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Digital Divide and E-Government
The Pew Internet and American Life Project has a new survey Home Broadband Adoption 2008 (PDF, 31 pages) that says "Adoption stalls for low-income Americans even as many broadband users opt for premium services that give them more speed." NextGov looks at the report in relation to e-government initiatives. (E-Government's Tough Nut, by Allan Holmes, Tech Insider NextGov, July 3, 2008.) Some of the problems for a government wanting to interact with citizens online is that many citizens cannot or will not be able to do so. The articles picks the relevant statistics from the Pew report: the percentage of low-income Americans who have a broadband Internet connection dropped from 28 percent to 25 percent; of those that use the slower dial-up connections, almost two-thirds said they had no desire to change to broadband; 27 percent of Americans have no Internet access, with most of those being either elderly or low-income; only 10 percent of the non-Internet users have any desire to become wired. As Holmes says:
These are the hard-core resisters - and there are millions of them. That means if government wants to move ahead with providing more electronic services - including services that may require faster and more robust connections that broadband provides - a large portion of Americans may just not care. And these resisters are exactly the demographics that government tends to serve.Continue reading
PDF is now ISO standard
PDF (Portable Document Format) has been approved by the International Organization for Standardization (ISO). The new standard is ISO 32000-1.
ISO 32000-1:2008 specifies a digital form for representing electronic documents to enable users to exchange and view electronic documents independent of the environment in which they were created or the environment in which they are viewed or printed. It is intended for the developer of software that creates PDF files (conforming writers), software that reads existing PDF files and interprets their contents for display and interaction (conforming readers) and PDF products that read and/or write PDF files for a variety of other purposes (conforming products).See also: PDF now ISO standard, By Joab Jackson, GCN, 07/03/08.
With Adobe relinquishing control of PDF, the ISO Document Management Applications Technical Committee will review any changes made to the format. The openly published standard provides the technical information required for writing software programs that can create and read PDF files, ensuring that organizations will always have some tools available to render PDFs, even if Adobe stops shipping its PDF viewer.PDF/A (Electronic document file format for long-term preservation) was approved by ISO earlier. Continue reading
District of Columbia provides live data feeds
I had not seen this before, but it looks like a model for open government. The District of Columbia provides free access to "city operational data" (e.g., Demographics, Health Care, Environment, Human Services, Education, Economic Development, Public Safety) in a variety of formats including RSS (Atom) feeds, XML, CSV, and ESRI Shapefiles. The feeds are drawn from more than 150 data sets, ranging from the all- important crime reports to pothole complaints. DC Data Catalog and Data Feeds Continue reading
Declaration of Independence
On this July Fourth, I was pleased to find that the Cornell University Law School Legal Information Institute blog, LII Announce, quoted this paragraph from the Declaration of Independence, number 4 of the many grievances listed by the colonists against the King:
He has called together legislative bodies at places unusual, uncomfortable, and distant from the depository of their Public Records, for the sole purpose of fatiguing them into compliance with his measures.And of this passage, they say:
That the colonists should consider a complaint about informational distance to be on a par with the dissolution of the legislatures, imposition of unfair taxes, and the lack of a judiciary is revealing. These days, the de facto depository of our public records is the Internet, no longer physically distant but perhaps equally fatiguing in other ways. Outmoded publishing policies and practices -- and a failure to recognize the public need for legal information -- keep us at a remove from our public legal information that is greater than it should be. We're a click away in theory, but the practical distance is much greater.Thanks to Tom for the tip on the OpenHouseProject mailing list. Continue reading
-- The Glorious Fourth, by Charles Macklin, LII Announce, July 4, 2008.
Iran-Contra’s Lost Chapter
Robert Parry, who broke many of the Iran-Contra stories in the 1980s for the Associated Press and Newsweek, has published a "lost chapter" from the 1993 Iran-Contra report:
- Launching the Private Network an 84-page draft, plus a CRS study on "Public Diplomacy, Project Democracy and Contra Aid" (attached as an Appendix). (PDF, 3.4 Mb, 104pp).
For background and Parry's report on this chapter, see: Iran-Contra's 'Lost Chapter' By Robert Parry, Consortium News, June 30, 2008.
[T]he Iran-Contra scandal's "lost chapter" is a narrative describing how Ronald Reagan's administration brought CIA tactics to bear domestically to reshape the way Americans perceived the world.
For a copy of the document, National Security Decision Directive NSDD-77, "Management of Public Diplomacy Relative to National Security," January 14, 1983, which is mentioned in the chapter, and other related documents, see: Rumsfeld's Roadmap to Propaganda, National Security Archive Electronic Briefing Book No. 177. January 26, 2006.
Volume 1 of the three volume Final Report Of The Independent Counsel For Iran/Contra Matters is available online here from the Federation of American Scientists, and here from the Federal Bulletin Board, and here from permanent.access.gpo.gov.
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