Crowdsourcing challenge: Who started the open data initiative?
I was recently thinking about the diffusion process behind open data initiatives. Local and federal governments across the world are incorporating their versions of "free data." This movement has even travelled up north, such as in the village I currently reside in; which released its first batch of data on November 2009. It seems all too coincidental that many levels of government adopted "free data" soon after the launch of Data.gov by the U.S. government in May 2009. Some questions that pop into my mind are: 1. When and where exactly did this open data movement originate from? 2. Are left-wing local/federal governments stronger supporters of this policy? I invite the readers to share any insight they have regarding these (open?) questions. Continue reading
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
Is the hype behind E-Government justified?
Before I begin, I would like to first thank Mr. Jacobs for the opportunity to contribute to this blog. Hopefully I can provide some new perspectives about government information through the eyes of an (aspiring) economist. There is no doubt that E-Government is all the rage these days. One justification for E-Government is that technology makes government more transparent, and transparency deters corruption. To the best of my knowledge, there are actually few studies that look at whether E-Government actually prevents the government from behaving badly. There is one recent study by Anderson in Information Economics and Policy that attempts to identify this relationship. Using an indexes for corruption and E-Government, he confirms that E-Government can indeed reduce corruption, even after "controlling for any propensity for corrupt governments to be more or less aggressive in adopting e-government initiatives." (pg 210) A broader claim one may extrapolate from this study is that transparency prevents corruption. E-Government acts as a mechanism for transparency, in a similar manner as media/press. That said, a study by Snyder and Stromberg finds that American politicians don't work as hard (for their constituents) if they receive less press coverage. One advantage of E-Government is that the government knows more about their inner workings than information starved reporters. The trade-off though is that government can cherry-pick what information is revealed; why would any rational corrupt government official agree to reveal information that supports claims of his bad behavior? To that end, reporters in search for political scandals are more likely to shine the light on bad behavior than E-Government. Continue reading
August 2010 Lost Docs Report and Appeal
A special appeal to lostdocs reporters: please try to send us your report receipts the same day you receive them from GPO. While all reports are appreciated, sending reports as you receive them makes for a smoother workflow that better reflects when lostdocs/document discovery reports are received by GPO. If you use Microsoft Outlook for e-mail, you can set up a rule to send your lostdocs reports to lostdocs@freegovinfo.info automatically. Check out these two YouTube videos to see how to create rules in Outlook:
REPORT August 2010 was a deceptively light month. We only posted nine lostdocs reports. I say "deceptively light" because we received only a handful of reports until late August, when we received approximately 50 reports in two days. These reports were made from late June through late August. What couldn't be posted for August is being posted for September. Don't let this backlog stop you from sending us your current reports. I'm excited to report that of the nine reports we were able to post last month, four were quickly cataloged by GPO. You can view this list by visiting lostdocs.freegovinfo.info/category/found/ and looking at the postings with August 2010 dates. We are appreciative of these new records and note that the cataloged documents were all oil spill related. GPO is matching effort to newsworthiness and we commend them for it. No false positives were found in our small sample. APPEAL If you like the concept of a public listing of fugitive documents reported to GPO, there are a number of easy ways to help us:
- If you report a fugitive document to GPO, send your e-mailed receipt to lostdocs@freegovinfo.info. We welcome any item reported to GPO in the past month. It is best if you can send us the receipt the same day you get it from GPO. Some e-mail programs will support auto-forwarding. If so, please consider autoforwarding items where the subject contains "lostdocs submission."
- Visit the blog at lostdocs.freegovinfo.info and comment on the listed items. Comments can include -- Did your library receive the item? Did you find it in the CGP? Do you think the item is out of scope for the CGP? Did you report the item as well and so on.
- Post the blog link to your website or share it on Facebook, Twitter, or other social media.
- Subscribe to the blog feed at lostdocs.freegovinfo.info/feed/ or better yet incorporate the feed into your website or blog.