We Salute MnCOGI
Our media monitoring for mentions of FGI recently pulled up the Minnesota Coalition on Government Information at http://www.mncogi.org. According to the organization's About page, it's mission is "promote public access to government activity and information." The page also carries their guiding principles which we at FGI agree with almost entirely:
MnCOGI carries out its mission through uniting, informing and enhancing the impact of organizations and individuals committed to open access to public records.
It is the active responsibility of government to promote public participation supported by open access to accurate public information by and about the government.
Documents/records produced with public funds, regardless of physical format, are part of the public record.
Compliance with open meeting and public records laws must be monitored and enforced by responsibility authorities and institutions that are held accountable.
Because collection, maintenance and preservation of information are the responsibility of each government office each must be held accountable.
Research and education are essential to preserve and improve access to public information.
Education and support for all Minnesotans about their rights and responsibilities is best accomplished through a broad-based coalition of informed advocates for open access.
Preservation of public records is a critical part of achieving accountability to be encouraged by MnCOGI.
MnCOGI will link with and support parallel efforts at the federal level while maintaining a specific focus on the free flow of information on public policy matters at the state and local levels in Minnesota.
About the only quibble we have with MnCOGI is that we believe that collection, maintenance and preservation of information are responsibilities too important to be left to each government office. They must be assisted in those tasks by third parties with fewer axes to grind, like libraries. But this is a minor quibble given the level of involvement by libraries in MnCOGI.
One last thing we appreciate about MnCOGI is that they have signed up nonlibrarian organizations like the MN Newspapers Association to their efforts. Congratulations on that. Keep up your important work!
Continue readingLet’s Cook with Government Documents!
Sarah Gewirtz has posted another fun video about government documents, this time incorporating recipes. Please watch it and consider embedding it at your own web site:
For more videos by Sarah and others, please visit our videos page. This page also links to resources that YOU could be using to come up with great promotion ideas!
Continue readingProposals for Transparency From Barack Obama
Note: This posting should not be construed as an endorsement of Barack Obama for President. - Daniel
Senator Barack Obama has made some intriguing proposals on government transparency that seemed worthy of sharing with our readers. The following proposals are taken from the 64 page pamphlet "Blueprint for Change", which is available at http://www.barackobama.com/pdf/ObamaBlueprintForChange.pdf:
(From page 4): Shine the Light on Federal Contracts, Tax Breaks and Earmarks
Create a Public “Contracts and Influence” Database: As president, Obama will create a “contracts and influence” database that will disclose how much federal contractors spend on lobbying, and what contracts they are getting and how well they complete them.
Expose Special Interest Tax Breaks to Public Scrutiny: Barack Obama will ensure that any tax breaks for corporate recipients – or tax earmarks – are also publicly available on the Internet in an easily searchable format.
End Abuse of No-Bid Contracts: Barack Obama will end abuse of no-bid contracts by requiring that nearly all contract orders over $25,000 be competitively awarded.
Sunlight Before Signing: Too often bills are rushed through Congress and to the president before the public has the opportunity to review them. As president, Obama will not sign any non-emergency bill without giving the American public an opportunity to review and comment on the White House website for five days.
Shine Light on Earmarks and Pork Barrel Spending: Obama’s Transparency and Integrity in Earmarks Act will shed light on all earmarks by disclosing the name of the legislator who asked for each earmark, along with a written justification, 72 hours before they can be approved by the full Senate.
Bring Americans Back into their Government
Hold 21st Century Fireside Chats: Obama will bring democracy and policy directly to the people by requiring his Cabinet officials to have periodic national broadband townhall meetings to discuss issues before their agencies.
Make White House Communications Public: Obama will amend executive orders to ensure that communications about regulatory policymaking between persons outside government and all White House staff are disclosed to the public.
Conduct Regulatory Agency Business in Public: Obama will require his appointees who lead the executive branch departments and rulemaking agencies to conduct the significant business of the agency in public, so that any citizen can watch these debates in person or on the Internet.
Release Presidential Records: Obama will nullify the Bush attempts to make the timely release of presidential records more difficult.
These all seem like worthy goals we hope that any eventual President will embrace.
Please share what you know about other candidate's stands on transparency issues. There is some information from an August 2007 Reason Magazine article suggesting that Obama and Ron Paul were two of the strongest candidate advocates for greater transparency, but perhaps more have made proposals by now.
Continue reading
A Wiki Grows at EPA
The February 4, 2008 issue of Government Computer News carries an interesting interview:
Molly O'Neill | EPA the Web 2.0 way
GCN Interview By Joab Jackson
http://www.gcn.com/print/27_3/45741-1.html?topic=&CMP=OTC-RSS
The article talks about some of the EPA's experiments with web 2.0 technologies including wikis. One of the wikis arose out of the Puget Sound Information Challenge:
So we decided to use the mashup camp as our staging area for the wiki. We had a form on the wiki site that you could download, fill out and send in. We also sent up an e-mail address and a phone number.
It was a little scary because we hadn’t told anyone about this beforehand. What if no one contributed? That wasn’t a problem — we had so many people interested and providing useful information.
We had people building applications. National librarians were culling data for library resources. We had people help organize it. The interesting thing was to watch how many hits we were getting through social networking. People took my e-mail and sent it to other people, who sent it off to even more people. We had a blog from Germany weigh in. We had over 17,000 page views and 175 good contributions.
We learned a lot, and we delivered something as well — in fact, several of us are going to Seattle to meet with the council to talk about these tools. They have to write a strategic plan, so maybe they could write a strategic plan with the wiki online. Instead of spending months trying to gather data, they could do it a lot faster using social networking.
Wikis are interesting animals as government documents. While they are very changable, wikis carry their own version control. Think about what implications that might have if you think a wiki is worth saving for preservation. Would you try to copy every version? Take a snapshot once a month? Or decide it was ephemera you didn't need? We'd like to know what you think. If you'd like to see EPA's Puget Sound wiki for yourself, please visit http://pugetsound.epageo.org/.
As a tool for quickly gathering community input, I think EPA is onto something. Especially if most contributers are identified. It would become easier to distinguish special interest group input from regular community input. Or at least the potential is there.
Aside from the wiki, the interview has a great insight from Ms. O'Neill that I think has relevancy to the library community. She is asked "Why do you think federal agencies have such a hard time disseminating information on the Web? " and the last part of her answer is:
But the third reason is that we tend to organize data in a way that it makes sense to us. Although this is changing a little bit now, at EPA we still primarily organize our data by how we are organized as an agency. People outside the agency don’t think of things that way. They get frustrated because they want all the information about a subject, like climate change or environmental indicators. So where do they go? We’re doing a lot to improve search on our site. When you do a search on the main page, it will give you folder options. When you type in “waste water,” it will organize by folder topics like stormwater or industrial effluent.
This is both warning and opportunity for libraries. The warning is that we also tend to organize data in a way that makes sense to us in databases (catalogs) that make sense to us but not to users. But the good news is that one of the ways we organize materials is by subject. And documents librarians are very good about searching across agency boundaries for materials. It's one of the many ways we add value to government information.
Continue readingCopyfraud
- There is a good article in Searcher Magazine that documents specialists and other interested in public domain materials should read:
- Title: 'Copyfraud' and Public Domain Works.
- Author: Ebbinghouse, Carol
- Source: Searcher; Jan2008, Vol. 16 Issue 1, p40-52, 9p
- Ms. Ebbinghouse does a good job of explaining how some try to usurp the public domain through fraudulent notices and/or slight alterations of materials. Her opening gives a good flavor of what's to come:
You find a PDF version of the Federalist Papers on the internet that is just what you need, but it carries a copyright date of 2001. Now that's odd, considering that the last Federalist paper was written and published in 1788. Cautious, you find an ASCII text version, but it has a copyright date of 1999. Can you download this one? Does the fact that one is an image and the other plain text make any difference? And how the heck does anything written in the 18th century end up with post-1923 copyright dates?
Can someone legitimately move public domain text into copyright? What about when you go to an archive, only to find open source and nonpublic domain titles mixed in with public domain items, but the archive seems to put restrictions on your subsequent use of everything (no copying without permission; no commercial re-use, etc.)?
- What leads some vendors to attempt to convince people that public domain materials are really under copyright? In part, because there's little legal cost to doing so, According to Ms. Ebbinghouse:
- As Jason Mazzone points out, "Copyright law suffers from a basic defect: The law's strong protections for copyrights are not balanced by explicit protections for the public domain. Accordingly, copyright law itself creates strong incentives for copyfraud. The limited penalties for copyfraud under the Copyright Act, coupled with weak enforcement … give publishers an incentive to claim ownership, however spurious, in everything. Although falsely claiming copyright is technically a criminal offense under the Act [17 U.S.C. §506(c)] prosecutions are extremely rare. Moreover, the Copyright Act provides no civil penalty for claiming copyrights in public domain materials. … [and] no federal agency is specially charged with safeguarding the public domain."
- Reading this paragraph gives rise to an interesting idea. What if there were substantial fines for removing works from the public domain and the fines were used to run an orphan copyright registry that people could use without fear of prosecution. What if the American Library Association could get together with large foundations and start suing corporations for violations of the public domain? Would it lead to a world where if you weren't certain of a work's, you presumed it was public domain for fear of the consequences of an illegal claim of copyright? We could live with that.
- Waking up from that daydream, I want edto point out this articles to readers of FGI because so much government information is both public domain and often repackaged as being in copyright. And occaisionally like the first edition of the Iraq Study Group report, government documents have copyrighted materials embeded into them. Ms. Ebbinghouse's article can help you navigate these difficult issues and help you deal with the copyfrauds out there.
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