Conference: Limiting Knowledge in a Democracy
This promises to be a very interesting conference! If you are going and will be blogging or tweeting, please let us know. (admin at freegovinfo.info)
- LIMITING KNOWLEDGE IN A DEMOCRACY A Social Research conference at The New School, New York City, February 24-26, 2010. www.socres.org/limitingknowledge
Join award winning journalists, distinguished scholars, and policy makers to examine how the U.S. government and other political and cultural institutions distort or otherwise affect the flow of information. What limits on access to knowledge safeguard our democracy and what limits erode it? Keynote: Seymour Hersh Featured Speakers: Steven Aftergood David D. Aufhauser Ronald Bayer Christopher Capozzola Julie E. Cohen Daniel Ellsberg Peter L. Galison Rebecca Goldstein Glenn Greenwald Dale Jamieson Philip Kitcher Nicholas Lemann Eric Lichtblau Michael Oppenheimer Daniel Sarewitz Jonathan Zittrain Over three days, the conference will investigate how our government and other political and cultural institutions organize, fund, restrict, facilitate, or otherwise affect the flow of knowledge, and examine how limits may support or undermine democracy. Speakers will examine the government and technological structures and mechanisms that limit transparency, the influence of private interests and government over media and the propagation of misinformation, and the host of other powerful forces surrounding policy-making that curtail our knowledge and threaten our privacy. We will also look at other institutions that significantly affect what we can know, what we ought to know and what we should try to know, including the research community itself, as well as the implicit limits located within our culture that strongly influence what we seek to know and what we are content not to know. And, we will discuss the role of whistleblowers and investigative journalism to uphold public accountability. These issues will be addressed from the perspectives of government policy, political science, public health, history, science, economics, media, law, journalism, and philosophy.Continue reading
THOMAS gets significant new features
THOMAS, the legislative information service hosted by the Library of Congress, has announced new long-needed features and enhancements.
These include:- Bookmarking. Yes, it is now easy to save a permanent link to a page in THOMAS.
- Easy sharing. The same toolbar that gives you a permanent URL, has links for sharing a page using popular sites such as Delicious, Facebook, and Twitter.
- New RSS feed: Bills Presented to the President.
- Top Five Bills. "The five most-searched-for bills from the past week will be listed in the center box on the right side of the homepage." They are listed by bill number, but hovering over them gives you a name.
C-SPAN complains about closed health care meetings
C-SPAN complains about private health talks, by Foon Rhee, Boston Globe (January 5, 2010).
Democrats' apparent decision to come up with a final health care bill not only behind closed doors but within a very select group of negotiators is drawing criticism not only from expected quarters, but from the media.Continue reading
Why Did the Bush White House Copy and Print Every Email It Received?
What are the impacts of the government using social networks and other commercial services to communicate with the public and for internal communications? What are the impacts of what is recorded at all when staff knows that their words will be publicly available later? These and other issues are covered in a fascinating overview of the Presidential Records Act:
- Why Did the Bush White House Copy and Print Every Email It Received? It's a Long Story, By Nneoma Amadi-obi, History News Network (Jan. 4, 2010).
A premise — the stewardship and sharing of knowledge…?
Thanks to James for the invitation to blog… I should start out by making clear what I believe to be the ethical foundation for what we do as librarians… Librarianship is founded in two inter-related principles. 1) the stewardship of knowledge and 2) the free, open and effective sharing of knowledge for the common good. Everything we do as professionals flows from – or, at least, should(!) flow from --these two principles. (We can talk later about aberrations…) Stewardship implies thinking comprehensively and synthetically about knowledge and about how knowledge is historically organized but even more importantly, about how knowledge might be organized as it continues to evolve… I hope it is very clear that I am saying explicitly: librarianship is not defined by a physical format (board and rags) or by intellectual domain or by economic or cultural jurisdiction. By implication, stewardship implies a careful consideration of how knowledge is created, of epistemology. I think all good librarians practice epistemology intuitively . A senior scientist for whom I once worked said that he had the uncomfortable feeling that I was “observing” him – and of course, he was right – for many years I have considered ethnography to be an essential part of the librarians role. Though, unlike me, a really skilled librarian-ethnographer is not obvious… What should follow from practical observations is insight and innovation for the benefit of all who seek to use knowledge. As for sharing, the American public library is one of our most fundamental democratic institutions. It embodies the meritocratic notion that every member of our civil society has the right to access to knowledge and should have the freedom to develop knowledge creatively and productively (or even idly and unproductively! – Bertrand Russell, among others, has noted the importance of “idleness” to the creative process – and apparently, Charles Darwin – as he was gestating The Origin of Species -- shot pool with his butler most days… The pool table was next door to his study). The American public library tradition has evolved in parallel with the evolution of science. Both traditions are strongly dependent upon full disclosure, upon full access and upon effective use. In a very fundamental sense, without submission of one’s scientific analysis and data to public scrutiny, one is not practicing science. Similarly in the public sphere, there has been a strong and increasing demand that public policy and decisions taken for the public good, be “evidence-based” . (One might consider Colin Powell's performance before the the UN, just prior to the Iraq War, -- to be a pro forma honoring of this expectation?) In a complexly representative system of government, it is only by provision of the evidentiary basis for policy and decisions that citizens can engage with and evaluate policy and decisions. The importance to access to data as evidence has become critically clear as the discussion of global climate change has progressed… Ultimately not only should the available data as evidence be fully available for examination, but the scientific logic that supports the selection of those data as evidence should also be transparently and usefully available... More, to follow... Continue reading