In conjunction with the President's speech to students on Tuesday, Sept. 8, The Department of Education is sponsoring a video contest for students. More information will be available at http://www.ed.gov/iamwhatilearn/index.html .

From the announcement :

To further encourage student engagement, the U.S. Department of Education is launching the "I Am What I Learn" video contest. On September 8, we will invite students to respond to the president's challenge by creating videos, up to two minutes in length, describing the steps they will take to improve their education and the role education will play in fulfilling their dreams.

We invite all students age 13 and older to create and upload their videos to YouTube by October 8. Submissions can be in the form of video blogs, public service announcements (PSAs), music videos, or documentaries. Students are encouraged to have fun and be creative with this project! The general public will then vote on their favorites to determine the top 20 finalists. These 20 videos will be reviewed by a panel of judges including U.S. Secretary of Education Arne Duncan. The panel will choose three winners, each of whom will receive a $1,000 cash prize.

President Obama will deliver a national address to the students of America at 12:00 p.m., Eastern Time (ET), September 8, 2009.

Information about the speech, teacher handouts for classroom activities, frequently asked questions, and additional information are all available here:

• President Barack Obama to Make Historic Speech to America’s Students, U.S. Dept. of Education.

You can watch the speech live at 12pm ET on the WH website (http://www.whitehouse.gov/live/), on CSPAN, or on the CSPAN website. It will also be available via satellite for schools. The speech will continue to be available on www.ed.gov and on http://www.whitehouse.gov/mediaresources/.

NARA Nears Completion of Ingesting Bush Records, National Coalition for History (Sept 4, 2009).

The National Archives and Records Administration announced this week that the agency has nearly completed the process of loading the electronic records of President George W. Bush into the Electronic Records Archives (ERA) system. To date, more than 85% of the total volume has been ingested.

...The intake of these records is expected to be complete by the end of September, 2009. Currently, the use of the system is limited to Presidential Libraries staff...

See also: Archives reports progress on road to digital ERA, by Max Cacas, Federal News Radio, (Sept. 3, 2009).

On September 3, the Obama administration and Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington (CREW) settled four ongoing cases regarding public access to White House visitor records. As a result, for the first time in history records of White House visitors will be released. President Obama issued a statement saying that each month, records of visitors from the previous 90-120 days will be made available online.

• White House Will Post Visitor Logs Online, National Journal, "Tech Daily Dose" (September 4, 2009).
• Obama Administration To Release White House Visitor Records, National Coalition for History (September 4th, 2009).
• White House Takes Huge Step Toward Transparency, By Ellen Miller, Sunlight Foundation (09/04/09).

The Washington Post has an RSS feed called, The POTUS Tracker. It lists events location and events for the President of the United States.

There is also a more traditional Calendar view of the President's activities and you can view events by issue, type, and attendees.

Grading WhiteHouse.gov, By Jose Antonio Vargas, Washington Post, March 24, 2009.

Remember when government information was boring and no one talked about it? Well, not anymore! Now everyone wants to weigh in on making government information accessible and interesting and useful. At the Washington Post, there is a new series, Grading WhiteHouse.gov, "a monthly feature that invites five thinkers across the online political and cultural spectrum to grade President Obama's WhiteHouse.gov." Cool!

The Sunlight Foundation has a new website called OOGL: Open Our Government List, for you to vote and submit ideas for what the Open Government Directive should address.

Shortly after President Obama's inauguration, he issued a memo on transparency directing his top officials to develop plans for an Open Government Directive to promote transparency, participation, and collaboration. The Sunlight Foundation has created this page in order to add a public element to the crafting of this Open Government Directive that is itself transparent, participatory, and collaborative.

So far, the highest vote goes to Ethics Information, APIs & Bulk Data Access, and Procedural Information.

Spread the word and vote!

There is an interesting article over at Wired magazine's website by Evan Ratliff, entitled "The Wired Presidency: Can Obama Really Reboot the White House?".

The various obstacles that Obama will have to deal with are discussed, including license agreements, purchasing rules, a ban on endorsements, and restrictions on revisions, among others. They even mention the Change.gov's CC license (which appeared after FGI and others wrote many many emails about why they had a copyrighted site initially!):

The Obama team was able to sidestep these kinds of troublesome rules on Change.gov, in part because, as a quasi-governmental site, it's not subject to executive-branch restrictions. They were able to post videos on YouTube, link to outside sites, and even publish content under a Creative Commons license, allowing it to be freely shared.

Here are some other good quotes from the article:

...turning his innovative campaign and transition into Government 2.0 won't be easy. The nimble Obama startup is about to be absorbed into a stodgy, technologically backward behemoth: the federal government...Ahead are bureaucratic obstacles the campaign never imagined, along with the political land mines that transparency brings.

"We know that there are a lot of people advocating for more open government," Godwin says. "We're saying, absolutely, put the data out there. But I think we have to be realistic."

Recovery.gov is back up. This time, it has many more features. It is a website that, according to the website:

Lets you, the taxpayer, figure out where the money from the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act is going. There are going to be a few different ways to search for information. The money is being distributed by Federal agencies, and soon you'll be able to see where it's going -- to which states, to which congressional districts, even to which Federal contractors. As soon as we are able to, we'll display that information visually in maps, charts, and graphics.

You can read a full copy of the bill, share your recovery story, and learn more about the President's accountability & transparency objectives. And check out the "Where is Your Money Going"? page for a simple visual representation.

Two very different articles that evoke Presidents' Day have come to my attention recently. "The Founders' Great Mistake" (via Mark Drapeau) is an interesting look at the formation of the American presidency and the shadow of George Washington.

Even when Washington remained silent, his presence shaped the debate. When, on June 1, James Wilson suggested that the executive power be lodged in a single person, no one spoke up in response. The silence went on until Benjamin Franklin finally suggested a debate; the debate itself proceeded awkwardly for a little while, and was then put off for another day.

Many of the conversations about presidential authority were similarly awkward, and tended to be indirect. Later interpreters have found the original debates on the presidency, in the words of former Supreme Court Justice Robert H. Jackson, "almost as enigmatic as the dreams Joseph was called upon to interpret for Pharaoh."

The article then continues to track the development of the powerful executive position, and argues for reform of both the electoral process and the interregnum period - the eleven or so weeks the outgoing president spends as a lame duck.

The second is a post from the official Google blog, "From the height of this place." This post describes the company's technology optimism, and sketches a picture of the future world of computing and communication.

Putting the power to publish and consume content into the hands of more people in more places enables everyone to start conversations with facts. With facts, negotiations can become less about who yells louder, but about who has the stronger data. They can also be an equalizer that enables better decisions and more civil discourse. Or, as Thomas Jefferson put it at the start of his first term, "Error of opinion may be tolerated where reason is left free to combat it."

...

Information transparency helps people decide who is right and who is wrong and to determine who is telling the truth. When then-Senator Clinton incorrectly stated during the 2008 Presidential campaign that she had come under sniper fire during her 1996 trip to Bosnia, the Internet set her straight. This is why President Obama's promise to "do our business in the light of day" is important, because transparency empowers the populace and demands accountability as its immediate offspring.

Of course, this picture of the future of the information world is heavily Google-centric. The post makes the point, though, that the future of radical technological development is primarily in the commercial realm. Rather than driving innovation, the government is another user, one that adopts technology piecemeal.

What do these two articles have in common?

Drawing from a recent FGI discussion, I think it's relevant that neither of these parties works de facto "for the people." Whether or not it was true in the past, the president does not serve at the whim of all Americans who are eligible to vote. Rather, the president walks a fine line between serving the interests of the executive branch, and serving the interests of Congress, in order to maintain a level of cooperation that will allow the interests of the executive branch to themselves be furthered. One hopes that the best interests of the executive branch are in fact aligned with the best interests of the people, particularly given that presidents and their parties are eligible for re-election. Still, there is an interesting parallel between the president/executive branch and a socially aware company like Google: doing the right thing probably comes with some strings attached, whether those strings are profit, goodwill, or a reduction in future opportunity costs.

These strings themselves are the leverage government information advocates have with both public and private entities. With enough loud voices, goodwill can be harder to earn. The library community has been burned by Google (endless summer? really?) in the recent past. And we hardly need a reminder of failures in the recent past on the part of the executive branch to maintain our goodwill.

The carrot-and-stick technique with government entities (best exemplified recently by the ongoing work of Carl Malamud) is slow but ultimately effective, as the continuing success of Public.Resource.Org shows. As we await the announcement of a GPO partner, I wonder what advocacy for government information would look like in a hypothetical future where technology and data is locked up by commercial entities, rather than open and free. For me, that hypothetical future suggests that we have many more allies out there than just the names and faces already at work on government information issues. Maybe there are ways and projects that would recruit more of these advocates to become voices on government information issues.

I realize that this has been a superficial and simplistic comparison between two complex entities, but I hope it inspires some thought on how similarities may inform current and future strategy.

Court Rejects White House on Missing E-mails, National Security Archive, November 10, 2008.

A court ruled today that the National Security Archive may proceed with its effort to force the White House to recover millions of Bush Administration Executive Office of the President (EOP) e-mail records before the presidential transition.

It was a moving victory speech from PRESIDENT BARACK OBAMA! On this night, in this town, there are parties in the street, cars honking, a feeling like 11:59 on New Year's eve. Below is the tag cloud of President Obama's speech, courtesy of tag crowd. For those that weren't able to tune in, here's audio of his speech. Now the real work begins!

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.

The Committee on Oversight and Government Reform is the main investigative committee in the U.S. House of Representatives. It has authority to investigate the subjects within the Committee’s legislative jurisdiction as well as “any matter” within the jurisdiction of the other standing House Committees.
Tues. Feb. 26 at 10 am the full Committee will hold a hearing entitled “Electronic Records Preservation at the White House.”  According to the Committee website,  the witnesses expected to testify include:

Did White House Lie About Loss of Five Million Emails?, by Damon Poeter CMP Channel (03 October 2007).

When Congress asked about 5 million executive branch e-mails that went missing, a White House lawyer pointed the finger at an outside IT contractor. The only problem? No such IT contractor exists, according to sources close to the investigation of a possible violation of the Federal Records and Presidential Records acts.

The article includes a "Timeline of Events in White House E-mail Scandal."