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“Sunlight has long been the best disinfectant to prevent problems in our market”
SEC Seeks More Transparent Disclosure For Investors, U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission, press release 2008-227, Sept. 25, 2008.
The Securities and Exchange Commission today announced that it will hold a roundtable on October 8 to discuss ways to modernize its disclosure system to give investors more useful and timely information for investment decision-making.... "Sunlight has long been the best disinfectant to prevent problems in our markets. The more direct sunlight we can shine on company disclosure documents to extract the information that investors most want and need to make financial decisions, the more honest our markets will be and the stronger investor confidence will be," said Dr. William D. Lutz, Director of the 21st Century Disclosure Initiative.Thanks and a tip of the hat to J.H. Snider who says, "The SEC’s disclosure technology may already be the best of any agency in the Federal government.... Nevertheless, given the recent financial meltdown, it looks like it may continue to break new ground. Continue reading
Will Losses on Wall Street Mean Gains for Google in Government Sector?
Wall Street Loses, Google Gains in Government, by Anne Laurent NextGov, September 30, 2008.
Despite the bailout blow-out, my mind has kept wandering all day to a Washington Post story about Google's new office, of all things. Finally, Bob Gourley, former chief technology officer at the Defense Intelligence Agency, helped me understand why.Laurent says that government agencies won't be spending on IT in the near future because, increasingly, IT is becoming a utility that can be outsourced and that there is already evidence that governments may outsource to Google.
Agencies already are moving. The Post highlights the District of Columbia, where CTO Vivek Kundra has employees using Google's spreadsheets, email, videos, maps, word processing and a wiki. Alabama has won many plaudits and imitators with its amazing mash-up of Google Maps, Virtual Alabama.She links to these interesting stories, among others:
- Wall Street Crisis, Enterprise Technology and Cloud Computing by Bob Gourley
- The End of Corporate Computing, By Nicholas G. Carr
- Google Goes to Washington, Gearing Up to Put Its Stamp on Government by Kim Hart, Washington Post, September 29, 2008; D07
Scaling house.gov
Yesterday, after the House defeated the economic "bailout" bill, citizens swamped their representatives with e-mail and attempted to reach web sites hosted by house.gov to get more information. The result? "Millions of individuals seeking information about the forsaken legislation have slowed its 10 servers to a crawl." (Servers buckle as Congress rejects $700bn Wall Street bailout By Austin Modine, The Register, 9/30/2008.) The response? House limits constituent e-mails to prevent crash, By Jordy Yager, The Hill, 09/30/08 Continue reading
Why we need open documents, a real-life example
Here is an excellent example of why we need government information distributed in truly-open, re-usable formats. The very important and much discussed $700 billion economic "bail-out" bill, the "Emergency Economic Stabilization Act of 2008" (H.R. 3997), has gone through at least four versions between September 25th and today. Josh Tauberer, the tireless open-government advocate and programmer who developed GovTrack.us, has adapted a bill comparison tool that he developed for GovTrack and posted the resulting analysis of changes between the different versions here:
- Special Feature: Economic Stimulus Bill Text Tracker, GovTrack. Sept 29, 2008.
It's not very pretty because while House bill writers have been posting the PDFs, PDFs don't make it easy to make comparisons. They *are* composing the bills in XML, and if they made those available we the public would have an easier time. Maybe we wouldn't complain to our reps so much either because we could actually understand what is going on better! [source] ...Why is this so ugly? This is based on converting the PDF drafts into text, which doesn't always work right. If you think the public should be able to do this better, tell your representative to support The Open House Project report recommendations. [source]What we need is not just easy-to-read human-consumable documents (e.g., PDF, HTML, word-processing documents), but also machine-processable documents that can be analyzed, parsed, re-formatted, and re-used (e.g., XML). Continue reading
Just Released: DOJ Report of Investigation into the Removal of Nine U.S. Attorneys
An Investigation into the Removal of Nine U.S. Attorneys in 2006, U.S. Department of Justice Office of the Inspector General and Office of Professional Responsibility, Sept. 2008. (PDF, 392 pp., 3.6 Megs). Site http://www.usdoj.gov/oig/new.htm says "HTML coming soon." From the conclusion:
The most serious allegations that arose were that the U.S. Attorneys were removed based on improper political factors, including to affect the way they handled certain voter fraud or public corruption investigations and prosecutions. Our investigation found significant evidence that political partisan considerations were an important factor in the removal of several of the U.S. Attorneys. The most troubling example was David Iglesias, the U.S. Attorney in New Mexico. We concluded that complaints from New Mexico Republican politicians and party activists about Iglesias’s handling of voter fraud and public corruption cases caused his removal, and that the Department removed Iglesias without any inquiry into his handling of the cases. However, we were unable to fully develop the facts regarding the removal of Iglesias and several other U.S. Attorneys because of the refusal by certain key witnesses to be interviewed by us, as well as by the White House’s decision not to provide internal White House documents to us. Therefore, we recommend that counsel specially appointed by the Attorney General work with us to conduct further investigation and ultimately to determine whether the totality of the evidence demonstrates that any criminal offense was committed.Continue reading
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