Sebastopol, in Sonoma County, is better known for its apples and grapes than its high-tech innovators, but Sebastopol-based Carl Malamud just received a $2 million grant from Google to continue his work of putting government codes, laws and court decisions online, The Press Democrat reports.
With that funding, he hopes to make Sonoma County an innovator in publishing law in standardized ways that programmers can make robust use of.
"We want to use Sonoma County and the North Bay as a petri dish," he said. "We have to do this someplace and we're starting in our back yard."
While many governments have started posting their laws, they each do so in nonstandardized ways, so every user has to figure out how to use each individual website.
"We are going to find the holes and get that stuff online," he said. "We want to gain experience as to what standards should be used and learn what it will take to scale that up over time.""Our speciality is bulk access so any computer programmer can take this stuff and start working with it," he said. "Our primary focus is not end users. Our site is a like a big old loading dock for data."
Amazingly, for Sonoma County, which only accepts paper filings and doesn't put case dockets online, county supervisors are supportive.
"Making information readily available to the public is one of the pillars of having a transparent government, and a government that is effective," Carrillo said. "We are thankful for Google for choosing a local company."
