Updated Guides to Government Info Access Laws
Catching up with some updates released in August: CRS has updated its Access to Government Information in the United States report. The latest edition is dated August 31, 2009 (via OpenCRS.com). The Justice Department released its 2009 edition of Department of Justice Guide to the Freedom of Information Act on August 10. The announcement says the "2009 edition contains a newly updated and revised discussion of all aspects of the Freedom of Information Act, as amended by the OPEN Government Act, including the Act's procedural requirements, its exemptions and exclusions, as well as considerations applicable to FOIA litigation." Continue reading
Gov 2.0 Expo Showcase: Govies Represent
Last week's Gov 2.0 Expo conference, run by O'Reilly Media and TechWeb, featured over 25 five-minute presentations by people who have managed government projects -- at all levels of government -- that involve Web 2.0 methods. For the summaries and presentation links related to each speaker, see the full Gov 2.0 Expo schedule; each session title is linked to the relevant information. In 2.0 participatory fashion, attendees texted to vote for the best presentation in each program segment. The winners were: City of Santa Cruz Offers Blueprint for Solving CA Budget Crisis with Social Media - Peter Koht (City of Santa Cruz) txts 4 africa - Merrick Schaefer (UNICEF) Transit 2.0 at BART.gov - Melissa Jordan (Bay Area Rapid Transit) Utah Department of Public Safety Media Portal - Jeff Nigbur (State of Utah, Department of Public Safety) Digital Diplomacy: Understanding Islam through Virtual Worlds - Rita King (Dancing Ink Productions) Of special interest to the FGI audience, Steve Schultze of the Berkman Center for Internet & Society at Harvard discussed RECAP in his presentation, Crowdsourcing Federal Court Transparency. Also of interest, the presentation on EPA's MyEnvironment, MyEnvironment: Environmental Information for Your Community, generated lots of approving noises from the audience. Tim O'Reilly was everywhere at the conference, quickly and respectfully responding to tweets and blog posts critiquing his "Government as a Platform" catch phrase/vision/conversation-starter. His keynote: Opening Keynote: Tim O'Reilly, O'Reilly Media (video, blip.tv) And his "Government as a Platform" talk recorded prior to the conference: The Platform for Change (video, blip.tv) O'Reilly Media must view the Expo Showcase as a success; another has been announced for 2010. The Expo preceded the main event, the Gov 2.0 Summit. I'll have more on that in a later post. Related post: Gov 2.0 Expo and the Apps for America 2 Challenge Winners Continue reading
CRL Free Webcasts on The Future of Primary Sources
The Center for Research Libraries is offering a series of brief (22 minute) webcasts on the broad topic of The Future of Primary Sources during the week of October 5-11. Each of the three webcasts covers a different topic and each will be available at three different times. The three webcasts are "The Historical Record in the Post-Newspaper Age," "Political Science, Sociology, and Economics," and "Chemistry." Each webcast will "survey new and emerging forms of evidence and documentation, profile major organizations that produce and maintain this evidence, and outline the challenges for preservation." Registration is required. See http://www.crl.edu/acls/agenda.asp for links to the schedule and registration and technical details.
The Center for Research Libraries (CRL) is engaged in a series of case studies, funded by the National Science Foundation, to examine the longevity of digital resources. The case studies investigate the conditions that help digital content last for substantial periods of time, as well as the factors that threaten the survival of digital knowledge. To obtain scholarly input on these studies, CRL will hold a series of brief online forums for researchers in the fields of history, social sciences, and chemistry. CRL seeks forum participation from scholars who depend on traditional or electronic source materials. The forums will focus on three major types of research materials: electronic news, social science data, and chemical information.Continue reading
Sunlight calls on GPO to publish The Constitution Annotated in XML
220 Years Later, It’s Time to Publish the Constitution Annotated Online in XML, By Daniel Schuman, Sunlight Foundation, (09/17/09).
The Constitution Annotated has been written by the Library of Congress for nearly 100 years, and contains analysis of nearly 8,000 U.S. Supreme Court cases. Over the decades, GPO has published print versions of this extraordinary resource every two years, with limited electronic versions available from 1992 edition onward. Although the Library of Congress has drafted the Constitution Annotated in XML for a number of years, that data is no longer present when it is published online by GPO.Continue reading
Google’s Role in the Government Cloud
An announcement from Google and more articles about the federal government's cloud computing initiative (see: Feds go for the Clouds) help reveal the advantages and difficulties of the initiative.
- Google Apps and Government, by Matthew Glotzbach, Director, Product Management, Google Enterprise Official Google Enterprise Blog (September 15, 2009).
- Government Steps Into The Cloud, By Charles Babcock InformationWeek (Sept. 15, 2009)
- Google Plans Private Government Cloud, By Thomas Claburn, InformationWeek(September 16, 2009).
While there is agreement on the general outline of cloud computing, security in the cloud needs to be better defined and implemented, Kundra said. ...Users who ship data to the cloud will need contractual guarantees that it will be maintained with the same level of security as it was in-house, but neither vendors nor users are sure yet how such guarantees can be made.Google's announcement addresses some of the issues of security and responsibility. Google says that it intends to build a separate "Dedicated Google cloud for government customers in the US." Claburn reports:
"The government cloud will come from Google-owned-and-operated facilities," said Google Enterprise director of product management Matthew Glotzbach, in a phone interview. "It will be sections of existing facilities. But it will be a fully parallel instance of Google Apps. The difference being we're working with the government to meet the specific needs of government data regulations." ...Google's reticence to allow IT professionals to inspect its data centers as part of their due diligence has been a source of criticism in the past.So, the emphasis in the government announcements is on cost savings and efficency tempered with an awareness of the need for security and accountability. As I said in an earlier post, it seems that this is probably a step forward for government information technology, but it remains to be seen if it is a step forward for government information. Continue reading