automating the Open Government Data Roundup blog feature

[Jennifer Bell]

I just finished reading, for fun, 'The Four Day Workweek'. It's a
goofy book, but it highlights a really important part of starting a
business that it's easy to forget as an entrepreneur: don't build
yourself in as a bottleneck.

On that thought, one of the most time consuming parts of keeping the
VisibleGovernment blog going is monitoring and digesting various
channels for news for the Open Government Data Roundup feature. While
I, personally, am building a lot of domain knowledge, it's maybe not
the most effective organizational approach. It would be better if
more people were involved in the filtering and assembly. It would be
best if scores of people interested in open data accross Canada were
involved in the activity.

I've been mulling over how to try and acheive this. Some thoughts:

- use a twitter/microblog tag for everything open data, with a
Canadian focus, and then use that to automate building an article.
- use a delicious tag to do the same thing -- this has the advantage
of being able to pull out the best quotes
- teams could be assigned different channels (sunlight labs, tech
president, mySociety, openhouseproject, etc.) submitting the most
appropriate content
- mixed ink could be involved in some way

I'd be interested in hearing if anyone has ideas on this, or seen this
work really well for another knowledge domain.

Jennifer