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.)

Library Perspective. Interview with Emily Sheketoff, Executive Director of the Washington Office of the American Library Association, CSPAN, 11/06/2008. [30 minutes, Flash Video].

Sheketoff discusses federal copyright, privacy, and piracy policy and how those issues could be effected by President-Elect Barack Obama’s administration. Paul Sweeting, editor of Content Agenda was the guest host.

In September, I had the good fortune to attend a most interesting panel discussion held at UC Berkeley's Free Movement Speech Cafe (which just so happens to be in the UCB's Moffitt Library!) called Archives of Dissent. The panel was part of a week-long series of Bay Area events called The Great Rehearsal commemorating the 40th anniversary of the uprisings and worldwide upheavals of 1968, their impacts and legacies. Archives of Dissent brought together librarians, curators, oral historians, conservators, publishers, academics, and others working to prevent the loss and erasure of radical voices, events and movements of both the past and the present.

The panel included:

• Lincoln Cushing (19:35), independent librarian and Docs Populi archivist. The first 10 minutes of the presentation are images from Lincoln's collection of radical posters.
• Julie Herrada (28:20), Labadie Collection Librarian, University of Michigan, curator of a “1968? special exhibit, and good radical reference buddy. The Labadie Collection is an internationally renowned archive of social protest materials.
• Kalim Smith (41:25), UC Berkeley doctoral student in anthropology and folklore, researching the preservation of Native American languages threatened with extinction.
• Megan Shaw Prelinger & Rick Prelinger (50:08), Co-founders of the appropriation-friendly Prelinger Library in San Francisco

What does this have to do with government information you say? in many aspects, govt documents collections fall within the context of cultural archives, govt documents librarians by and large have the same radical political passion about govt information as professional and lay archivists, and the myriad issues and opportunities of digitization and the transformation of physical collections discussed in terms of archives parallel (and in many respects are predated by) those same opportunities and issues of govt information collections.

What were the main themes of the panel? (I'm in full Rumsfeld mode :-) ). All of the speakers had great things to say about needing willpower to build collections -- especially those of social movements that aren't necessarily well-funded -- building archives that are situated within and expound on cultural contexts, the importance of preservation, the politicization of access, DIY archivism, information ecologies, archives as battlegrounds, etc.

The most challenging for me (and therefore the most interesting) was Kalim Smith's talk. Kalim is an Anthropology PhD student at UCB. He talked passionately about extinction, loss and erasure of native languages. He surmised that the efforts to revitalize/preserve native languages might have the effect of re-colonizing them; that writing down, or archiving those languages, takes them out of the very context in which they grew and thrived. To think about this in terms of archives and libraries, the very act of preservation outside of context in which the materials were created, is potentially damaging. That's certainly a thought bomb that has reverberated in my mind.

Please take some time to watch this panel of most engaging folks. You'll be glad you did!

This is a presentation by Stephen Schultze, a fellow at the Berkman Center for Internet & Society at Harvard on the topic "Open Access to Government Documents." He focuses on CRS reports, Oregon State Codes, and PACER (Public Access to Court Electronic Records). The presentation is available as streaming video, downloadable video, and as a downloadable audio-only MP3 file.

• Open Access to Government Documents, Berkman Center. October 13, 2008.

In the past twenty years, a remarkable number of government documents have been put online. In some cases, these documents are made easily and freely accessible. In others, technology has failed to overcome barriers or even created new barriers to access. One particular subset of documents -- opinions, dockets, and the full public record in federal court cases -- remain behind a pay wall. Although the U.S. Government cannot hold copyright in documents it creates, it has for a long time long charged for the cost of creating and maintaining these documents. While the courts understandably seek to pay for the services they provide, this talk will argue that there is an alternative path in which the public benefits far outweigh the costs. Stephen Schultze makes a dynamic case for free access to government documents, in honor of Open Access Day 2008.

Produced 13 Oct 2008

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!]

In this interview, Jon Udell talks with Director and Associate Director of the Center for Information Technology Policy about the future of government information distribution and the paper Government Data and the Invisible Hand (Robinson, David, Harlan Yu, William P. Zeller, and Edward W. Felten. SSRN, May 28, 2008). The paper proposes that the government should reduce its role in presenting important government information to citizens and should provide reusable data, rather than providing websites, as the core of its online publishing responsibility.

• Ed Felten & David Robinson of the Center for Information Technology Policy, Princeton University, Jon Udell's Interviews with Innovators, 46 minutes, 21.1mb, recorded 2008-09-02

The Center for Information Technology Policy is sponsored by the School of Engineering and Applied Science, and the Woodrow Wilson School of Public and International Affairs at Princeton. It promotes an informed public discussion of digital technologies. addresses digital technologies as they interact with policy, markets and society.

Jon describes the conversation on his blog: A conversation with the founders of Princeton’s Center for Information Techology Policy.

Also see:
Freedom to Tinker
Center for Information Technology Policy
Ed Felten
David Robinson
Jon Udell and his blog
XRBL ("a language for the electronic communication of business and financial data")

Here is a super way to spend your next free lunch hour: watch and listen to Lawrence Lessig give one of his fantastic presentations:

• Changing Congress: Lessons Learned by a Copyright Activist, Lawrence Lessig. 4/2/2008, UCSB. [streaming video, about 1 hour].

He talks about history, politics, technology, copyright, and much more.

When Lessig found that he could not get reasonable changes to copyright law (even the late, eminent economist Milton Friedman said that the importance of stopping excessive copyright extensions was a "no brainer"), he realized there were bigger problems to confront. If Congress can't make the right decision when the problems are easy, how will it make the right decisions when the problems are difficult?

Lessig's new organization is Change-Congress. It is attempting to build tools that will help citizens ("in our pajamas," as Lessig says) create basic reforms in how our government functions. The Change-Congress home page features an interactive map created with data from the Federal Elections Commission and GovTrack.us and Google maps. The goal of the organization is to create tools that both candidates and citizens can use to pledge their support for basic changes to reduce the distorting influence of money in Washington.

Lessig is a professor at Stanford Law School, the founder of Creative Commons and the author of three very important books: Code, The Future of Ideas, and Free culture : how big media uses technology and the law to lock down culture and control creativity.

There are more videos from Change-Congress at: change-congress.blip.tv

If this is the first time you've seen one of Lessig's presentations, you are in for a treat. A colleague of mine called it "mesmerizing." There is a bit more about Lessig's presentation style in an analysis of it by Chris Tunnell on Lessig's blog: A physicist on the "Lessig style", by Chris Tunnell, April 28, 2008.

Here's a special weekend edition of lunchtime listens! A couple of weeks ago, Brewster Kahle and the Internet Archive made news by challenging the FBI's illegal national security letter against the archive. The archive was also in the news because of Microsoft's decision to discontinue their live book search and the funding of the archive's Open Content Alliance book scanning project.

Now you can hear exactly what happened direct from Brewster himself. Listen to his interview a few days ago on This Week in Tech (TWIT). Happy listening!

Maybe I should name this west coast lunchtime listen ;-) Be that as it may, Clay Shirky gave a talk last month (click on the image to get to the video) at the Berkman Center for internet and Society covering some of the ideas from his incredible new book Here Comes Everybody: The Power of Organizing Without Organizations. The focus of the talk is Shirky's notions about the enabling power of the Web and along the way he has a lot of interesting things to say about sharing, conversation, collaboration and collective action. There's a lot of power in sharing and Shirky points to several interesting examples of that power.

Here Comes Everybody: The Power of Organizing Without Organizations (Event Video/Audio)

The New York Public Library has lots of free audio and video (and text!) on iTunes! See: NYPL on iTunes U., by Barbara Taranto, NYPL, April 8, 2008.

If you have iTunes, here are some direct links to get you started:

• NYPL at iTunes
• Live from the NYPL
• Slate At 10: Online Media and the Future of Journalism (text)

I love love love This_American_Life. It's at the top of my podcast list (along with Studio_360 and Radio_Lab). The 3.28.08 episode, "The audacity of government" is particularly interesting from a govt information viewpoint. Ira Glass once again takes the strange but true anomaly, tells it in the first-person humanly and humanely to show the absurdity of, in this case, bureaucracy and governments. You can download it to your favorite audio player or listen online.

Act One. The Prez vs. The Commish.
Ira Glass tells the story of a little-known treaty dispute with far-reaching ramifications for our understanding of executive power. The dispute is between the President and one of his appointees...to the International Boundary Commission with Canada.

Act Two. This American Wife.
This American Life contributor Jack Hitt uncovers a strange practice within the U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Service. If a foreign national marries a U.S. citizen and schedules an interview for a green card, but the U.S. citizen dies before the interview takes place, the foreign national is scheduled for deportation with no appeal—even if the couple has children who are U.S. citizens.

Act Three. 44.
Ira Glass interviews Charlie Savage, a Pulitzer Prize-winning reporter for the Boston Globe, who's written a book called Takeover: The Return of the Imperial Presidency and the Subversion of American Democracy about the ways the Bush Administration claims executive powers that other presidents haven't claimed.

Interviews with Innovators: Online Access to Public Information: Carl Malamud, IT Conversations, March 18, 2008.

For many years Carl Malamud has been a tireless crusader for online access to U.S. public information: SEC filings, patents, Congressional video, the Smithsonian's historical photgraphy, and most recently, case law. On this edition of Interviews with Innovators, host Jon Udell asks Malamud about his strategies, accomplishments, and future plans.

This is an inspiring interview. If only there were libraries and library directors who had the simple, effective vision that Carl has!!

For some reason I just went back to review the keynote given by Karen Schneider -- aka Free Range Librarian -- at the 2007 Code4Lib conference. I found some really great practical tidbits for talking about open source in libraries as well as some food for thought. So please take the 50 minutes to sit back and enjoy Karen's most interesting talk. You'll be glad you did!

Below are some highlights:

• @ the 19min mark...seizing control of the tools we know we need to have and that we can create oursleves...we're really in a renaissance of librarian-built software for the first time it's like we're shaking ourselves awake and really grabbing hold, seizing the day. Librarian-built software begins to restore the balance of power in our profession...
• @27min mark (slide 16), there's an interesting exchange about open source including stereotypes of open source and how to talk to directors about open source at @ 36min.
• Slide 32 = every library needs a developer
• 48min mark = Q&A from Dan Chudnov discussing free software and Schneider's over-simplification that there's no free software. Dan points out that there's a higher level of conversation about free software that needs to happen.

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We're not all work and no play at FGI. So, here is something we have been waiting for and are excited that it is now online. It is http://www.titlepage.tv/ and they describe it and their first episode this way:

There's never been anything like it online. We bring together four of today's top authors at a time for unscripted, passionate conversations about their work.

We couldn't be more proud of our first episode. Richard Price, Colin Harrison, Susan Choi, and Charles Bock gave us an inside look at their latest novels, but the conversation didn't stop there. Harrison taught us how to salvage a story by introducing a new character; Bock told us how his acclaimed first novel almost ended up in a drawer; Choi explained why she didn't identify the home country of her main character; and the very organized Price admitted that he writes "outlines for my outlines" when preparing a novel.

Unlike many other sites, we do ask our visitors for an attention span. This first show runs to about an hour, but trust us -- the time flies.

Today also marks the debut of our other features, including blogs, additional book recommendations, and interactive forums where you can start your own passionate conversations with fellow readers.

Enjoy!