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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.

Index to C-Span videorecordings

C-SPAN has recently released a great new online resource with lots of potential:  the  C-SPAN Congressional Chronicle (currently in beta) is an index to the C-SPAN video recordings of the House and Senate floor proceedings. According to C-SPAN the video recordings are matched with the text of the Congressional Record as soon as it is available.  Each appearance has a video link where users can watch and listen to the actual remarks.  C-SPAN  hopes that this site will provide a useful tool for viewers and followers of Congress to research, watch, and review the actions of the Congress. They welcome  bloggers and websites to create links to various videorecordings and also welcome comments and suggestions for improving the service. 

Slate on Wikipedia and Digg

Slate has an interesting article titled "Digg, Wikipedia and the Myth of Web 2.0 Democracy" in which the author, Chris Wilson, talks about how a few people are responsible for most of the entries in Digg and Wikipedia and various permutations of having an open-access site.  He makes that point that  "Despite the fairy tales about the participatory culture of Web 2.0, direct democracy isn’t feasible at the scale on which these sites operate. Still, it’s curious to note that these sites seem to have the hierarchical structure of the old-guard institutions they’ve sought to supplant."

Hearing on electronic preservation in the White House

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:

  • Alan R. Swendiman, Director, Office of Administration
  • Theresa Payton, Chief Information Officer, Office of Administration
  • The Honorable Allen Weinstein, Archivist of the United States
  • Gary M. Stern, General Counsel, National Archives and Records Administration
  • Sharon Fawcett, Assistant Archivist for Presidential Libraries
  • Collaborative blogs – legal issues

    You and some friends or colleagues decide to start a blog together. This is pretty common, but might there be some legal issues you haven’t considered? Over at InformIT, Eric Goldman has written a 2 part series that examines this possiblity.  Part I discusses the legal ramifications of blogging collaboratively,  and in part 2 the author points out some possible solutions and recommendations for mitigating unwanted consequences of co-blogging.

    Supreme Court Justice statistics

    SCOTUSblog has announced the release of a new statpack (9 page pdf) that shows the breakdown of how each Supreme Court Justice has ruled at the quartermark of the term.  One new statistic includes how often each Justice votes with the majority, both overall and in divided cases.  The idea is that these figures reflect a general, if imperfect, measurement of how often each Justice is presumably pleased with the outcome of the Court’s decisions. Justice Antonin Scalia is the only member of the Court to vote with the majority in every merits decision issued so far this Term.

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