting. But wait, which Tea Party?

The new app, available free from the iTunes app store, is actually pulling its feed from the Tea Party Patriots (their motto: "Official Grassroots American Movement"), which is organized by Dick Armey's FreedoomWorks and drove many of the protests and rallies we've seen across the country. But among the better known tea party entities, there's also the Tea Party Express, a national bus tour organized by a conservative PAC called Our Country Deserves Better, chaired by a former Assistant Republican Leader in the California State Assembly. And then there's Tea Party Nation, the company that, somewhat controversially, pulled together a "National Tea Party Convention" in Nashville last month. There are others.

"Which Tea Party" is driving that new iPhone app might seem like a silly question, but it points to the idea that (a) the movement has multiple parts and (2) because it does, this is a movement that could, potentially, really be made more powerful if its various leaders went fully modern and adopted a common set of digital standards, platforms, etc. For example, it doesn't really matter as much if there are a number of different and loosely tied offshoots of the Tea Party, for example, if they're all publicizing their events using the same XML feed.

It's ask and ye shall receive XML, it seems. After years of pushing by open government advocates, it took just a "Dear Colleague" from South Carolina Republican Jim DeMint and a gang of bipartisan senators to finally spur the Senate Rules Committee to, this week, change its longstanding practice and begin publishing votes in a structured data format that makes for easy analysis, visualization, and mashing up by the public. Rules Committee chair Chuck Schumer (D-NY) perhaps saw that, with transparency on the march in Washington, this was an inexpensive, easy win. Almost immediately, the Senate began publishing a comprehensive XML list of roll call votes and details on each bill's vote, also in XML...

Obama has been making big news today for calling for something rather geeky: interoperability between the Defense Department's electronic health records system and the Department of Veterans Affairs' much praised VistA digital records program. A soldier, the thinking goes, shouldn't experience any gap in care or coverage when he or she is transitioning between active duty and veteran's status. Of course, Obama has made a big deal about the potential of electronic health records (EHRs) to improve the America health care system. And a successful DOD-VA EHR bridge would be quite a lovely case study to bolster his approach.

Down in DC a few weeks ago, a friend of mine had the gall to say, "you know, you're not only a politics geek, you're a real geek geek." The nerve of the guy. This post isn't going to lessen my geek rep one iota, but whatever. What I have to report is pure awesome and I don't care who knows it. This morning, I was reading the Sunlight Foundation's Lab's director's Clay Johnson's blog post about what's next for the Labs, and a throwaway mention gave me that prickly sense down the back of my neck that I get when I know I've stumbled across something powerfully good: innovations in naming standardizations that will streamline fundraising reports, regulatory records, and more. Gadzooks! Does it get more exciting?