New Hampshire Begins Open-Data Efforts

Plugh writes "The Free State Project was created to move 20,000 small-government activists to New Hampshire (here's the Slashdot story from 2002). IT people, with our ability to work anywhere, were some of the first to move. Now, with over a dozen Free Staters elected to the NH legislature, these geeks are starting to affect government data-sharing policy."

Comments

Free Staters?

[no known priors]

I remember a quote about them, something like "they confuse freedom for corporations with freedom for people". Corporations aren't people, and so the tax rate for corporations (one of the reasons to pick New Hampshire I think) should be either irrelevant, or, a place with high taxes for corporations should be better (if it translates to lower taxes for real people).

Ahem, back on topic:
I think it is wonderful that at least one government is providing information in open formats (ahem, 'nerd-friendly, "pipe-separated" files'). I can't see the connection though between the "New Hampshire Liberty Alliance" (the group that seems to promoted the change according to the article), and the Free Staters.

Indeed, The Free State website says:

We are not a political action organization. We are not tied to any political party or organization; we do not run candidates for election, we do not financially support or endorse candidates, and we do not oppose or endorse legislation. All these things will be done by local activist organizations with which many Free Staters are involved.

Re:Free Staters?

[Maxo-Texas]

Less true with each passing day.

In fact, it is possible and plausible that we'll have many billion dollar corporation with less than a dozen employees within the next 10 years.

It's called "capital intensive". Lots of machines and automated processes. A few short term jobs setting it up. Some slave wage offshore labor.

But otherwise a nearly pure pump of wealth from the mass market into the hands of a few people. Even out of that dozen, probably half of them will just make "good" salaries while almost all the benefit of the corporation is gained by a few people.

That's really the pattern now. Multi billion dollar corporations where most of the profits go to a few employees-- not even to the shareholders.

Re:Free Staters?

[superdude72]

Corporations are simply groups of individuals who freely enter into an agreement. A marriage is a corporation of sorts,...

Um, no. "Corporation" is explicitly defined in law. If you have been registered with the government as a corporation, you are a corporation. Otherwise, you're not. There is no informal sense of the word. Is your marriage a legally recognized third person that shields you and your spouse from any debts incurred by the "marriage" person? Then it is nothing like a corporation.

New Hampshire actually still has the highest business tax rate in the nation [watchdog.org], which is what's keeping it from being the wealthiest place in the world,

It's also cold, mountainous, landlocked, largely inaccessible, and a host of other things that make it not the place where people would establish a trading center or do anything requiring a lot of manpower or inexpensive access to resources.

Re:Free Staters?

[brit74]

"Corporations are simply groups of individuals who freely enter into an agreement."
What nonsense. That's like saying everyone who lives under a dictatorship approves of the leadership because they could've emmigrated elsewhere. Corporations reflect the attitudes and desires of the upper management and the stockholders. If corporations were merely an agreement between equals then there should be no such thing as unions. Unions exist to protect the 'common employee' against the upper management, which is another way of saying that they know their interests are not always aligned.

"New Hampshire actually still has the highest business tax rate in the nation [watchdog.org], which is what's keeping it from being the wealthiest place in the world"
So, what you're saying is that New Hampshire has the highest business tax in the US, and the fact that it's the 6th richest state in the US is a complete mystery to you because it "should be" the 50th richest state based on having the highest corporate tax?
* Source: http://money.cnn.com/2007/08/28/real_estate/wealthiest_states/index.htm

Re:Free Staters?

[Daniel Dvorkin]

Corporations are made up of people... just thought you might like to know.

People who, when acting under the aegis of the corporation, have certain powers and privileges which they do not have when acting as individuals. We, the people, grant these powers and privileges conditional on good behavior, and have both the right and the duty to revoke them when the people exercising them break the rules. The rights of the individuals who make up the corporations are in no way affected by this.

Short version: corporations aren't people, and it's damn well time we stopped acting as though they were.

Re:Free Staters?

[Daniel Dvorkin]

Corporations are simply groups of individuals who freely enter into an agreement.

If you truly believe that's all corporations are, you are too ignorant to have a meaningful opinion on the subject. People acting as agents of a corporation do not act solely "on the basis of their rights as individuals," and anyone who pays any attention at all is well aware of this fact. Now, if the people of New Hampshire decide to stand up for themselves and start granting corporate charters which grant only the same powers and privileges as those possessed by any married couple or "charity, club, community Web-site, etc.", I'll cheer them on ... but I'm reasonably sure that weak-minded propagandists like you won't be the ones to do it.

Re:Free Staters?

[cas2000]

corporations might be just like soylent green, but they're also a real-world artificial life that operates on algorithms that are at times profoundly indifferent to human welfare (at best) and even actively inimical to our welfare. they are not our friends, or our pets, or even our servants, they are a competing (artificial) life form. they use loopholes in our legal and financial "operating systems" to serve their own interests, not ours (and those interests include entrenching those loopholes and creating new ones to strengthen themselves).

the legal fiction of corporate personhood makes them a kind of cellular automata that treats humans as both a) just another resource to be exploited, and b) as competitors for other resources.

btw, before you (possibly deliberately) misinterpret what i'm saying: this is not intended to be some mystical nonsense about supernaturally self-aware corporations. it's just an inevitable emergent behaviour from the complex legal rules that we have constructed around corporations.

Re:Free Staters?

[Plugh]

In fact, some Free Staters are working to explicitly rule that corporations are not people:
HCR1 - establishing that human beings, not corporations, are entitled to constitutional rights

I say "some" because while all Free-Staters agree with the general goal of reducing the size and scope of government, the specifics and tactics differ widely.

Re:Free Staters?

[Seth Cohn]

Actually, I think relative to the makeup of NH, the makeup of FSP movers is roughly the same. We have plenty of 'minority' participants. In fact, compared to pretty much any Libertarian convention or gathering, we have FAR more women involved in the FSP. If you are a geek woman with libertarian tendencies, you will still have your choice of menfolk here, and yet have a large group of like-minded women to hang out and be friends with - you won't be a rare 1% (the usual mix in libertarian circles), more like 25-30% of the total.

Re:Enough with the "corporations" canard

[shutdown -p now]

Corporations are neither created nor run by robots or space aliens or zombies. They are created and run by people, with the express purpose of shielding these people from losing everything they own in event of their business failure. Corporations are merely a legal device for lowering risk of entrepreneurial activities by people.

Corporate shield suffers from the same problem as anonymity on the Net, and for the same reasons - it brings out the jerk, or worse, the sociopath in the person, as they do not suffer consequences for their decisions.

Re:Small government?

[iserlohn]

He said -

Although they won't find many first-world countries where the government isn't significantly involved in the regulating society and running public services.

You said -

Well, there's always the option of secession.

I say -
~~~Woosh~~~

Re:IT People != US Libertarian Nutters

[clang_jangle]

Even here in the US they're merely an extremely vocal minority. Unfortunately they do tend to end up in influential positions, since they are the ultimate rich wannabe/asskisser types, and we end up with a lot of righttards mouthing off and a lot of people who don't feel free to respond due to the minority of asshats who are in a position to make others miserable. It sucks big time and I can't fucking wait for the poli-fashion to swing the other way. Maybe the 8-year-olds of today will have a '60s-style party in 2020, 'cause right now it's like the new '50s.

Re:An outcome of the Free State Project?

[dkleinsc]

As someone born and raised in NH, this probably has very little to do with the Free State Project. There a bunch of other reasons NH would implement this kind of thing:
  * The Republican base in NH are generally very libertarian-leaning. That's a major reason why the Free Staters picked NH as the place to go in the first place.
  * The NH Democrats agree with the Republicans on personal liberty issues and ensuring that the citizens control the government rather than the other way around.
  * The state takes great pride in its citizen legislature, and there's very few professional politicians. To give you an idea, the Speaker of the NH house spends a lot of her time running a day care center, and another state rep works as an elevator operator. Each rep only represents about 3000 constituents. That means they really need to listen to even small groups of citizens.
  * The longtime secretary of the state of NH, Bill Gardner, is probably one of the most non-partisan public officials in the country. He has a well-deserved reputation for fairness and competence, and as a result has been kept in office despite several changes in both the legislative majority and the governor's party affiliation. He knows a good idea when he sees one, and has a lot of trust from both Republicans and Democrats, so if he supports a good common-sense proposal it's likely to get implemented.

The state has its flaws, but its state government is very responsive to good ideas.

Secession?

[Plugh]

Some Free-Staters (again, not all) actually have been working hard on the notion of State Sovereignty; see the FSP page on this topic.

Also, a new bill has been introduced this session:
HCR19 - Affirming States' powers based on the Constitution for the United States and the Constitution of New Hampshire.
There are also a few bills in play this session asserting the NH manufacturing shall not be regulated by the federal government. Longshots? Well, with over a dozen Free-Staters elected to the NH House of Representatives, maybe less long-shot than in other states....

Re:An outcome of the Free State Project?

[Plugh]

As someone who was at the meeting that created this "open government data initiative", I can tell you that it was 1 Free-Stater State Rep and one NH native State Rep that made this happen.

So you're saying law is not government?

[Kupfernigk]

Good luck with your economy when there is no civil or criminal law relating to it. You may think it is easy to draft a civil law that does not involve some kind of regulation, but the experience of the developed world over the last hundred years or so is that you are wrong. Countries with no tradition of Government-made and enforced civil law - China, Iran - are pretty much shit holes for the great majority of the population. But of course as a "libertarian" you're identifying yourself with the 1-5% whom you think worthy of having liberty.

Re:So you're saying law is not government?

[khallow]

Good luck with your economy when there is no civil or criminal law relating to it.

Because reducing the extent of government power in society can mean only one thing: complete elimination of all government presence and the dissolution of the society into anarchy. I hope you do realize there is a huge false dilemma here?

Just because the US has a regulation banning the sale of incandescent lightbulbs past the year 2014 or so, IIRC, doesn't mean that if we got rid of that regulation, then there'd be no civil or criminal law left.

Countries with no tradition of Government-made and enforced civil law - China, Iran

That's nonsense. They have a long history, going back at least two millennia each, of civil law. They are shit holes because that law is selectively enforced and government bureaucracies have the power to invent new, selectively applied law on the spot, not because they don't have it in the first place.

Re:Small government?

[sjwaste]

Yeah, let's think about this. New Hampshire secedes, having infrastructure of its own. You know what happens next? Quebec. Now you have the lovable Habitants all riled up, seceding from the rest of Canada, and occupying a not insignificant stretch of land between Ontario and New Brunswick... and a border with New Hampshire. You see where this is going, right? Quebec, full of angry French (that the actual French don't actually like)? Now, I'm not talking about their inconvenient shipping lanes. They don't care about that, so they have no use for the stretch of land from Portsmouth to Seabrook. Get your head in the game.

The GAME. Those assholes have been looking for something, anything, to bring back to Quebec City for years. And you know what? If New Hampshire secedes, the Quebecois are coming. They're marching straight down the I-93, trashing Concord, and laying over in Manchester. The airport? Nope. The Manchester Monarchs. Bingo. Is the Republic of New Hampshire prepared to defend the Monarchs franchise? I think not, and now you have the best AHL action this side of Glens Falls going up North to the Democratic People's Republic of Quebec. Now you've fucking done it.

So the Monarchs are gone, and we've been driven back into Northeast Delta Dental Stadium - if it's even called that, since a fine organization like Delta Dental might not want to do business with a brand new foreign country. After all, we'd have no credit rating. Anyway, the Monarchs are gone and our problems are just beginning. After all, the LA Kings franchise trusted us to develop and guard that team. Implicitly, we agreed that their AHL affiliate would not just up and go to Quebec. And LA has a lot of firepower, as well as the ability to overwhelm us in other ways - Anze Kopitar, Paris Hilton, gangs whose names with which I am not familiar.

So New Hampshire wants to secede, huh? Are you willing to risk Quebec becoming independent, stealing the Manchester Monarchs, and triggering war with LA over that? I thought not. The Fisher Cats just aren't that good.

Re:An outcome of the Free State Project?

[Seth Cohn]

What he said. Of course, what do I know, I'm only the guy he's talked about, and sponsor of the legislation?

The Sponsor speaks...

[Seth Cohn]

Glad to see Slashdot pick this up...

The actual bills:

Open Data: http://www.gencourt.state.nh.us/legislation/2011/HB0310.html
Open Source: http://www.gencourt.state.nh.us/legislation/2011/HB0418.html

I'd love to see this legislation copied in every state... patches are welcomed, btw. I can't grant commit access, but bug reports are always welcomed.

I'd also be glad to answer questions, if anyone has any.

Re:The Sponsor speaks...

[Seth Cohn]

Good points, I'll try and clarify those better.

Re:An outcome of the Free State Project?

[Plugh]

I was not one of the reps in question -- though one of the two (Seth) has posted on this thread.

And the NH Constitution is pretty amazing. Among other things, they hard-coded the elected legislators' salary at $200/biennium. So it would take a constitutional amendment to raise the politician's salary. Ain't gonna happen. I love it!!

Re:Scraper

[Seth Cohn]

The scraper used by the NHLA (referred to in the original article) is homebrewed for NH's website. It's actually in it's 3rd generation of code, and powers a complete bill review system, used by the pro-liberty activists to track all 800+ bills each year. See nhliberty.org

There are other scrapers out there... I just came across a site the other day that attempts to scrape and track all 50 states worth of legislation (I won't plug them though), and had a few nice features (like facebook and twitter linkage) that I recommended to the NHLA coders to clone and improve on...

The goal of getting the db dump the state of NH is now providing is to _end_ the need for scraping, and allow anyone who wishes to build a tracking system for far less time and effort and resources. With the current db dump, half of the folks on Slashdot could build a tracking system now. And the other half would then complain about them.

The goal of my open data bill is to have every single NH agency providing various data in a similar manner: it's YOUR data (if you are a NH citizen).
I'd like folks interested in Transportation issues to be able to get better DOT info... for example. The best way to improve things is more eyeballs, that's the philosophy here: if you open it, someone will build apps to use the data, and good things will happen as a result of increased exposure to the information.