Accurate, Focused Research on Law, Technology and Knowledge Discovery Since 2002

CFPB launches participatory e-gov applications developed by visiting scholars and in-house coders

Via Joseph Marks at NextGov, writing about new iterations in government interactions with consumers: “The eRegulagions site got support from some of the 30 CFPB design and technology fellows participating in a two year program for tech professionals to build tools that help regulated companies comply with the laws CFPB enforces and to use data collected by the agency to help the public. Fellowship participants also produced AskCFPB, a searchable library of more than 1,000 questions and answers about consumer products and services, such as credit cards, student loans and mortgages. In addition to building eRegulations one piece at a time, CFPB developers also open sourced the project from the beginning, posting each new piece to the code sharing site Github. Sites like Github allow outside developers to study Web projects and to adopt or retrofit portions of them for their own use. The U.S. and Indian governments, for example, have open sourced the code for their open data sites, Data.gov and Data.gov.in, so other governments can launch their own open data sites without starting from scratch.

Leave a reply