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  Another example of an outdated and inefficient agency is the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office, which takes three years to process a patent, he said.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.

I found this NPR story this morning very interesting. The U.S. Supreme Court hears arguments today in a case that pits an individual's right of free speech and association against USAPA. The case is being brought by the nonprofit Humanitarian Law Project. Too bad the briefs for this case aren't publicly available yet (at least not on FindLaw :-( ). This would be a slam dunk for the Humanitarian Law Project if their name was followed by "LLC."

Please check out the spring 2009 plenary at Coalition for Networked Information (CNI) by David Rosenthal, chief scientist of the LOCKSS program. He presents a "contrarian view" of digital preservation. The issues he raises are definitely important to think about for those of us working to preserve digital govt information/documents for the long term.

We posted about Carl Malamud's address to the Gov2.0 Summit in september, but BoingBoing reminded us that there is now video of his address (below). Carl's speech is quite rousing and reminds all of us what we can and should be doing to facilitate access to government information. You can also get his pamphlet online to read along with the address.

And don't forget to read Appendix A: "29 things government could do today." One thing I would add to that list is that every witness statement inserted into the official record in the course of public Congressional hearings should be considered in the public domain regardless of its original copyright status (some witnesses submit published articles, book chapters and the like as part of their written statements which means that the Google Book Project *still* treats post-1923 scanned government publications as if they were in copyright and only shows snippets instead of full-text.)

“Government as platform” means exposing the core information that makes government function, information that is of tremendous economic value to society. Government information—patents, corporate filings, agriculture research, maps, weather, medical research—is the raw material of innovation, creating a wealth of business opportunities that drive our economy forward. Government information is a form of infrastructure, no less important to our modern life than our roads, electrical grid, or water systems. (p.21)

[Thanks for the reminder BoingBoing!]

While poking around the Government Printing Office's (GPO)'s OPAL training site at http://www.opal-online.org/archivegpo.htm, I found a couple of online workshops that I think will be valuable to beginner and expert alike:

Searching for Free Government Full Text Docs Online: Where to Begin? presented in October 2009 by Holly Harper, GPO intern and MLIS student at the University of Washington.

* Streaming audio with slides

Geology Librarianship and Government Documents presented in August 2009 by Stephanie Earls, GPO intern and MLIS student at the University of Washington.

* Streaming audio with slides

They appear to run best in Internet Explorer. The recordings were made by two library school interns working with GPO's Robin Haun-Mohamed. The intention was to create programming that would be helpful to generalist librarian and new depository staff.

I think they've done well at this and created some videos that should be shared with non-librarians as well. I publicly thank Robin and the GPO staff that made these possible. You may wish to pause the videos in places to make notes of URLs.

One new thing I learned (or was reminded anew) by the "Full Text Docs" presentation was the ability to browse publications in FDSys by collection, congressional committee or by Date. Use the "last 24 hours" option to see just how much information government is pumping out these days. And that's just a fraction of what's available.

My highlighting these two OPAL presentations should not be interpreted as a slight on the other good material you can find there. Go, watch and explore.

The Edge Foundation promotes "inquiry into and discussion of intellectual, philosophical, artistic, and literary issues, as well as to work for the intellectual and social achievement of society." Here's a video of Frank Schirrmacher, German journalist, essayist and author and co-publisher of the national German newspaper Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung (FAZ). In the video below, Schirrmacher riffs on the notion of the "informavore," an organism that devours information like food. After posting Schirrmacher's thoughts, Brockman invited other bright folks to respond, including George Dyson, Steven Pinker, John Perry Barlow, Doug Rushkoff, and Nick Bilton. Enjoy!

THE AGE OF THE INFORMAVORE: A Talk With Frank Schirrmacher

FRANK SCHIRRMACHER is a an influential German journalist, essayist, best-selling author, and since 1994 co-publisher of the leading national German newspaper Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung (FAZ), where he is Editor of the Feuilleton, cultural and science pages of the paper. He is the author of the Das Methusalem-Komplott (The Methusaleh Conspiracy), a book, published in 14 languages selling more than one million copies in Germany, on that country's aging society; and Payback: Warum wir im Informationszeitalter gezwungen sind zu tun, was wir nicht tun wollen, und wie wir die Kontrolle über unser Denken zurückgewinnen (Payback: Why in the Information Age we are forced to do what we do not want to do and how we can recover control over our thinking, November, Karl Blessing Verlag).

[Thanks BoingBoing!]

In case you missed last week's lunchtime listen of Carl Malamud at the gov2.0 summit, the video's now been put online. Check it out. I defy anyone to say he wouldn't make a great public printer!

Carl Malamud (from public.resource.org) gave what was generally agreed was a rousing talk at Gov2.0 Summit this morning. The talk was entitled "By the people..." Please go to his site to access the pamphlet he created (and order it for your library!) and a live pre-recording of the address. I promise it'll be worth it!

I just read Tim Berners-Lee's notes on putting government data online. I must say, when TBL describes it, it sounds like a piece of cake :-) The key seems to be the use of linked data. It's a snap; let's do it! RAW DATA NOW!!

Footnote: Do's and Don'ts

* Do pick URIs which are likely to be persistent
* Do put RDF metadata giving the license.
* Do use the RDF and SPARQL standards
* Make sure your human readable pages are accessible.

* Do NOT hide data files inside zip files unless they are also available directly.
* Do NOT put data up in proprietary formats.
* Do NOT wait until you have a complete schema or ontology to publish data.
* Do NOT seek to replace existing data systems.

Of all the things I have read about the Google book digitization project and its consequences, this is one of the best. Listen to the interview (Lunchtime Listen!) or read the transcript.

• Google Faces Antitrust Investigation for Agreement to Digitize Millions of Books Online, interview with Brewster Kahle, Democracy Now!, April 30, 2009.

This is relevant to government documents since so many are in the project. The way they are treated and controlled by Google and Google's contracts and licenses and agreements will have lasting impact on long-term, free, public access.

Kahle highlights two things that, for me, are very important. First, at least some of the participating libraries are relying solely on Google and its restrictions and are not even getting digital copies from Google although they could.

BREWSTER KAHLE: Let's take the out of copyright, the stuff that's really--it's public domain, meaning belongs to the public. It's lived long enough to become part of the public sphere. But there are perpetual restrictions that the libraries must perform, that if they get these digital copies back, they must put up restrictions on use, such that they cannot be accessible by the general public.

AMY GOODMAN: Who can they be accessed by?

BREWSTER KAHLE: People on campus can use them, for the out-of-copyright works, but just on campus. And otherwise, they have to put up restrictions. And what's turning out is a lot of these libraries aren't even bothering to get copies back, because what can they use them for? I mean, in the future, people are going to want to have access to as many books as possible. And what Google is doing is pulling these together for many libraries to build a great collection. Terrific. But the bits and pieces that are going back to these libraries don't make up a great collection. And what they can do with them is very, very limited. So these libraries aren't, in many cases, even bothering to get the digital copies back.

Second, when Kahle asked if Google would share copies of digitized books with the Internet Archive, Google refused.

AMY GOODMAN: Conceivably, Google could give you the digitized copies, is that right?

BREWSTER KAHLE: Yes, Google could, but they have refused.

AMY GOODMAN: Why?

BREWSTER KAHLE: They say that they've paid for the work. They want to be the place that people go to get them. So they are going to be the proprietors of the public domain.

Although Google claims its mission is "to organize the world's information and make it universally accessible and useful," it would be more accurate to say its mission is to make money controlling the world's information.

NPR.org has a brief article and audiocast entitled "21st Century Crowbars Help Pry Open Government" by Andrea Seabrook. It is the second of a two-part series, of which the first part is entitled "Follow the Money: Web Site Tracks Stimulus Dollars".

Both stories highlight several "watchdog" websites such as OpenCongress.org, OpenSecrets.org, Filibusted.us, and Legistalker.org. Filibusted.us recently won the "Apps for America" contest hosted by the Sunlight Foundation.

Clay Johnson, described by NPR as a 21st century government watchdog, of Sunlight Labs states:

We live in a society now where if it's not on the Internet, it doesn't exist. The more transparent we make government, the more people can participate in it. And when people participate in it, they're no longer apathetic about it. So transparency kills apathy.

This is actually about a month of lunchtime listens / views! Last fall, there was a Free Culture Conference held at UC Berkeley. Now the entire slate of panelists can be seen on blip.tv. Speakers included a who's who of internet law and free culture activists -- Laurence Lessig, Pam Samuelson (who just wrote a paper on excessive copyright infringement awards!), our buddy Josh Trauberer of GovTrack.us, EFF's Jason Schultz and many more!

Here is a short, informative interview from NPR. You can listen online or download. It is only about 6 minutes long -- more of a coffee-break listen!

One Click Disclosure, On the Media, (January 16, 2009).

"Government spending data has long been publicly available but it's never been easier to find and interpret. That's thanks to USAspending.gov, a site created by the Federal Funding Accountability and Transparency Act of 2006 which was sponsored by Tom Coburn and Barack Obama. The Sunlight Foundation's Greg Elin explains what makes the site so revolutionary. "

Thanks to Amy West's tweet for the heads-up about this video, "Tech Agenda 2009: Open Government." John Wonderlich turns a nice phrase (@ 3:10) in response to the question about defining what is open government. John says, "the Federal Depository Library Program is like the internet of the '40s and '50s." Check this one out while nibbling on your cheese (yes that's for you Rebecca :-) ).

This is the second in a series of town halls, "Tech Agenda 2009: Creating New Opportunities for Open & Participatory Government" focused on how technology can help government become more accountable, transparent and participatory. Panelists for Panel II, "Changing Policy to Promote Open Government," include Chris Barkley, Meredith Fuchs, Karina Newton, and John Wonderlich. The discussion was moderated by Andrew McLaughlin of Google. This event took place on December 12, 2008 at Google's offices in Washington, D.C.

You will just have to trust me on this one. Listen and enjoy. It is okay to think about the implications of ants, and bees on Depository Libraries and long-term preservation.... Let me know what you think.

• Emergence, RadioLab, WNYC, July 15, 2008. (Streaming audio and downloadable MP3 available.)