How the White House found a publishing ally in Medium
In its totality, Medium predicts it will take you all of 3 hours and 51 minutes to read the whole budget. But it was published in a distributed manner for a reason: the White House wants it to be sliced and diced in whatever manner its readers see fit. To that end, it released all of the data in budget on GitHub, a website for hosting open-source projects, where users are invited to “create their own visualizations or products from the data.” All that data is in the public domain.
While it’s interesting how the US government utilizes new technology, there’s something within me thinking that they give an unfair advantage to some startups by endorsing them. I don’t see any harm in government using Facebook, Twitter, Github (read: established online platforms), but instinctively I’m thinking that the US government doing Medium (read: a startup) a huge favor by endorsing them. Question then is: when does a startup turn into an established platform? What metric does one use to decide that?