Defense Department Social Media Links
Here is an interesting collection of officially unofficial military blogs, facebook, flickr, myspace, and delicious pages, youtube channels, twitter accounts, and more.
- DoD Social Media (Defense.gov "Registered Sites")
The appearance of external hyperlinks does not constitute endorsement by the United States Department of Defense of the linked web sites, or the information, products or services contained therein. For other than authorized activities as military exchanges and Morale, Welfare and Recreation (MWR) sites, the United States Department of Defense does not exersise any editorial control over the information you may find at these locations. All links are provided consistent with the mission of Defense.gov.While these quasi-official social media channels are at least quasi-official, there is even more, less-official, information coming soon. A Twitter thread on Gov 2.0 has been hot recently asking the question, "What if every govt employee have a blog?" and referring to this O'Reilly post: Why Posterous Is a Smart Tool For Informal Government Blogging. See also: Lost Conversations, Lost Decisions, Lost History. Continue reading
More on Congressional Committee Webcast Archives
Josh Tauberer has a follow up to his earlier post on Congressional Video. In it he quotes and notes:
> With the exception of distinct 'direct download' links on the House > Energy Committee page, committees' technology choices stand in the > way of reuse or archival. Saving streams from the various proprietary > protocols used by committees requires specialized tools which may > violate DMCA. Given the public domain status of these videos, formats > and technologies which encourage -- rather than defeat -- archival > and reuse by citizen/users should be adopted. To reiterate some of that: it may be illegal to make copies of some of these videos under the DMCA law because the videos are provided in particular proprietary formats. That is so even if the committee says it is ok to copy it.and suggests:
* For the sake of archives and use by professional journalists, provide a stream that is high-quality (it probably exists but just isn't public). * Similarly, provide the streams at least additionally in a format that does not make it a violation of federal law to copy (again, it's a problem regardless of whether the committee says "go ahead"). * Remove any additional assertions (e.g. House Rules) on how congressional video may be used. Either it is public or it is not. It is an affront to free speech if Congress thinks government records, of all things, should be off-limits to any part of public discourse. * Partner with experts in the public --- e.g. Aphid and Carl Malamud --- on establishing goals for congressional video.Continue reading
Lost Conversations, Lost Decisions, Lost History
Oliver Bell summarizes the issue of new forms of government communication and the need for new ways of preserving them:
- Lost Conversations, Lost Decisions, Lost History..., by Oliver Bell, TalkStandards (November 13, 2009)
Work needs to begin on archiving standards that will retain the information that is driving decisions today and as technology plays an increasingly larger role in the business of government archiving standards needs to be a core part of systems design, not a problem that we try and solve after the fact.One important element of this issue is Title 44 of the US Code that defines what GPO and the FDLP can handle. Its definitions limit what we can archive within those boundaries of the FDLP. But... if we had digital deposit, GPO could deposit official Title-44-approved content in FDLP digital libraries and those libraries could combine that content with non-Title-44 (Gov-2.0) content. GPO can't do this because of the limits of Title 44, but individual FDLP libraries have the flexibility to build their own collections combining Title 44 content with other content. We can do this today without changing the law. But we need digital deposit to make those collections rich and useful. Continue reading
A Smart Tool For Informal Government Blogging?
When technology makes a difference: How about a blog that uses email as a way of posting? "For government employees, it could be a breath of life in an otherwise locked-down state of cybersecurity affairs. "
- Why Posterous Is a Smart Tool For Informal Government Blogging, by Mark Drapeau, O'Reilly Radar (Oct 19, 2009).
Confused about RDF? Semantic Web? Linked Data? Don’t be. Read this!
Here is an excellent article on these important technologies:
- The Web's next act: A worldwide database. by Jackson, Joab. Government Computer News, November 9, 2009.
...the idea of machine-readable data can be a hard sell to people who are unfamiliar with the idea. The idea of Linked Data, like the idea of a World Wide Web when it was first introduced, "solves a problem we didn't know we had," said Ronald Reck, head of consulting firm Rrecktek. In other words, many of the benefits offered by the then-nascent Web, such as the ability to share documents, was already offered through other technologies, such as the File Transfer Protocol. Likewise, it is difficult to understand the concept of a single format for Web-based data when plenty of formats such as relational databases and spreadsheets already annotate data in ways that make it reusable by other systems. ...Berners-Lee said that to use an API, a systems administrator or developer must write a program for the data to be accessible. With RDF, a Web browser should be able to reuse the data, requiring no additional work on the part of users.See also: 13 resources for government Linked Data. 2 examples of how government data linking can work. Continue reading