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More ways to follow government tweets
The Hill Reports that there is yet another service tracking government tweets:
- New site tracks government-run Twitter accounts. By Jordan Fabian The Hill (01/04/10).
- a list of Twitter accounts from Cabinet Secretaries, Agencies and Departments by The White House
- GovTwit
- Tweet Congress
- Congressional 140
- GovFresh
- Members of Congress who Twitter
- Capitol Tweets
Conference: Limiting Knowledge in a Democracy
This promises to be a very interesting conference! If you are going and will be blogging or tweeting, please let us know. (admin at freegovinfo.info)
- LIMITING KNOWLEDGE IN A DEMOCRACY A Social Research conference at The New School, New York City, February 24-26, 2010. www.socres.org/limitingknowledge
Join award winning journalists, distinguished scholars, and policy makers to examine how the U.S. government and other political and cultural institutions distort or otherwise affect the flow of information. What limits on access to knowledge safeguard our democracy and what limits erode it? Keynote: Seymour Hersh Featured Speakers: Steven Aftergood David D. Aufhauser Ronald Bayer Christopher Capozzola Julie E. Cohen Daniel Ellsberg Peter L. Galison Rebecca Goldstein Glenn Greenwald Dale Jamieson Philip Kitcher Nicholas Lemann Eric Lichtblau Michael Oppenheimer Daniel Sarewitz Jonathan Zittrain Over three days, the conference will investigate how our government and other political and cultural institutions organize, fund, restrict, facilitate, or otherwise affect the flow of knowledge, and examine how limits may support or undermine democracy. Speakers will examine the government and technological structures and mechanisms that limit transparency, the influence of private interests and government over media and the propagation of misinformation, and the host of other powerful forces surrounding policy-making that curtail our knowledge and threaten our privacy. We will also look at other institutions that significantly affect what we can know, what we ought to know and what we should try to know, including the research community itself, as well as the implicit limits located within our culture that strongly influence what we seek to know and what we are content not to know. And, we will discuss the role of whistleblowers and investigative journalism to uphold public accountability. These issues will be addressed from the perspectives of government policy, political science, public health, history, science, economics, media, law, journalism, and philosophy.Continue reading
THOMAS gets significant new features
THOMAS, the legislative information service hosted by the Library of Congress, has announced new long-needed features and enhancements.
These include:- Bookmarking. Yes, it is now easy to save a permanent link to a page in THOMAS.
- Easy sharing. The same toolbar that gives you a permanent URL, has links for sharing a page using popular sites such as Delicious, Facebook, and Twitter.
- New RSS feed: Bills Presented to the President.
- Top Five Bills. "The five most-searched-for bills from the past week will be listed in the center box on the right side of the homepage." They are listed by bill number, but hovering over them gives you a name.
C-SPAN complains about closed health care meetings
C-SPAN complains about private health talks, by Foon Rhee, Boston Globe (January 5, 2010).
Democrats' apparent decision to come up with a final health care bill not only behind closed doors but within a very select group of negotiators is drawing criticism not only from expected quarters, but from the media.Continue reading
Why Did the Bush White House Copy and Print Every Email It Received?
What are the impacts of the government using social networks and other commercial services to communicate with the public and for internal communications? What are the impacts of what is recorded at all when staff knows that their words will be publicly available later? These and other issues are covered in a fascinating overview of the Presidential Records Act:
- Why Did the Bush White House Copy and Print Every Email It Received? It's a Long Story, By Nneoma Amadi-obi, History News Network (Jan. 4, 2010).
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