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I’m heading to the FCC next week for a developer event.

On Monday, November 8, 2010, the Federal Communications Commission will sponsor an Open Developer Day event at FCC Headquarters in Washington, DC, to promote collaboration between Web developers in the public and private sectors, in furtherance of FCC goals to further innovation in accessible technologies and foster citizen participation in open government.

This will be a public, single-day event that prioritizes accessibility goals, though other Web solutions are also of interest. The event will feature guest engineers from the Yahoo! Developer Network and Yahoo!’s Accessibility team, and will have a component addressing the requirements and opportunities in the new Twenty-First Century Communications and Video Accessibility Act.

FCC Hosts Open Developer Day: Accessibility Innovation – Yahoo! Accessibility Lab

I’ve been playing with government data to make it ready for quick mashups. I threw a challenge to some other developers for creating a quick map mashup with a series of map points generated by a spreadsheet on Data.Gov. This is what Anthony Ettinger put together with Yahoo! Pipes:

It’s great to see how you can grab a spreadsheet from the government’s repository, convert it to CSV format, upload it to your server, and quickly parse that data for mashups. It would be easier if data.gov had the file in csv format instead of xls or zip. I could have saved the first few steps.

Related articles

• FCC Hosts Open Developer Day: Accessibility Innovation (developer.yahoo.com)
• Baker Awarded FCC National Broadband Map Data Assessment Contract (eon.businesswire.com)
• FCC Fines Verizon a Record-Breaking $25 Million for Screwing Customers [Fcc] (gizmodo.com)
• The man behind the National Broadband Plan (Q&A) (news.cnet.com)
• Calling all developers! FCC releases APIs for key databases (arstechnica.com)

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Especially when it means putting me on a video. I just ordered insiderarts.com, so take that you domain squatters! Now I just need to build it :)

Check out my site when you need some new food ideas: InsiderFood.com

I’m in the Bucharest airport waiting for my flight to Paris. It’s been a busy three days and I’m looking forward to a lazy Sunday.

Bucharest is a city of dichotomies

In many ways, the country is very young; they got a fresh start in the 1989 revolution. But it is also a very old city and you see the taces of history every where you look. Within a few blocks you can see centuries old churches, 19th century grandeur, post WW1 boom, the communist blocks, the inflated classicism of Nicolae Ceauşescu’s projects, and flashy contemporary casinos.

It’s a relatively poor country where the people still live well. It’s also a very rich country with the same love of status objects as any other quickly developing economy. Food is cheap, good, and simple. Hotels are relatively expensive. The national art museum was a bit pricey, but the one down the street was super cheap.

Bucharest is also a city I feel like I’ve visited before. I just can’t place it. There are parts that remind me of Vienna, Seattle, Tijuana, Los Angeles, and dozens of other cities.

The humongous palace has to be the symbol of the city. This is the second largest building in the world and it is imposing. It sits on a mount to increase the perception of power. Surrounding it are other elephantine, yet classic buildings.

Ceauşescu was the leader for 24 years and transformed the country. It reminds me of what would happen if Donald Trump became a dictator of a country. Huge projects were created for the sake of having the feature. Some of these projects sit unfinished and empty 20 years after his death. Others, such as the metro system, are widely used today.

Beyond the surface of the city and its buildings, I found a river of optimism. It’s still a “new” country and opportunities abound for the motivated and energized. This brings me to why I was in Romania.

Bobby Voicu, the most famous Romanian blogger (TM), is the community outreach person for Yahoo! Romania. He invited me to speak to a group of university students about the Yahoo! BOSS search API. This is a tool that Yahoo! provides for people to quickly and easily build their own search engine and more. This group of students are meeting regularly to build web sites and applications with Boss, Adobe Flex, and lots of elbow grease.

They reminded me of my days as a photo student at Palomar College. There was a small group of us that met regularly in and out of class. We challenged, encouraged, assisted, and fought with each other. It was an incredibly productive period. I’m looking forward to seeing the products coming from this group.