Home » Posts tagged 'lunchtime' (Page 7)
Tag Archives: lunchtime
Lunchtime listen: Malamud at Gov2.0 summit (#gov20)
Carl Malamud's at it again. In his rousing opening keynote titled "Currents of Our Time" at the 2010 Gov2.0 Summit in Washington DC, Malamud described both the horrendous current lay of the land in govt IT as well as several uplifting examples from the progressive era of government and activists at the forefront of positive public change. Then he defined his 3 steps for for transforming government as platform:
- finish the opengov revolution (bulk data, strong FOIA, providing access to knowledge to all!)
- spend a minimum of $250 million per year for a decade on a national scanning initiative.
- open systems revolution: "a Computer Commission with the kind of authority the Civil Service Commission had to conduct agency-by-agency reviews and help us reboot .gov, flipping the bit from a reliance on over-designed custom systems to one based on open-source building blocks, judicious use of commercial off-the-shelf-components, and much tighter control of the beltway bandits."
Call for a historiography of government documents
James Bridle, a book publisher from London, gave a talk on the "Value of Ruins" (listen below) at the 2010 dConstruct Conference. He talks about [w:Geocities], the wayback machine, [w:Library of Alexandria], the Yo La Long Dia, the tragedy of the loss of history and the importance of historiography.
Bridle's bit about the historiography of wikipedia got me thinking that the FDLP, over the last almost 200 years, has been creating, preserving and giving access to a historiography of the US government. It's no hyperbole that this historiography is really important. As we've said many times, the change of format from paper to digital does not mean that libraries no longer need to participate in the historiography of the FDLP. Rather it's even more critical. Won't you join the 20 libraries (and growing!) of the LOCKSS-USDOCS project in continuing to participate in this critical FDLP historiography, this massively important Government document changelog?
[Originally heard from RossK and Judell!] Continue reading
Lunchtime listen: Malamud’s 10 rules for radicals
Here's a way to spend an enjoyable lunchtime: watch Carl Malamud give his Keynote address "10 Rules for Radicals" to the WWW2010 Conference in Raleigh, NC on April 30, 2010 -- and if you've got more time, you can also watch all of the law.gov workshops over on Carl's Internet governance space at the Internet Archive! Certainly some great rules to live by!!
- Call everything "an experiment."
- When the authorities finally fire the starting gun, run as fast as you can.
- Eyeballs rule.
- When you achieve your objective, don't be afraid to turn on a dime and be nice.
- Keep asking, keep rephrasing the question until they *can* say yes.
- When you get the microphone, make sure you make your point clearly and succinctly.
- Get standing. one can criticize all one wants, but if you can document malfeasance and wrongdoing, they have to talk to you.
- Try to get the bureaucrats to threaten you (related to rule 7).
- Look for over-reaching.
- Don't be afraid to fail
Lunchtime listen: Martin Luther King’s “I have a dream” speech
Tomorrow (August 28) is the anniversary of Martin Luther King's famous [w:I Have a Dream] speech on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial during the [w:March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom]. It was a defining and high-water moment for the civil rights movement and one of the greatest speeches in American history. Please take a few minutes to watch (and/or read) King's famous speech. It's a great reminder of the better angels in each of us.
A quick look at the bigger picture
For those of us who spend our lunchtimes wandering around the internet, TED Talks are an excellent and often-inspiring diversion. In a February 2010 talk, David Cameron discussed the relationship between politics and behavioral economics, arguing that the technology-driven empowerment of citizens ultimately increases their well-being. Whether or not you agree with Cameron's political perspective, and whether or not you agree with his assessment of human nature, his description of the relationship between "people power," and transparency, choice, and accountability is an interesting one. He points to the Missouri Accountability Portal as an excellent example of public access to technology resulting in public empowerment. Incidentally, Cameron promised a site that would track all government spending over £25,000, and all government contracts. Public spending data is now available in the Combined Online Information System (COINS) database. The UK government portal, direct.gov.uk, links to some guidance on using COINS, which indicates that the pledge about publicizing spending should be fulfilled by November 2010. It also indicates that user-friendly access options for some data subsets will be in place by August 2010. You can watch the video here, or view the video with subtitles and an interactive transcript on the TED Talks site.
- David Cameron: The next age of government. Filmed February 2010.
Latest Comments