The Federal Communications Commission announced last week two new consumer tools on its broadband.gov website, The Consumer Broadband Test, which measures broadband quality indicators such as speed and latency, and The Broadband Dead Zone Report, which enables Americans to submit the street address location of a broadband “Dead Zone” where broadband is unavailable for purchase. Both test

• FCC Launches Broadband Consumer Tools (press release) March 11, 2010 (PDF).
• Broadband Test. Also available as the FCC’s first mobile app at the Apple and Android app stores.
• Dead Zone Report.

See also:
The Digital Divide: Speed Matters

40 percent in US lack home broadband

Gov 2.0 International: Global Innovation Meeting Local Challenges, "The O'Reilly Gov 2.0 Online Conference." Thursday, March 11th. Cost: Free.
9:00am - 11:15am US-PST
12:00pm - 2:15pm US-EST

Gov 2.0 is a worldwide revolution—from the United States to Australia and everywhere in between. Members of government are interacting with citizens via social media and open data efforts are spreading from city to city. At this Gov 2.0 Online Conference, you'll hear about open government efforts in Canada, the United Kingdom, and Israel. The speakers will share stories and lessons learned, and answer your questions. Learn about some of the Gov 2.0 best practices that have helped effect important change in other countries, and discuss effective ways to use specific tools and processes in other settings.

Vivek Kundra, Federal Chief Information Officer of the United States, spoke at the University of Washington's Evans School of Public Affairs in Seattle last week and outlined some of the current problems of government Information Technology and some of the approaches he is taking to address those problems.

• Federal Chief Information Officer Vivek Kundra speaks about Government 2.0. [streaming video] ustream.tv [about 30 minutes, plus 30+ minutes of questions and answers]

See also:

• Federal CIO Describes Problems, Changes in IT, by Nancy Gohring, IDG News Service (Mar 4, 2010).

  It takes the Veteran's Administration 160 days to process benefits for veterans, he said. "That's because the Veteran's Administration is processing paperwork by passing manila folders from one desk to another"

  Another example of an outdated and inefficient agency is the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office, which takes three years to process a patent, he said. "One reason is because the U.S. PTO receives these applications online, prints them out, and then someone manually rekeys the information into an antiquated system," he said.

• Federal Chief Information Officer Vivek Kundra - Making Government Work: Closing the IT Gap to Deliver for the American People [Event Announcement] University of Washington's Evans School of Public Affairs in Seattle, March 4, 2010.

In response to the Open Government Directive, the National Archives and Records Administration (NARA) has created a web page devoted to its Open Government Initiatives (http://www.archives.gov/open/). Currently, it lists four NARA datasets: CFR, Federal Register, Archival Descriptions from ARC, and Organizational Descriptions from ARC. These listings conform to the Open Government Directive call for agencies to create a gateway at the specific web address at http://www.[agency].gov/open.

But, in addition, NARA has created "a records control schedule website that allows the public and Federal agencies to browse scanned copies of unclassified, NARA-approved records control schedules." (http://www.archives.gov/records-mgmt/rcs/). The only "announcement" of this new service so far has apparently been a response to a question on the NARAtions blog. Kate has more details and background at ArchivesNext. (Big hat tip!).

A snapshot of income disparity. Opinion, by Tim Rutten, Los Angeles Times (February 24, 2010).

[I]n 1992, the Clinton administration asked the Internal Revenue Service to begin tracking the incomes and tax payments of the country's 400 richest households. During the George W. Bush years, the IRS continued to collect the data, but -- you'll be shocked to know -- didn't release it to the public.

But the data are now available:

• The 400 Individual Income Tax Returns Reporting the Highest Adjusted Gross Incomes Each Year, 1992-2007, Internal Revenue Service, Statistics of Income Division. December 15, 2009.

Rutten notes that the IRS figures show that in just one year (2006-2007) "the average income of the country's 400 top taxpayers rose 31%." He continues:

That's all of a piece with trends documented by economists Emmanuel Saez and Thomas Piketty, whose research into global income patterns shows that between 1992 and 2007, America's 400 richest households increased their average income by 399%, while the bottom 90% of the country's households gained just 13%. (Those percentages, by the way, reflect inflation-adjusted dollars.)

The U.S. National Archives and Records Administration (NARA) has a new document that addresses agencies using "cloud computing":

• Frequently Asked Questions About Managing Federal Records In Cloud Computing Environments.

  The purpose of this FAQ is to provide agency records officers with a basic overview of cloud computing, its benefits and concerns, and records management implications that agencies will need to consider when implementing cloud computing services.

Addressing records management implications associated with cloud computing, NARA notes that, "Various cloud architectures lack formal technical standards governing how data is stored and manipulated in cloud environments. This threatens the long-term trustworthiness and sustainability of the data."

See also: NARA Addresses Cloud Record Keeping, By Elizabeth Montalbano, InformationWeek (February 22, 2010).

The New York Times announced today the release of version 3 of its "Congress API."

• Introducing Version 3 of the Congress API, By DEREK WILLIS, New York Times Open Blog (February 23, 2010).

The Times gets raw data directly from the U.S. House and Senate Web sites and Thomas, the Library of Congress public web site with legislative information. It parses and stores the data on its own servers and provides an API (Applications Programming Interface) to the data so that programmers can query the data, get results, and easily provide the data to users in interesting and unique ways.

This is an excellent example of treating government information as "data" rather than as "documents." Rather than having a PDF file that lists all members of Congress (a document-centric way to deal with information), a database of all members of Congress with an API front-end to the database (which treats information as data) allows developers to build software that allows users to get a list for a state or district. When combined with other information such as voting records, bill-sponsorship, party affiliation, and so forth, users can get the information they need assembled in response to a specific information request. To the user the end result looks like a "document" but the document is built dynamically from the data.

Developers at the NY Times and elsewhere are using this to create interesting web sites and applications. See, for example, Your Government - The Oregonian, and Congress Speaks, and the Times' own Represent, which combines Federal and State information to allow users to find elected representatives in New York City.

"The Federal Communications Commission released its National Broadband Plan Consumer Survey, Broadband Adoption and Use in America, which found that affordability and lack of digital skills are the main reasons why 93 million Americans -- one-third of the country -- are not connected to high-speed Internet at home." (from the February 23, 2010 press release 93 MILLION AMERICANS DISCONNECTED FROM BROADBAND OPPORTUNITIES):

• Broadband Adoption and Use in America, OBI Working Paper Series no. 1, By John B. Horrigan, Federal Communications Commission, 2010. (52 pages. PDF)

  The FCC conducted a survey of 5,005 Americans in October and November 2009 in an effort to understand the state of broadband adoption and use, as well as barriers facing those who do not have broadband at home....

  The main dividing lines for access are along socioeconomic dimensions such as income and education....

  There are three primary reasons why the 35 percent of non-adopting americans do not have broadband: cost, lack of digital literacy and broadband is not sufficiently relevant for them to purchase it...

See also: FCC Survey Shows Need to Teach Broadband Basics, By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS, New York Times (February 23, 2010).

There's an App for That, by Emily Long, Tech Insider (02/19/10).

MultiEducator Inc., a multimedia software developer, earlier this month released American Dreams, [$2.99] an iPhone/iPod application that compiles historical documents, speeches and Supreme Court decisions. The program [has] text versions of 480 speeches (including every inaugural address), 90 Supreme Court rulings and 18 audio recordings, which will expand as events occur and other historical documents are deemed worthy of inclusion.

...A quick search of the iTunes app store revealed [another app] U.S. Historical Documents [By Standard Works LLC, $.99, with "over 200 of the most influential documents in U.S. history"], which lets users search, bookmark and create inline notes. Other related apps compile information on members of Congress, presidents and famous speeches.

The Environmental Protection Agency's Rulemaking Gateway, which "provides information to the public on the status of EPA's priority rulemakings" could be a model for tracking rulemaking, according to an article in NextGov:

• EPA Web site paving the way to transparency, by Aliya Sternstein, NextGov (02/19/2010).

  EPA has committed to releasing rulemaking plans earlier than in the past. As soon as an agency regulatory policy officer determines it is appropriate to start developing a rule, information will be posted on the gateway, officials said. A regulation could appear on the site months or even years before a file is created on the governmentwide rule-tracking site Regulations.gov.

It has user-friendly searches and is closely tied to Regulations.gov.

Next Generation Connectivity: A review of broadband Internet transitions and policy from around the world, The Berkman Center for Internet & Society at Harvard University. (February 2010).

On July 14, 2009, the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) announced that the Berkman Center for Internet & Society at Harvard University would conduct an independent expert review of existing literature and studies about broadband deployment and usage throughout the world and that this project would help inform the FCC's efforts in developing the National Broadband Plan. The Berkman Center's Final Report was submitted to the FCC on February 16, 2010.

...
Our most prominent initial findings, confirmed and extended in this final draft, were that U.S. broadband performance in the past decade has declined relative to other countries and is no better than middling. Our study expanded the well known observation with regard to penetration per 100 inhabitants, and examined and found the same to be true of penetration per household; subscriptions for mobile broadband; availability of nomadic access; as well as advertised speeds and actually measured speeds; and pricing at most tiers of service.

The Center has made the full datasets behind their research available for download.

Digital Rights Management (DRM) techniques are bad enough when applied to digital content, but this article notes that when there is not even a standard for DRM, the difficulties and problems that DRM creates are multiplied:

• E-books need a common language, By Troy Wolverton, San Jose Mercury News, (02/14/2010)

  I never need to worry about whether I can read a book. As long as a book's a book, that is — printed on paper, in English. I know I can pick it up and read it no matter how long it sits on my shelf after I bought it. But as we move into the era of e-books, that assumption no longer holds.

There is more on Apple's decision to impose DRM on ebooks, after dropping DRM from music, here:

• Digital handcuffs for Apple ebooks?, by Carolyn Kellogg, Los Angeles Times "Jacket Copy" blog. (February 16, 2010)

  Apple's old digital rights management software (DRM), FairPlay, is slated to make a comeback with the e-books it will be selling on its iBook Store. While music users have been free of these "digital handcuffs" for the last year, Alex Pham reports that readers will not be.

The new report from the National Telecommunications And Information Administration (NTIA) on broadband availability in the U.S. is now available. The most dramatic finding is that approximately 40 percent of all persons in the U.S. have no broadband access at home.

• DIGITAL NATION: 21st Century America’s Progress Towards Universal Broadband Internet Access "An NTIA Research Preview" (February 2010). (PDF, 1.3 MB)

The good news is that "broadband Internet connectivity by households has grown dramatically" with 63.5 percent of U.S. households (not persons) having acces to broadband service at home -- a 25 percent increase from two years ago.

We have to temper even this good news, however, when we realize that the definition of "broadband" is both vague and slow. The survey only asks respondents to differentiate between "A regular ‘dial-up’ connection" (not broadband) and everything else ("DSL, cable modem, fiber optics, satellite, wireless (such as Wi-Fi), mobile phone or PDA, or some other broadband"). (See: Survey Instrument, October 2009 CPS Internet Use Supplement.)

A separate survey by SpeedMatters.org (2009 Report on Internet Speeds in All 50 States) reports that the average download speed for the nation was 5.1 megabits per second (mbps) and the average upload speed was 1.1 mbps and that the United States ranks 28th in the world in average Internet connection speeds.

The NTIA report also notes that, while "virtually all demographic groups have increased their adoption of broadband services at home over time," there are still "demographic disparities" of internet broadband access that have persisted over time.

Like previous NTIA reports, this one is based on data collected in the Census Bureau's in the Current Population Survey. This time the survey used was conducted in October 2009 an had a sample size of approximately 54,000 households and 129,000 citizens. The last report was two years ago, Networked Nation: Broadband In America 2007. (See: NTIA says we are "reaping the rewards" of government's broadband policy.)

An Associated Press story on the NTIA report (New data: 40 percent in US lack home broadband, By Joelle Tessler, Seattle Post Intelligencer, February 16, 2010) quotes FCC Chairman Julius Genachowski saying that "he wants 100 million U.S. households to have access to ultra high-speed Internet connections, with speeds of 100 megabits per second, by 2020. That would be several times faster than the download speeds many U.S. homes with broadband get now - 3 megabits to 20 megabits per second."

See also: Survey: 40 percent in U.S. have no broadband, by Lance Whitney, CNet (February 16, 2010).

The Economic Report of the President is available from the White House web site in 3 formats: PDF, Kindle, and the open ePub format which Barnes & Noble's Nook, Sony's Reader, and other ebook-reader-software can use. The epub format, being an open, non-proprietary standard is, potentially, much easier to preserve for the long-term than proprietary formats like Kindle and PDF.

I looked at the Kindle version, the ePub version using the Stanza application on a Macintosh laptop and on an iPhone, and the PDF version on my laptop. The PDF looks the way the printed book looks with accurate page formatting and layout. The ePub and Kindle formatting is not perfect, but is readable. Table of Contents links did not work at all in Stanza, but did on the Kindle -- including links to individual statistical tables in the appendix. The PDF version has a navigation sidebar for the chapters, but not for the statistical tables within the appendix.

Statistical tables are complete and accurately formatted in the epub and Kindle versions. They are tiny on the iPhone, but re-sizable, so the tables are readable. I doubt many people will want to read those tables on their phones, however. On the Kindle, the statistical tables are not resizable and I found them very hard to read, even when I rotated them to "landscape" orientation. The tables did not appear at all in the Stanza app on the Macintosh.

This is a welcome first step for making digital government information more widely available. The digital publishing community needs to do more work on the open ePub format to handle formatting and links better and the hardware and software manufacturers need to work toward better usability. After working recently to produce a book in Kindle, epub, and PDF formats, I know that publishers (including whoever formatted these for ebook readers [GPO?]) can do a better job even now with what they have. But, this is a good first step.

See also: White House embraces e-book readers, By Nate Anderson, ars technica (February 15, 2010).

White House Makes Full Copyright Claim on Photos, by Kathy Gill The Moderate Voice (Feb 6th, 2010).

The U.S. government policy on photographs and copyright is pretty straightfoward: photos produced by federal employees as part of their job responsibilities are "not subject to copyright in the United States and there are no U.S. copyright restrictions on reproduction, derivative works, distribution, performance, or display of the work."

Why, then, is the Obama White House asserting that no one but "news organizations" can use its Flickr photos? Why is it asserting that manipulation is prohibited? Why is it asserting that photos may not be used in "commercial or political materials, advertisements, emails, products, promotions that in any way suggests approval or endorsement of the President, the First Family, or the White House"?

http://www.flickr.com/photos/whitehouse/4331402906/