Around 1973, I spent a summer working as an intern at my local Social Security Office. The thing you learn quickly about the government is you can’t get anything done without the right form.
Among my tasks were to update all the manuals which showed all the current forms and how to fill them out, and to set up the filing system in the lunch room where we needed to have every possible form we might ever need (most of them multipart with carbon paper) in numerical order, and with the correct revision number – not just the SSA forms, but the forms of the other government agencies that were contacted – the Census Department to do record searchs, the Black Lung disability fund, Brown lung disease reports, the Railroad Retirement Board, etc….
Pretty much every day, the Post Office would deliver us updates for the form manuals, and new supplies of the forms where someone wanted to add a new item on an existing form.
The character of Radar O’Reilly on M*A*S*H is all too real – the military has the disease even worse than the civilians. All people will be known by their first two initials, and all documents will be written with numbered, indented paragraphs (GM’s internal documents used the military style)
The FCC application database is now being updated on my server each morning around 5:30. It’s somewhat incomplete, but it lets you easily spot all the new applications, and you can filter by type.
http://streamingradioguide.com/recent-apps.php
So for those you FCC application monitoring geeks, there you go.
I’ve now added the Application status to the display. The “Accepted” date is the day the fee was paid for the application, not the date the application was received and its identifier was assigned, so application IDs are not in sequence
Looking at this data, it is a good case study for just how much database design has improved in the last 40 years – and how the FCC is bogged down in their Legacy.
Every Application record has associated with it an “application indicators records”, most of which have nothing to do with application it is connected to (items that only apply to TV, information related to Construction Permits (most apps have nothing to do with a Construction Permit)….
It’s not a criticism of the people working at the FCC – that’s what a legacy is. To revamp the database to make it conform to today’s ideas would be a huge task – and what limited resources the FCC has are surely working on more important things like enforcing EEOC laws.