Home » post » Wired Presidency

Our mission

Free Government Information (FGI) is a place for initiating dialogue and building consensus among the various players (libraries, government agencies, non-profit organizations, researchers, journalists, etc.) who have a stake in the preservation of and perpetual free access to government information. FGI promotes free government information through collaboration, education, advocacy and research.

Wired Presidency

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.”

CC BY-NC-SA 4.0 This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License.


Leave a comment

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *

This site uses Akismet to reduce spam. Learn how your comment data is processed.

Archives