Joshua Ian Tauberer, Ph.D. Washington, DC Professional Experience- 2010– POPVOX co-founder and chief technology officer
- POPVOX.com is a disruptive online advocacy platform focusing on
issues before the U.S. Congress, co-founded by myself, Marci Harris, and
Rachna Choudhry. As chief technology officer, I manage the development
of our web and mobile products and the technology team, and I currently
do most of the coding.
- 2003– GovTrack.us/Civic Impulse, LLC founder/owner
- GovTrack.us is a reference and legislative tracking tool for bills
before the U.S. Congress. GovTrack spurred the word-wide open government
data movement. The website was incorporated into Civic Impulse, LLC, of
which I am the sole member, in 2009 for a short-lived pilot project
involving a small team of free-lance writers. I currently manage
occasional contractors. The website runs advertising and is
profitable.
- 2004–2010 LARSA, Inc. director of software architecture
- LARSA, Inc. develops desktop software for structural engineers,
primarily used on bridge and earthquake analysis and design. As the
director of software architecture, I lead a rewrite of the user
interface and an overhaul of the analysis backend, which included a
significant amount of algorithm design and applied linear algebra, and I
also supervised the creation of printed material and technical
documentation. I have an ongoing consulting relationship. From 2000–2004
I had a position as software developer.
- 2007 The Open House Project co-author
- This collaboration among open government advocates and professionals made a recommendation to then-Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi on how to better use technology to further Congressional transparency.
- 2006 XML.com freelance writer
- During this time I wrote three articles for XML.com on the semantic web, including a well-regarded technical introduction to the field (“What is RDF”), under the heading “Hacking Congress.”
- 2003 The Daily Princetonian features editor
- I was the last "executive editor for Page 3".
Education- 2010 Ph.D., University of Pennsylvania (Linguistics)
- My doctoral dissertation, Learning [voice], investigated the phonetics-phonology interface of the so-called voice contrast through large-scale corpus studies with a focus on infant speech. The dissertation made use of machine learning algorithms (k-means, SVMs), maximum liklihood estimation, and large-scale data analysis. Teaching assistant responsibilities included Introduction to Cognitive Science, Introduction to Linguistics, and graduate-level Introduction to Phonetics. Service included several years editing the U. Penn Working Papers in Linguistics.
- 2008 M.A., University of Pennsylvania (Linguistics)
- My masters thesis, Learning in the Face of Infidelity: Evaluating the Robust Interpretive Parsing/Constraint Demotion Model of Optimality Theory Language Acquisition, investigated the accuracy of a machine learning algorithm for language acquisition.
- 2004 A.B., Princeton University (Psychology)
- My senior thesis, Crossing Bridges in Discourse Representation, was a psycholinguistic experiment investigating presuppositions. I also earned certificates (minors) in linguistics and applications of computing.
- 2000 Plainview-Old Bethpage John F. Kennedy High School, Plainview, New York
PublicationsTechnology (government transparency, semantic web)- Inventing Open Government in ACM XRDS, Winter 2011.
- Case Study: GovTrack.us, in Open Government: Collaboration, Transparency, and Participation in Practice (2010), O'Reilly Media. Buy The Book. Download My Chapter (PDF)
- Building a Civic Semantic Web, in Nodalities, August 2009.
- Improve Databases, in The Hill, June 12, 2007.
- Legislators Should Live in a Glass House, in The American (online), Feb. 14, 2007.
- What is RDF?, on Xml.com, Jul. 26, 2006.
- Query Census Data with RDF, on Xml.com, Apr. 12, 2006.
- GovTrack.us, Public Data, and the Semantic Web, on Xml.com, Feb. 8, 2006.
Linguistics (academic publications)Invited Talks / Media Appearances- House Administration Committee Conference on Legislative Data and Transparency, February 2012: Data Impact and Understandability. [slides]
- DC Week: Politics for Programmers, November 2011: From Data to Civic Engagement. slides
- GPO FDLP DLC Conference, October 2011: A Government Data Haiku. slides
- The Kojo Nnamdi Show on WAMU, September 2011: “Congress Online: More Information, Better-informed Citizens?”
- American Association of Law Libraries Conference, July 2011: A Taxonomy of Open Government Applications. slides
- Wolfram Data Summit, September 2010: Perspectives on Open Government Data Policy. slides
- Princeton University Center for Information Technology Policy, Open Government: Defining, Designing, and Sustaining Transparency workshop, January 2010: (Some) Transparency is a Paradox. slides | video (at 14:50)
- Princeton University Center for Information Technology Policy, Studying Society in a Digital World, April 2009: Crowd Sourcing Civic Engagement with Civic Hacking. slides
- Free Culture 2008 at Berkeley, October 2008. Civic Hacking. slides | video
- IT Conversations: Jon Udell's Interviews with Innovators, July 2008.
- Princeton University Center for Information Technology Policy, Civics in the Cloud, January 2008. Open government data policy and a semantic future for civics. slides | video
Additional Presentations and Manuscripts- On Bulk Data for Legislative Information, public comment submitted to House Appropriations Subcommittee on the Legislative Branch, Feb. 6, 2012.
- Principles and a Brief Legal History of Open Government Data session at Transparency Camp, April 2011. slides
- On the proposed Open Government Directive. May 22, 2009, public comment.
- Open Data is Civic Capital: Best Practices for "Open Government Data". May 19, 2009, unpublished monograph.
- "Semantic Web II: Civic Hacking, the Semantic Web, and Visualization" talk at Transparency Camp 2009, March 1, 2009. slides | notes
- Open Government Data Standards and Expectations, session at Transparency Camp 2009, Feb. 28, 2009.
- Introduction to RDF: What is RDF and what is it good for?. January 2008, unpublished monograph. This is a more complete version of my "What is RDF?" article on Xml.com. (Translated by Oleg A. Paraschenko into Russian and by Kevin Sarmiento into Spanish.)
- The Open House Project Recommendations Report: Congressional Information & the Internet, May 8, 2007.
Press Clips (selected)- Nov. 28, 2011. techPresident: Capitol Hill's Dec. 7 Hackathon Means Government's Getting Geekier.
- May 29, 2011. The Washington Post: Popvox connects advocacy groups, public to Congress.
- Dec. 27, 2010. ReadWriteWeb: Data Hacker Pageranks Members of the US Congress.
- Sept. 28, 2009. LA Times: These crusaders bring transparency to government.
- May 11, 2009. Columbia Journalism Review: Senate goes XML.
- January 2009. The Atlantic: iGov: How geeks are opening up government on the Web.
- July 16, 2008. Princeton Alumni Weekly: Data Crusader: Josh Tauberer '04 is someone a policy wonk could love.
- July 3, 2008. ZDNet: Seven Tech ways to make America better this July 4.
- June 30, 2008. TIME: The Citizen Watchdogs of Web 2.0.
- March 1, 2006: The Washington Post: Think Your Lawmakers Don’t Read Bills? Do It Yourself.
- Jan. 27, 2005: The New York Times: How Did They Vote? Updates by E-Mail of Congressional Ayes and Nays.
- additional press hits for my work: GovTrack clips, POPVOX clips
HonorsProfessional ServiceAdditional Technology Projects- 2007– OpenGovData.org participant and site maintainer
- Formed out of a 2007 meeting of open government activists and professionals,
this site presents the Eight Principles of Open Government Data and lists
related information.
- 2005–2009 SemWeb .NET Library creator
- An open source .NET library written in C# for working with RDF data for the Semantic Web. It's used in the
Gnome application F-Spot, and possibly elsewhere.
- 2009 New Jersey Gang Survey Viewer co-creator/organizer
- This is a visualization tool for the New Jersey State Police Street Gang Survey 2007 developed by five volunteers in Philadelphia over the course of a weekend in December 2009, as part of the Great American Hackathon.
- 2009 FlyOnTime.us co-creator
- This entry for Sunlight Foundation's Apps for America contest, in
collaboration with Josh Sulkin, is a mash-up of airline on-time flight
statistics from the FAA with historical weather data from the NOAA.
Mentions: White House open gov status report,
The New York Times (3/12/11), NPR (3/14/10), The Washington Post (7/21/09), The Politico (6/24/09).
- 2007–2008 Praat-Py creator
- This is an extension to the Praat program for phonetic analysis that allows scripts to by written in Python.
- 2008 U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission Corporate Ownership RDF Data
- A semantic web RDF database of SEC data.
- 2006–2007 The Penn Lambda Calculator co-creator
- This is a linguistic semantics pedagogical tool made in conjunction with Lucas Champollion and Maribel Romero.
- 2004–2007 Sender Verification Extension for Thunderbird creator
- A Mozilla Thunderbird extension for verifying the domain name claimed in the
From: address of emails using SPF, as a tool to combat
phishing. Downloaded around 150,000 times.
- 2007 U.S. Census RDF Dataset creator
- A 1-billion triples RDF database of U.S. Census statistics, at the time
the largest open, linked, and dereferencable RDF database of real-world
information.
- 1999 Webcytology [more info] co-creator
- My first major web project (I was in high school), this was a winning entry in the 1999 ThinkQuest
competition. It featured a cellular automata simulation, inspired by Conway's
Game of Life, where users would design organisms with different biologically
inspired properties. In collaboration with Andew Kallem.
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