As of this writing, 17 of you have responded to our poll and we thank you. If you haven't taken the poll, please take a moment to do so. It'd be nice to have at least all 148 current Bloglines subscribers to take the poll. On behalf of FGI I assure you that no personally identifying information is being collected.

Why do we care? Because we believe that finding out more about our current audience will help us to carry out our original vision of:

to raise public awareness of the importance of government information and create a community with various stakeholders to facilitate an open and critical dialogue.

We believe that it is important to garner support for government information not just within our own community of federal depository libraries but with those organizations and citizens that actually need to know about the activities of our government in order to participate fully in the democratic process. This includes non-profit organizations, government watchdogs, academics and researchers, journalists, the business community, and individual citizens. By creating this nexus, we hope to facilitate collaboration among the various stakeholders and participate in the design of a truly robust system for the digital age where government information is freely accessible, fully functional and usable, and preserved in a distributed system of libraries.

We are living in a critical time for government information access. To succeed in creating "a truly robust system for the digital age where government information is freely accessible, fully functional and usable, and preserved in a distributed system of libraries," we need to reach out beyond librarians.

If it turns out our audience does include a significant number of non-library people, we need to brainstorm ways to collaborate. If we are truly writing for an audience that is 90% library staff, then we need to find ways to break out of the choir loft. Help us chart our course by giving us a clearer picture of our current audience!

And of course, please tell more people about FGI, especially if they fit into any of the groups mentioned above!

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"And besides all that, what we need is a decentralized, distributed system of depositing electronic files to local libraries willing to host them." -- Daniel Cornwall, tipping his hat to Cato the Elder for the original quote.