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White House Task Force on Middle Class Working Families Blog
A new web page at whitehouse.gov for the White House Task Force on Middle Class Working Families has its own blog (but, oddly, no separate RSS feed!).
According to a press release:The Task Force is a major initiative targeted at raising the living standards of middle-class, working families in America. It is comprised of top-level administration policy makers, and in addition to regular meetings, it will conduct outreach sessions with representatives of labor, business, and the advocacy communities. The Task Force will be chaired by Vice President Joe Biden. The Vice President and members of the task force will work with a wide array of federal agencies that have responsibility for key issues facing the middle class and expedite administrative reforms, propose Executive orders, and develop legislative and policy proposals that can be of special importance to working families.Continue reading
bulk data downloads
Recommended reading: O'Reilly Radar - Bulk Data Downloads: A Breakthrough in Government Transparency by Tim O'Reilly (March 4, 2009): "What would it mean if all the bulk data from the Library of Congress, Congressional Research Service, Government Printing Office, and "the appropriate entities of the House of Representatives" were made available?" Here's an excerpt from the appropriations bill that's the focus of the post - "*Public Access to Legislative Data* - There is support for enhancing public access to legislative documents, bill status, summary information, and other legislative data through more direct methods such as bulk data downloads and other means of no-charge digital access to legislative databases..." O'Reilly was especially struck by the possibilities embedded in that final passage - "bulk data downloads and other means of no-charge digital access to legislative databases" and the specific reference to agencies ... Read the full Radar post here! Continue reading
CIO2.0 – White House Names “First Federal Chief Information Officer”
The appointment of Vivek Kundra to become the White House's "first federal chief information officer" caught my eye in a NYT Caucus alert: As reported by The Caucus, The Politics and Government Blog of the Times [New York Times, Thursday, March 5th], "[i]n a 25-minute conference call, Mr. Kundra discussed some of his plans and interests, including his intention to extend the use of “cloud computing” in the federal government and to create a data.gov web site that will put vast amounts of government information into the public domain..." [emphasis added] Perhaps Mr. Kundra meant to say he would make public domain government information more accessible to the people by publishing it freely in an open access government site. The post continues, Mr. Kundra "sketched out an ambition that is hardly modest: to shatter the assumption that government technology automatically must lag behind the private sector...[H]e will be expected to oversee a push to expand uses of cutting-edge technology. He will have wide powers over federal technology spending, over information sharing between agencies, over greater public access to government information and over questions of security and privacy..." [emphasis added] "Mr. Kundra ... likes to refer to citizens as “co-creators.” Infoworld has an informative, brief article on cloud computing: Galen Gruman, Eric Knorr. What cloud computing really means: The next big trend sounds nebulous, but it's not so fuzzy when you view the value proposition from the perspective of IT professionals. Infoworld (April 07, 2008). Continue reading
A New Era of Responsibility
One of our favorite rss feeds, docuticker, identifies an interesting gov doc in a recent update - Budget of the United States Government — Fiscal Year 2010: The Budget Documents, A New Era of Responsibility: Renewing America's Promise (OMB). A New Era of Responsibility "... [p]rovides a description of the Obama Administration’s fiscal policies and major budgetary initiatives. This document is an overview of the full Fiscal Year 2010 Budget expected to be released this spring." It is comprehensible in the way a well written commercial outline can distill an impenetrable appellate decision. In it, the President's Message begins: "Throughout America’s history, there have been some years that appeared to roll into the next without much notice or fanfare. Budgets are proposed that offer some new programs or eliminate an initiative, but by and large continuity reigns. Then there are the years that come along once in a generation, when we look at where the country has been and recognize that we need a break from a troubled past, that the problems we face demand that we begin charting a new path. This is one of those years..." That's clear. Think of it as lyric prologue to prose recovery (I'm an optimist) -- The 2010 Budget joins its predecessors at GPO Access ... (and, some day, FDSys as well). Continue reading
Transboundary issues are needful things
There is an obvious transboundary need for free flowing, current foreign / international government information. This transboundary need reflects the nature of our most critical 21st Century challenges -- climate change, crime, trade, labour rights, poverty, hunger, etc. -- they know few hard geo-political boundaries. So how can we know what's going on in our extended community of nations, better known as the Western Hemisphere? Supra national sources of information like the United Nations and it's subsidiary regional commission ECLAC (Economic Commission for Latin America and the Caribbean) do what some of our finest U.S. government agency publications do -- they track the statistical universe of nations. One of my favorite sources of free flowing, current foreign / international government information is UNPULSE, "Connecting to UN Information" (A Service of the UN Library). UNPULSE links to the 2008 edition of the ECLAC's Statistical Yearbook for Latin America and the Caribbean, "... one of the main sources of statistical information of the region." The full text of the report, published in English and Spanish, is divided into four chapters: "(1) Demographic and social areas, with special attention to gender; (2) Economical statistics such as prices, international trade, balance of payments and national accounts; (3) Information on natural resources and the environment; and, (4) Methodological aspects and other data on sources, definitions and coverage of the statistics cited." About ECLAC: "ECLAC is one of the five regional commissions of the United Nations. It was founded with the purpose of contributing to the economic development of Latin America, coordinating actions directed towards this end, and reinforcing economic ties among countries and with other nations of the world. The promotion of the region's social development was later included among its primary objectives..." ~ Free government information flowing south to north. Continue reading
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