Winners of Sunlight’s Design Government Contest
The Design for America Winners, by Clay Johnson, Sunlight Labs (05/26/2010).
The Design for America contest led to the most compelling, interesting visualizations of any of our contests. With about 72 entries, the design community stepped up and showed amazing ways for us to view government and imagine new ways for government to serve citizens. All in all, our winners were wonderful -- each entry is a different vision of how government could be. Each entry either shows us how government could look or how government does work.Continue reading
PACER updates
There is no new good news about PACER (Public Access to Court Electronic Records), but at least the issues are being aired and investigated. On Tuesday, June 22, the Advisory Committee on Transparency will host a briefing entitled “Transparency Made Easy: How to Make the Government More Open and Accountable” (announcement). There are useful background documents about PACER listed in the announcement:
- One pager description of The Problem with PACER, Princeton University, June 15, 2010
- What Does It Cost to Provide Electronic Public Access to Court Records, Stephen Schultze, May 29, 2010
- Electronic Public Access Fees and the United States Federal Courts’ Budget: An Overview, September 4, 2009, Working Paper by Stephen? Schultze.
- RECAP "Better Access to Public Court Records." (RECAP is a free extension for Firefox that improves the experience of using PACER, the electronic public access system for the U.S. Federal District and Bankruptcy Courts.)
This is BIG: GPO + LOCKSS (update)
Last week, James made a modest announcement of the biggest development in digital deposit in decades.
This means that GPO is assisting the LOCKSS-USDOCS project in preserving content harvested from fdsys.gov. That means we are developing a geographically distributed network of digital archives. There are already 18 libraries participating, including 4 regionals. As James pointed out, this "replicates key aspects of the FDLP in the digital environment and furthers the concept of 'digital deposit,' an essential component of the digital FDLP." One indicator of the importance of this project in the world of digital preservation is that the Association of Computing Machinery's technology newsletter, ACM TechNews, lists the project today.- Stanford Helps to Digitally Preserve Mountains of Documents, ACM TechNews, June 21, 2010.
New APIs coming to Data.gov
Data.gov To House New APIs, By Dawn Lim, TechInsider (06/21/10).
A series of new application programming interfaces - tools that facilitate interaction between datasets and other software programs - will make it easier for developers to play and interact with the content on Data.gov, the online repository of federal information and a cornerstone of the open government initiative. But those are just the preliminary steps to establishing a self-running ecosystem that will convert raw government data into valuable content and interesting applications, a White House technology expert said last week at a government IT forum.Continue reading
Data.gov’s plans for map mashups
Data.gov's next big thing: Mashing up federal stats with maps, By Aliya Sternstein, NextGov (06/18/2010). Within the next month, data.gov will offer the public a chance to preview a so-called viewer that will let them combine many of the 270,000 data sets posted on Data.gov with maps. Continue reading