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When Standards Are Political — ODF (the Open Document Format)
When Standards Are Political -- ODF (the Open Document Format) by James Love (October 21, 2006), Huffington Post. James Love, Director of the Consumer Project on Technology, writes about open word-processing formats, why they are important for open exchange of information, interoperability, re-usability, preservability, and more. This article does an excellent job of explaining why this technical issue is an important policy issue. He compares and contrasts Microsoft's "Open XML" with the truly open Open Document Format (ODF). Continue reading
Saving Democracy With Web 2.0
A nice article on how free government information, unencumbered by Digital Rights Management technologies, and designed for use and re-use in the Web 2.0 environment can "re-democratize our democracy."
- Saving Democracy With Web 2.0 by Jennifer Granick, Wired News (October 25, 2006).
The Technical is Political
As much as we'd like to think that information policies are free from politics, it just isn't true. It is not often that the press deals with how politics affects information policy, but it is increasingly easy for the press to deal with the issue when it comes to issues of technology. And so we have an article in this week's Government Computer News:
- Election could affect IT programs -- New leadership could alter Congress -- focus on data, health privacy and security By Mary Mosquera, Government Computer News (10/23/06 issue)
- The Technical is Political by James A. Jacobs and Karrie Peterson, Of Significance... 3(1) 2001, p.25-35. Association of Public Data Users. (Full text PDF file)
In the realm of government information, technical decisions about data format, access software and public distribution methods are inherently political decisions. They affect what kind of data can be accessed, how, by whom, and for how long into the future it will be available. To evaluate and respond appropriately to policy changes by government producers of data, technical issues must also be looked at in the light of social values shared by the data-using community. How does a newly decked-out data product fare with regard to open access? Privacy of individuals? Documentation that allows the data to be correctly cited, tested for reliability, re-used in the future? Social and political concerns also come into play when the flexibility offered by distributing raw data is balanced against locking the data into a "user-friendly" software, and when products traditionally produced by the federal government are privatized. As private industry pushes harder for information to become a commodity - something that can be sold for profit - it is important for data users to push back with a strong philosophy of information as a social good, and to evaluate data products and access in light of their value to society, rather than on strictly narrow technical grounds.Continue reading
remix: US congressional staff salaries
Here is a new "remix" -- public information more easily available from a private source than from the government itself.
Storming Media, a private, independent reseller of Pentagon and other US federal government reports on many subjects, is now making available, for free, US congressional staff salaries in an easy to browse web interface. They obtain the data from the official record books: the Secretary of the Senate and the Clerk of the House reports. Continue readingAttorney General’s Report on FOIA
How is the Freedom of Information Act doing? 
It is a key component of government information and essential for that body of information that does not get published and distributed even on agency web sites. Last week, the Department of Justice released the Attorney General's Report to the President on FOIA Administration (October 16, 2006. PDF, 17pp. See also the press release accompanying the report).
Attorney General
Alberto R. Gonzales
Steven Aftergood points out that the report boasts of "reforms" that "may loom large within the government, but still appear inconsequential from the outside." The report, for example, makes much of using post cards to acknowledge receipt of FOIA requests instead of more formal letters and calls this a "novel idea...an outstanding idea." Such changes, Aftergood notes, are more about efficiency than productivity and "the executive order does little to improve productivity."
- Attorney General Reports on FOIA by Steven Aftergood (October 17, 2006) Secrecy News
The National Security Archive at George Washington University responded to the Attorney General's report with a letter to the Attorney General and a call for congressional oversight hearings to make optimistic FOIA processing goals a reality. It notes that the Attorney General's report is "merely an overview of 91 individual FOIA improvement plans drafted by federal agencies" and that "It fails to acknowledge that many of the admirable goals set by the agencies can only be met with an increased commitment of resources -- which the Executive Order makes clear is not being considered by the Administration."
In separate letters to the two principal congressional committees with oversight responsibility for FOIA the National Security Archive reiterates agencies' lack of basic technology such as copiers and Internet access.
- Attorney General's Report Ignores Serious Problems in Agency FOIA Programs, National Security Archive (October 19, 2006)
For more background on FOIA see Happy 40th anniversary FOIA!! or see the results of a simple search of FGI for our coverage of FOIA.
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