We normally keep our focus on US government information, but this report on green jobs caught my eye coming through my feed reader (UN Pulse is a really good site to follow for UN-related news!). Since this issue is in the news and on the lips of our presidential candidates, I thought I'd give you the heads-up about "Green Jobs: Towards Decent Work in a Sustainable, Low-Carbon World", (press release / PDF). It was cooperatively published by the International Labour Organization (ILO) and the UN Environment Programme (UNEP), the International Trade Union Confederation (ITUC) and the International Organisation of Employers (IOE). According to the press release, the study finds that "changing patterns of employment and investment resulting from efforts to reduce climate change and its effects are already generating new jobs in many sectors and economies, and could create millions more in both developed and developing countries. However, the report also finds that the process of climate change, already underway, will continue to have negative effects on workers and their families, especially those whose livelihoods depend on agriculture and tourism." Look for it soon in OCLC.

Wow it's October already! And that can only mean one thing: Polls are open in Ohio!! Ok, I guess it means 2 things: It also means we've got a new guest blogger to introduce. So without further ado, let's welcome James Turk to the podium. James comes to us from the Sunlight Labs (full bio here), makers of such fine projects as Visualizing Earmarks, Capitol Words, Fortune 535, PoliQuiz and of course PublicMarkup.org. We're really excited to read what's on James Turk's mind. Take it away James!

We'd also like to thanks Starr Hoffman, our guest for September. Starr started a number of good conversations (see below) all while juggling classes, work at University of North Texas and myriad other things. You're a Rock Starr!!

Last week, at the Technology Review's Emerging Technologies Conference held at MIT, there was a panel on electronic voting systems in which CA Secretary of State Debra Bowen participated -- along with Moderator Jason Pontin, Editor in Chief, Technology Review; Doug Chapin, Director, electionline.org; Ronald L. Rivest, Professor of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science, MIT; and Pamela Smith, President, Verified Voting Foundation. You may remember that in 2007, Bowen ordered a complete top-to-bottom review of voting systems in CA. I'm really glad to see a top-level politician sitting on a panel of cutting edge technologists and really, really glad to hear that top-level politician advocate for Open-source software.

Now, I'm not saying the open source is the end all and be all solution to the myriad issues facing e-voting (see Bev harris' Black Box Voting for more on those issues); but it's great to see that Bowen at least gets that open source software is at least part of the solution. We've been saying that for quite some time. For a complete wrapup of the panel see Lucas Mearian's ComputerWorld blog

One method of addressing software issues associated with the vast majority of proprietary e-voting applications out there is to move to using open source, especially for applications residing on optical scanners, which have been particularly troublesom. The concern is that IT administrators can't look at the software to correct errors or tweak it for a particular county's needs. Open source would go a long ways to disclosing problems associated with today's propretary e-voting applications, Bowen said.

[Thanks /.]

You can tell we're coming down the home stretch of the 2008 presidential election as we're being bombarded with ads, and more information than we can read even if we'd aced the Evelyn Wood Speed reading course! Luckily, there are more and more sites popping up to help us sift through those info-mountains. A couple of weeks ago, we posted about some mapping tools based on publicly available polling data.

now, VoterWatch has released the 2008 Presidential Debates Project. On September 26, the night of the first Presidential debate, Dick Morris, Cynthia McKinney and many others will provide commentary and perspective surrounding the debates. Best of all, they'll use the VoterWatch media player, to comment and blog within footage of the U.S. presidential debates. So, feel free to get your analysis from the paid presidential supporters in spin alley (which John Stewart aptly renamed "deception lane!"), OR check out the analysis from across the political spectrum from the likes of Brett Winterble of Covert Radio, Green Party Presidential Candidate, Cynthia McKinney, Political Author and Commentator, Dick Morris, Political Strategist, Sophia Nelson, Public Agenda, Reason Magazine, The Bob Barr for President Team, The Heritage Foundation, and VoteGopher.

Here's a handy dandy guide for all of you out there, and especially those on college campuses. The Harvard Institute of Politics has put together the Absentee Voter Guide. This guide contains all the information college students need to vote by absentee ballot from school. You can get absentee ballot or mail-in voting applications from all U.S. states as well as absentee and mail-in voting requirements. Please pass it around!

This is one of the reasons why I love the Web. Last year, BBC's Radio 3 Sunday feature broadcast a radio story by UK journalist and fringe explorer Ken Hollings about the RAND corporation (can also be accessed here). RAND (standing for Research ANd Development), the first think tank, was once dubbed the ‘malevolent university’ and influencer of presidents.

I wouldn't have even heard this fascinating history if not for the Web as it was recently posted to BoingBoing. Wikipedia's article on RAND has an amazing list of notable RAND participants including more than 30 Nobel Prize winners. RAND has been highly influential on US foreign and public policy since WWII. I highly recommend listening to this one!

[Thanks BoingBoing!]

Last week I posted a tag cloud of Barack Obama's speech accepting the Presidential candidacy of the Democratic party. Today is John McCain's turn. I got the transcript at zimbio, the same site I used to get the Obama speech. Tag Crowd was again used to analyze the transcript. Enjoy!

Hi all. We're starting a little late this month due to the labor day holiday. Please welcome to the podium Starr Hoffman, digital librarian from the University of North Texas (more bio here). Take it away Starr!

And we really need to thank Acting Superintendent of Documents, Ric Davis for joining us last month. Ric posted quite a few interesting and thought-provoking posts (below). This was a great opportunity for Ric and the Government Printing Office to reach out to the library community, so I would strongly suggest that readers go to those posts and submit comments. Thanks again, Ric. We really appreciate your efforts!

If you're like me, you want to keep track of the presidential race between Barack Obama and John McCain. I thought I'd share a few sites that I've bookmarked in order to keep up to the minute. My favorite site is Electoral-vote.com. E-V collects national and state polls and shows a nice map of the current electoral vote count. As new state polls are released, the maps, spreadsheets, tables, graphs, etc. are updated. There's also a comparison for that day in the 2004 presidential race, roll-over stats for how each state voted since 1992, and tracking of Senate and House elections.

Another site of interest is FiveThirtyEight "electoral projections done right." This one has lots of graphs, "tipping point" states, a return on investment index and more. 538 (the # of electors in the electoral college of course :-) ) also tracks governors' races. It's run by Nate Silver, a writer and baseball statistician. You know how crazy baseball fans are for data, so you know that this site is sucking up as much data as they can, chewing it up and serving it up in lots of different ways.

Also check out RealClearPolitics. This one pulls together news, blogs, editorials, polls and electoral maps (although the mapping feature is only for presidential race).

[Thanks David Weinberger/JoHo for the RealClearPolitics tip!]

[Update: HA! StanfordLawLibrarians cross-posted a similar story almost at the same exact moment on FGI and over at LegalResearchPlus. So I deleted their post and include this link to their story as well!]

Carl Malamud is itching for a copyfight, and when he wins(!), the American public will be better informed due to better access to state, county and federal regulations, building codes, plumbing standards, criminal laws etc.

Code city is now open and the readme file is a graphic novel (view it as a Flickr slideshow here!) explaining the travesty of state and local codes being copyrighted rather than in the public domain and freely available online. Code city included full-text scans of 43 state codes -- including the entire California Title 24 Safety Codes! -- and several city codes (Little Rock, Denver, Phoenix, Wilmington, Honolulu, St Louis, Las Vegas).

The goal of the project is to get as many city, county and state safety and building codes and regulations out on the open Web in a standardized digital format (YAY open standards!!) so that others can use the documents to design Web sites with more modern search and presentation features, "social Web sites where, for instance, plumbers could provide useful annotations to building codes -- perhaps blending Wikipedia with Facebook for a more useful law site." If/when he's successful, citizens (not to mention libraries!) will no longer be forced to shell out hundreds of dollars (CA code is $1,556 for a digital copy, or $2,315 for a printed version!). And that's a very good thing!!

California's building codes, plumbing standards and criminal laws can be found online.

But if you want to download and save those laws to your computer, forget it.

The state claims copyright to those laws. It dictates how you can access and distribute them -- and therefore how much you'll have to pay for print or digital copies.

It forbids people from storing or distributing its laws without consent.

That doesn't sit well with Carl Malamud, a Sebastopol resident with an impressive track record of pushing for digital access to public information. He wants California -- and every other federal, state and local agency -- to drop their copyright claims on law, contending it will pave the way for innovators to create new ways of searching and presenting laws.

"When it comes to the law, the courts have always said there can be no copyright because people are obligated to know what it says," Malamud said. "Ignorance of the law is no excuse in court."

Malamud is spoiling for a major legal fight.

He has begun publishing copies of federal, state and county codes online -- in direct violation of claimed copyright.

--Nathan Halverson, Press Democrat, Wednesday, September 3, 2008

We've played around before with tag cloud word analysis (using a tool called Tag Crowd), so I thought I'd do a cloud for Barack Obama's convention speech on thursday night. I'll post another cloud for John McCain's speech on Thursday.

Steven Aftergood (of the Federation of American Scientists and Secrecy News) has long been working on the issue of releasing Congressional Research Service (CRS) reports out to the public. In fact, for many years, he's posted them on his site in spite of the fact that the federal government refuses to publish and distribute CRS reports to federal depository libraries and the public.

In a post a couple of weeks ago (yes I'm behind!) entitled, "CRS Reports Are Still Out of Bounds," Aftergood highlighted exactly why CRS reports are so important and why they need to be accessible (go to the story for live links to the reports mentioned):

When a military judge ruled last month that Salim Ahmed Hamdan, a former driver for Osama bin Laden, could be tried for war crimes, the first footnote in his July 14 opinion (pdf) was to a Congressional Research Service report. (Hamdan was convicted yesterday for material support of terrorism.)

But Military Judge Keith J. Allred, lacking an official source for the CRS analysis by Jennifer K. Elsea (with which he ultimately differed), provided a link instead (see footnote 1 on page 3) to a copy of the document on the Federation of American Scientists web site.

By doing so, the Judge simultaneously highlighted the centrality of such CRS analyses to public discourse and the strange fact that these official documents are still not approved for direct release to the public.

Perhaps he also implicitly affirmed that FAS and other public interest publishers of CRS collections are helping to compensate for that continuing policy defect by providing the online access to CRS reports that Congress has denied.

Way to go Steven Aftergood and Secrecy News!!

And on the shameless plug side of things, I’ve begun harvesting sites that post digital CRS reports (including FAS) and making them searchable and accessible at the Internet Archive. Please check out the site and let me know if there are other sites that I’ve missed (jrjacobs AT stanford DOT edu).

You may or may not have heard of "disaster capitalism." Well here's a case of "disaster web harvesting!" I just got an email from our friends at the Internet Archive. They're the ones that preserve the 85 billion+ web pages from 1996 to the present and make them all freely accessible in the Wayback Machine (WOW!!).

Well at 4:30 Pacific Time, they're going to set up an Archive-It collection to crawl sites regarding the crisis unfolding between Russia and Georgia. If you've got a favorite site that you've been using to track this crisis, please send urls to Molly Bragg (mbragg AT archive DOT org).

Thanks!

Last month, at ALA Annual Conference 2008, FGI volunteers participated in the GODORT preconference "Docs2.0: emerging web technologies for the government documents community". At long last, we've got the video of all the speakers up and available!! It's also available on the internet archive (slightly better quality video). You can now access all the slides, video, and notes from the preconference at the GODORT wiki.

Speakers:

• James R. Jacobs, International Documents Librarian, Stanford University. "Social tagging for building subject portals"
• Amy West, Interim Head, Government Publications Library, University of Minnesota. "Integration of 2.0 tools like Instant Messaging (IM) for reference"
• Jim A. Jacobs, Data Librarian Emeritus, University of California at San Diego. "RSS for documents librarians"
• David Oldenkamp, International Studies Librarian, Indiana University. "Custom search engines with GoogleCSE"
• John Wonderlich, Program Director, Sunlight Foundation. (keynote) Open House Project

I am SOOO bummed that I can't be in Chicago tomorrow and Tuesday, but I hope there are some Chicago area librarians who can make it to the first "non-conference" of the Independent Government Observers Taskforce (IGOTF). Carl Malamud and his posse has pulled together a group of Govt observistas to...

• Encourage technical coordination
• Encourage training and outreach efforts
• Raise visibility of efforts by citizens to increase transparency of government
• Determine the need for and arrive a plan for the creation of support services, such as scanning of archives or hosting of content.

Doesn't that just sound like something in which libraries should be involved?!?!? To top it off, I just saw the agenda for the Municipal govt group (on google groups) and the first item is:

Cataloging and standardization*

How to make available data easier to find and work with (clearinghouses, indexes, formats, etc.)

So please, Please, PLEASE get yourself over to the Gleacher Conference Center at the University of Chicago tomorrow and Tuesday (Aug 4-5). If anyone DOES go, please drop updates in the comments or send notes to admin AT freegovinfo DOT info and we'll post to FGI!

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