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California bill to release the state’s building codes online for free
Carl Malamud posted the following to BoingBoing today:
Assemblyman Brian Nestande of California has introduced Assembly Bill 292, which would open source the California Code of Regulations (including the Building Codes!!). The summary reads:[HT BoingBoing!] Continue reading"This bill would provide that the full text of the California Code of Regulations shall bear an open access creative commons attribution license, allowing any individual, at no cost, to use, distribute, and create derivative works based on the material for either commercial or noncommercial purposes."Public.Resource.Org has bulk data for the CCR and the public safety codes (known as Title 24) online, but this would all be way easier if we didn't have to double-key the building codes every 3 years and jump on the West CD-ROM every 2 months to extract the data. This move would lead to tremendous innovation, just like we've seen when the Federal Register went open source in bulk. The bill sponsor, Assemblyman Nestande, has a long background in public policy and IP. He was campaign manager for Sonny Bono's successful 1994 congressional campaign.
Congresswoman Zoe Lofgren agrees: nominate Aaron Swartz for ALA Madison award
Some of you may remember that we nominated Aaron Swartz for the ALA Madison award a few weeks ago and asked folks to write in letters of support to the Washington Office. Last week, there was a memorial for Aaron in Washington DC -- Rick Perlstein covered it well for The Nation, "Aaron Swartz's DC Memorial: Radical Brings Bipartisanship to Washington". Congresswoman Zoe Lofgren, the 2012 Madison award honoree(!) and one of a number of Congressional members who attended Aaron's memorial, caught wind of the campaign to nominate Aaron for the Madison Award and sent in her own letter in support. She kindly allowed us to post the letter here.
Muckrock waives FOIA fees in Tribute to Aaron Swartz. Activists Flood Government Agencies
I just noticed this post over at Wired Magazine's Threat Level blog, Activists Flood Government Agencies With FOIA Requests in Tribute to Aaron Swartz. Last week, Muckrock, the site that helps journalists, lawyers, and the public submit FOIA requests for a small fee ($20 for 5 requests), waived their fees in tribute to the transparency fights of computer programmer and internet activist Aaron Swartz who committed suicide a few weeks ago. I hope Muckrock will post all of the documents received via these requests. According to Muckrock:
MuckRock has begun processing 153 free FOIA requests submitted in honor of Internet pioneer and transparency activist Aaron Swartz, who died earlier this month at age 26. Swartz, among MuckRock's first users and supporters, used public records laws to attempt to find out more about why the federal government was pursuing Internet piracy charges against him. He also filed requests related to alleged WikiLeaks collaborator Bradley Manning and the U.S. Mint, among many other topics. In a Jan. 18 letter to Attorney General Eric Holder asking about Swartz’s prosecution, U.S. Senator John Cornyn (R-TX) asked, “was the prosecution of Mr. Swartz in any way retaliation for his exercise of his rights as a citizen under the Freedom of Information Act?” As a way to honor Swartz’s legacy and to further his transparency work, MuckRock encouraged users to file requests in his honor free of charge. The requests cover all corners of government, ranging from the Department of Homeland Security’s documents relating to the high profile Tar Sands Blockade to the city payroll for Everett, Mass. Updates on the requests will be available at the File for Aaron profile page. Swartz’s own requests can be found here.I'm really glad Muckrock is doing this, and also happy to see that they post all requests and FOIA'd documents on their site. I've added Muckrock to our Archive-it FOIA collection. Continue reading
Public talk: “Gone Today, Here Tomorrow: The Future of Government Information and the Digital FDLP”
I had the distinct honor to be invited to speak at the University of Washington Libraries on thursday, January 24, 2013. I want to thank Cass Hartnett, the Northwest Government Information Network, the UW Information School, the UW Association of Library and Information Science Students (ALISS), and the University of Washington Libraries for allowing me the opportunity to talk publicly about the future of the Federal Depository Library Program (FDLP). the audio for my talk can be downloaded from the UW Library digital archive or streamed below from the Internet Archive. that is all.
We’re at the very beginning of the digital era where tools, policies, best practices, etc are all in flux. In many ways, we’re at the age of new metaphors needed to describe what it is that we as librarians do on a daily basis. I'd like to talk about the underlying historical ideals of the FDLP, discuss how those ideals have been under fire from both within and without the library community and argue that those ideals applied to today's new information metaphors give us the best chance at access to and long-term preservation and assurance of govt information. Then I’ll talk about some of the digital collection strategies that I’ve found to be successful and then conclude with a bit about collaboration and to-dos.
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