Cloudy Daze
There has been a recent uptick in the movement toward and the hype about cloud computing. The federal government's embrace of cloud computing with its apps.gov store for agencies to easily obtain cloud computing resources is, perhaps, the most visible. A couple of recent articles provide context and realism to the hyperbole.
- Legal Implications of Cloud Computing - Part One (the Basics and Framing the Issues), By David Navetta, InfoSecCompliance Blog (September 12, 2009). (Also available on LLRX).
Bottom line: this is not your father's outsourcing relationship, and trying to protect clients with contracts may be very difficult or impossible unless the cloud computing community begins to build standards and processes to create trust. ...there is going to be incredible financial pressure on organizations to take advantage of the pricing and efficiency of cloud computing and if attorneys fail to understand the issues ahead of time there is a serious risk of getting "bulldozed" into cloud computing arrangements without time or resources to address some serious legal issues that are implicated.
- Demystifying Cloud Computing for Higher Education, by Richard N. Katz, Philip J. Goldstein, and Ronald Yanosky, ECAR Research Bulletin, Volume 2009, Issue 19 (September 22, 2009) [membership required].
Public clouds are profit-driven and are most effective with those services that are highly commodified. If an IT service can be offered in a standardized fashion without special regard to end user variations, or to local, state, regional, or even national regulatory differences, then that service can be offered as an undifferentiated commodity service—presumably at a great price. In such a case, the dominant legal principle is likely to be caveat emptor—buyer beware—backed by standard contract language shielding the provider from any significant liabilities for process failures or data corruption and loss. ...The challenges and risks that will constrain higher education’s adoption of cloud computing relate to trust, confidence, and surety. ...Notwithstanding the near unanimous belief that cloud computing is an important enabler of a fundamental shift in the organization and economics in enterprise IT, the (non-hyperbolic) literature and the discussion with community leaders also make clear that at present the topic is mired in hype and near-utopian optimism.
FCC chair Genachowski emphasizes support for net neutrality
We've been tracking net neutrality for a while but it seems to have gone below the radar. That is, until today when Julius Genachowski, chairman of the Federal Communications Commission (FCC), gave a speech at the Brookings Institution in Washington D.C. and presented a series of open-access principles, emphasizing, among other things, net neutrality. And groups like Save the Internet cheered!
Genachowski added 2 principles to the FCC's original 4 principles of network freedom mapped out by Michael Powell in 2005 (see other 4 below):
(the other 4 principles are: (1) consumers are entitled to access the lawful Internet content of their choice; (2) consumers are entitled to run applications and services of their choice, subject to the needs of law enforcement; (3) consumers are entitled to connect their choice of legal devices that do not harm the network; and (4) consumers are entitled to competition among network providers, application and service providers, and content providers. See TechlawJournal for background)
On a side note, the speech was posted to the FCC's beta site called OpenInternet.gov built to "facilitate input and participation in the commission proceedings as this discussion evolves."
Gov 2.0 Summit: Report from the Outside
This post follows my September 18th post, Gov 2.0 Expo Showcase: Govies Represent. The Gov 2.0 Summit, sponsored by O'Reilly Media and TechWeb and held in Washington, DC on September 9th and 10th, was a Big Event--particularly for those who were there. Lots of blogging, lots of tech press coverage. It was full of big tech invitees and priced too high for the average local government webmaster or civic hacker. And me. So this is a view from the outside. Fortunately, videos from many of the conference sessions are available on the Summit website. You can review the full schedule of sessions and click on "Read more" to link to videos and any other material available for a session. One of the highlights, based on the chatter, was Carl Malamud's By the People... talk. The Summit website does not have it, but the video of Malamud's talk has been posted to his own site and is linked from FGI as a lunchtime listen. Here is a sampling of some of the videos available: Rapid Fire: Setting the Stage, esteemed panel presents 2.0 examples GeoEnabling Gov 2.0, Jack Dangermond, founder and president of ESRI Creating an Effective Platform, John Markoff of NY Times interviews the father of the Internet, the co-founder of Twitter, and Facebook's DC rep Based on the tweets, the Gov 2.0 Summit attendees seemed to be genuinely ecstatic about the show and new to many of the existing projects and the landscape of government information. Whether they see a market here is another question. For more coverage, check out the Summit website's long list of links to news articles about the conference. Continue reading
Employer Health Benefits 2009 Annual Survey
A recent non-government health care survey is a good complement to the recent Current Population Report P60 series report (see: Health Insurance Coverage: 2008):
- Employer Health Benefits: 2009 Annual Survey, Kaiser Family Foundation (Kaiser) and the Health Research & Educational Trust (HRET).
Among those that offer benefits, large percentages of firms report that in the next year they are very or somewhat likely to increase the amount workers contribute to premiums (42%), increase deductible amounts (36%), increase office visit cost sharing (39%), or increase the amount that employees have to pay for prescription drugs (37%).See also: You Have No Idea What Health Costs By Ezra Klein, Washington Post (September 20, 2009). "The most important health-care document released this week was not Sen. Max Baucus's Healthy Future Act. It was the Kaiser Family Foundation's 2009 Employer Benefits Survey." Continue reading
USPTO latest agency looking to outsource their data
[UPDATE: Michael Keller, University Librarian at Stanford University (and my boss), wrote a letter to USPTO as well. Thanks Carl for posting it to scribd.] Carl Malamud made me aware (see his letter to USPTO CIO John Owens below) of a posting on FedBizOpps of a Request for Information (RFI) from the US Patent and Trademark Office:
"This RFI seeks to obtain information from interested parties, including the vendor community, about potential opportunities to acquire patent and trademark data in bulk (my emphasis) and to provide such data to the public without cost. The USPTO is seeking comments on the identified problem and solutions that will make the data available to the public without charge."While there is mention in the RFI of IP data being easily accessible to the public, there's no mention of data.gov. This seems to be purely a "no-cost" way for USPTO to upgrade their IT infrastructure by giving away public domain information. This is worrisome on so many levels as it is just one more example of a government agency looking to outsource and privatize public domain information *and* its IT infrastructure -- see for example the Thomson West contract with the GAO to digitize their legislative histories. Additionally, in a vague nod to transparency, USPTO will be holding 1 (yes only 1) vendor information meeting on Sept 24. I'm not sure how USPTO thinks that a 2 week notice for a meeting held in DC will help the cause of transparency. Shouldn't they have several meetings in different geographic locations to talk about such a huge and important public resource (nearly 2 petabytes of data!!)? Luckily, this is only at the RFI stage, not RFP stage. USPTO is currently only looking for information on how to do this. This is the time for the government information/transparency communities to submit ideas for how the USPTO could make their patent information available *without* giving it away to vendors. Please contact the USPTO at the addresses below and give them ideas for making their data open, standardized and freely available in bulk. Public Meeting:
Thursday, 24 September 2009
9:00 a.m. -11:00 a.m.
USPTO Campus in the Madison Auditorium
600 Dulany Street
Alexandria, VA, 22314 Contracting Office Address:
P. O. Box 1450 - Mail Stop 6
600 Dulany Street, MDE, 7th Floor
Alexandria, Virginia 22313-1450 Primary Point of Contact.:
publicdatadissemination@uspto.gov
Secondary Point of Contact:
V. Anne Tugbang,
Contracting Officer
vanne.tugbang@uspto.gov
Phone: 5712726550
Fax: 5712736550