May 10, 2003

First Political Foray

As it happened, right after I wrote the initial manifesto, I went down to Olympia, the capital of Washington, on Wednesday, January 30, 2002, to spend a day with the state PTSA lobbyist. I broached the idea of open data format legislation to my (at the time) two state representatives and one state senator. Note that all three are current or former Microsoft employees and the district they represent borders the one Microsoft's main campus is in and includes many Microsoft employees (in fact, shortly after that, I was redistricted out of their district, into the one that includes Microsoft's main campus). The responses were: From the Democratic representative: "interesting idea." From the Republican-but-secretly-Libertarian representative: "I don't think it should be a law, but I would need to think about it." From the Republican senator: "I would have a hard time voting for something like that."

Posted by Adam Barr at May 10, 2003 10:51 PM
Comments