Princeton Center for Information Technology Policy

Web Page: http://sites.google.com/site/citpgsoc/

Mailing List:

The Center for Information Technology Policy (CITP) at Princeton University is a joint effort of the School of Engineering and Applied Sciences and the Woodrow Wilson School of Public Policy. The Center addresses a variety of public policy topics by engaging in hands-on technology research and development. The Center has become internationally known for a variety of work, including copyright/DRM, voting machine technology, network security, open government, and privacy.

CITP is unique in its interdisciplinary focus, combining the social sciences with engineering. The CITP community includes faculty, visiting scholars, graduate and undergraduate students, policymakers, and partner institutions. In some cases the Center works in partnership with government or corporate entities, and in other cases it critiques those entities' policies. A GSOC participant working with CITP would be a member of this broad community, engaged in various aspects of the life of the Center.

The Center is currently engaged in many software development projects, three of which are strong candidates for summer work. The RECAP project is a Firefox plugin that helps to "liberate" federal court records and place them in a free public archive in partnership with The Internet Archive. FedThread is a web application that makes the Federal Register more searchable and comment-able in partnership with the Government Printing Office of the US. All Our Ideas is a collaborative ideation and decisionmaking plaform used by a variety of governmental and non-commercial entities to take the pulse of their constituencies.

http://recapthelaw.org/

http://fedthread.org/

http://allourideas.org/

Projects

• Designing a widget to allow embedding of "All Our Ideas" idea marketplaces on websites Proposal to create an embeddable "All Our ideas" widget that will function on any general website. The embed should have some capability to change size and visually integrate well with the website on which it's being placed. Widget can then be modified so that it works in other contexts, like drupal and other content management systems, mobile devices, social networks, etc.
• Implementing and Analyzing Keyword Tagging in All Our Ideas Requesting that users tag ideas with keywords would allow the efficient online calculation of sets of related submissions, opening up a variety of interesting ways to analyze data sets in terms of broader topics. The relative importance of entire "issues" for a community and the divisiveness of a particular subject could be estimated in addition to the relative popularity of specific ideas. These results could then be compared to the users' own perception of the community.
• Proposal to FedThread from CITP I have solid background in computer science and engineering, and would like to contribute to an open source project. I am specifically interested in CITP projects especially FedThread for two reasons. First, it is related to government transparency issue which plays an important role in modern life; second, I am familiar with some search techniques so that I believe I can come up with my ideas and have my own contribution once I have chance to involve in.