Re: a bit OT- Fully Open Standards for Citizen-Government

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Forrest J. Cavalier III wrote:
| Chip Mefford wrote:
|
| Chip, do you ever sit in traffic and think about how much better
| the highways would work if computers were driving instead of
| clueless humans?

Of course, I'm sure we all do..

| The effort for the government to design the procedure
| to accept things a different way is non-trivial.  The need to
| train IRS examiners to deal with the different formats is not
| trivial either.

This is of course, just fine. All they need do is,
publish exactly what the format is, and the market
will take care of the rest.

| As it is, the IRS uses automatic document processing and IIRC
| some OCR handwriting recognition.  It works well-enough.

Am I to understand that this "e" filing, is just an electronic
version of the tax form itself? Like a PDF or something? Makes
sense, can be ocr'd, and human parsed. Seems like a lot
of effort, but that's okay too, it supports legacy.

| filling in each form correctly.  They do have value worth paying for.

Oh, no argument from me. Not at all. Folks tell me
Intuit's TurbTax is the greatest thing since sliced bread.
I don't use a platform that it will run on, so I wouldn't
know.

My point was more along the lines of, from what I've heard
(and from what I've seen) the government likes getting
stuff in "electronic" form. That's fine. I like it
too. What I would wish is, that all that electronic
form "stuff" be fully open standard. The software
doesn't have to be, just the interface itself. The
market will do an okay job deciding whose got the best
product for generating that interface. As long as
no one owns it. As long as it is non-proprietary.

All of this creeping feature"ism" or feeping creaturism
of electronic "documents" has me a bit concerned.

I do not wish to be put into a posistion of having to
accept a license term I don't agree with in order to
fulfill my social contract.

My point would be, I don't care about the generator, it's
the data that's important. At the citizen<->government
interface, I think all parties are best served if the
data transferred is formatted along clearly defined and
Open and free lines.

For instance. Government perfers (because it's easy) to accept
something-or-anotherin only Microsoft Word Version blahblah (I'm not up
on my Office versions) Word Document. This is what I would
consider unacceptable. What is perfectly acceptable in
this case, is that Government prefers to  accept something-or-another
in such-and-such format. Where such-and-such format
is published, understood, and not subject to restriction.
Microsoft could write software that outputs this format,
so could you, so (theoretically) could I. In this case
the citizen can fulfill their end of the contract,
MS gets to compete with others for the hearts and minds of the
citizenry by trying to build the best generator of that
commonly understood format. This is fair and equatable.
(I think).


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