Data from city governments on data.gov
The federal government's data portal data.gov has a space for American cities to make their data available: cities.data.gov. Data from four cities, Chicago, New York, San Francisco, and Seattle, are available so far.
- Cities.Data.gov Showcasing the applications and opportunities for harnessing the power of open data across the nation. City officials and developers working together to help improve the information available to city residents. Data in Cities.Data.Gov is not federal data.
- We Want You: City Data Edition, by Nate Berg, The Atlantic Cities (Aug 02, 2012). The new clearinghouse features thousands of openly accessible data streams, including information on building permits filed in these cities, a regularly updated feed of Seattle Fire Department 911 dispatches, budget documents and tons of maps of things like parks, film locations and building footprints. Chicago has 1,826 data feeds on the site, New York has 1,087, Seattle has 711, and San Francisco has 310. The federal government has made 6,560 of their own available.
FCC’s digital outreach
The Federal Communications Commission (FCC) posted a summary of its "digital firsts" over the last few years on its blog yesterday. This short piece gives a sense of the digital shift in government in a very short time. Two thousand tweets, Facebook, Flickr, online datasets, online maps, broadcast inspection files (!), APIs, LinkedIn, blogs, RSS feeds, etc.
- Digital Firsts, by David Robbins, Managing Director, Official FCC Blog (August 15th, 2012).
DMCA overkill: NASA video of Mars removed from YouTube
Hours after NASA's successful landing on Mars of its Mars rover, one of NASA's official clips from the mission was pulled from YouTube, and replaced with a notice from the video site indicating that the "video contains content from Scripps Local News, who has blocked it on copyright grounds." The video was replaced and Scripps apologized, but it is an example of how the scale are tipped in favor of the "content industry" and even obvious, public-domain content gets caught in the privatization of information trap. EFF has the background on the technology and how it works:
- Mars Landing Videos, and Other Casualties of the Robot Wars, by Parker Higgins, Electronic Frontier Foundation (Aug 8, 2012). [T]he problem likely lies not with the DMCA itself, but with the additional (and voluntary) automated Content ID system YouTube has developed. Content ID uses digital fingerprinting technology to identify duplicate audio and video on YouTube and, depending on the "business rules" configuration of the designated rightsholder, blocks or places ads next to videos. Unfortunately, the robots behind that copyright enforcement machine have the tendency to shoot first and ask questions later, even when it ends up silencing real -- human -- speech. Continue reading
California Suspends Open Meetings Law to Save Money
It costs money (at least in the short run) to make governments open and transparent. Even if open government is better for democracy and cost-efficient and cost-effective in the long run, governments may use the short-term cost as an excuse to curtail openness. OMB Watch reports that, as part of its Budget Act of 2012 (passed in June), California suspended the state's open meetings law for the next three years in an effort to cut state expenditures. The California open meetings law "requires cities and other agencies to publish the agendas of public meetings before they occur and make the minutes of these meetings available to citizens after they occur." As OMB Watch says, "In suspending the law, the state is sacrificing not only a fundamental element of a democratic society, but a vital tool that can actually save money."
- California Suspends Open Meetings Law to Save Money, OMB Watch (August 14, 2012). The state, facing increasingly tight budgets, suspended the law to save money. Under state rules, California is required to reimburse cities and counties for the cost of complying with mandated requirements, which includes its open meetings requirements. However, California has not reimbursed local governments for open meetings costs since 2005, accumulating a debt estimated at $96 million. By suspending the open meetings provision in the Brown Act, California expects to avoid paying open meetings costs for the next three years, as well as eliminate the current debt owed to local governments.
August 2012 LoC Digital Preservation newsletter now available
Hot off the presses, the August 2012 Library of Congress Digital Preservation Newsletter is now available. In this issue:
Happy reading! Continue reading
- Summary of DigitalPreservation 2012
- Rescuing the Tangible from the Intangible
- From AIP to Zettabyte: Comparing Glossaries
- One Family's Digital Archiving Project
- Fighting the Battle for Fleeting Attention
- Profile of William Kilbride
- Training Digital Curators
- Upcoming Events (Designing Storage Architectures, NDIIPP at Book Festival and others)
- Meetings Roundup (Open Repositories, Preserving Online Science, Data Intensive Research)
- Resources (Digital Disaster Planning, Digital Preservation in a Box, and others)