Home » Posts tagged 'transition' (Page 4)
Tag Archives: transition
Lost in Transition
The National Journal and Government Executive have created a new web site, Lost in Transition, for "Helping you navigate the Presidential Handover." Categories currently covered include: Appointments, Earlybird, Events, Insider Interview, Paper Trail, and The Short List. Continue reading
Tell Change.gov to…change
You may have noticed some of our recent blog posts that discuss the copyright status of the President-elect's website, Change.gov, as well as the vanishing contents of the website, among other concerns. We here at FGI created a standard letter for you to use (see below) if you wish to contact Change.gov and let them know your concerns. You can email the change.gov website by going to their Contact page at: http://www.change.gov/page/s/contact If you do contact them, let us know in the comments of this post so that we have an idea on how many emails have been sent. Thanks!
Hello, I strongly urge you to change the copyright statement on your site to clearly state that all information on the site is in the public domain. According to Copyright Law 17 U.S.C. ยง 105, "Copyright protection under this title is not available for any work of the United States Government." Since the site is in the .gov domain, people expect the material on the site to have been produced by government employees and thus as being in the public domain. If the bulk of material at change.gov was not created by federal employees, then I suggest that you post a blog entry explaining why your material is under copyright. You should also explore moving your content to a .org domain, which internet users understand can have copyrighted material. It would be ok to leave a redirect from change.gov to the new site as long as the new site was clearly labeled non-government. There has been much discussion over this matter at the Free Government Information website, which you can read about here: http://freegovinfo.info/taxonomy/term/876. Thank you for your prompt attention to this matter. Sincerely, Rebecca Blakeley Government Documents LibrarianUPDATE: Removed the portion of this template letter that asked for them to return the missing "Agenda" pages of the website. They've been restored! Continue reading
change.gov continues to disappoint
In spite of the optimism about technology policy (See for example, Obama preparing comprehensive technology policy, By Hiawatha Bray The Boston Globe, International Herald Tribune, November 12, 2008), the site continues to disappoint me. Today I was searching on the site and got this message when I composed my second search: You are only allowed to search every 15 seconds. Really? I continue to hope that they will fix problems and copyright claims. Maybe this isn't a harbinger of things to come but just one of many temporary transition problems. Continue reading
ObamaCTO.org
Are you wondering who President-elect Barack Obama will appoint as the country's first Chief Technology Officer (CTO)? Want to voice your opinion on what their top priorities should be? Then check out ObamaCTO.org and have your say! The website enables you to create an account, post your idea, comment on other ideas, and vote up to 10 times to help rank the ideas posted. I've noticed some of the ideas posted may not relate to what a CTO might do or be in charge of, but maybe those will get ranked out! Or maybe they could be potential priorities in the future. Who knows? What are some responsibilities of this future CTO? Well, I wish I could tell you, but the "agenda" for Technology page, including information about a CTO, is "not available right now" according to the change.gov website. Oh, the irony! But the Obama/Biden campaign website has some information still up on this issue of technology and a CTO where they state that:
Obama will appoint the nation's first Chief Technology Officer (CTO) to ensure that our government and all its agencies have the right infrastructure, policies and services for the 21st century. The CTO will ensure the safety of our networks and will lead an interagency effort, working with chief technology and chief information officers of each of the federal agencies, to ensure that they use best-in-class technologies and share best practices.Tip o' the hat to BoingBoing.net for posting about this new website. Continue reading
Lessons from Change.gov
NextGov's Tech Insider has a comment on the problems at Change.gov:
- Lessons from Change.gov, By Gautham Nagesh, Tech Insider, November 11, 2008.
The fact that so many sites have posted cached versions of the deleted web pages just drives the point home further; in this day and age, nothing you post on the Internet is going to go away quickly just because you pull it off your server.While there are ad-hoc caches here and there of some of the change.gov pages that have been removed, does anyone know where they are? Can a citizen find them? How long will it be before those ad-hoc copies are removed because whoever saved them loses interest or shuts down their blog or runs out of money or...? One conclusion that can we draw from this is that ad-hoc solutions are inadequate. Sure, some blogger may have saved a copy of one of the Agenda pages Change.gov removed, and another may have saved another, but this is no way to do systematic preservation. We are lucky that the Dot Gov Harvest is harvesting the Change.gov site, and I think Starr will post information about public access to those crawls here at FGI soon. But harvesting web sites is not a complete solution either. Harvesting is imperfect and incomplete. Links can break, embedded content can be lost, databases can prohibit or inhibit crawls of their content, and crawls can only save occasional snapshots of dynamic sites. There is a solution that is less ad-hoc and more comprehensive: governments need to actively deposit their content at the time of production with depository libraries. We read so often of libraries trying to "redefine" themselves in the digital age and trying to justify their existence to people who think that google is a library, that ad-hoc solutions to preservation are good enough, and that the government will provide free access to all of its information forever for free. For those librarians who don't believe all those myths, here is a simple way to reinvent your library: insist on digital deposit by the government and establish your library as a digital Federal DEPOSITORY Library. Continue reading
Latest Comments