White House Will Post Visitor Logs Online
On September 3, the Obama administration and Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington (CREW) settled four ongoing cases regarding public access to White House visitor records. As a result, for the first time in history records of White House visitors will be released. President Obama issued a statement saying that each month, records of visitors from the previous 90-120 days will be made available online.
- White House Will Post Visitor Logs Online, National Journal, "Tech Daily Dose" (September 4, 2009).
- Obama Administration To Release White House Visitor Records, National Coalition for History (September 4th, 2009).
- White House Takes Huge Step Toward Transparency, By Ellen Miller, Sunlight Foundation (09/04/09).
What is wrong with this picture?
The Executive Office of the President is looking for a private company to archive some of its presidential records. The records in question are those published by EOP on publicly-accessible web sites including social networking sites like Facebook and Twitter. Does this strike anyone else as indicative of a major problem with how the government is approaching records retention and preservation? Will they just call it "outsourcing" and hope that magic word makes all the questions go away? Wouldn't it be easier, more comprehensive, and more authoritative for the government to capture its own records on the way to social networking sites? Its workflow of a) posting to commercial services, b) paying contractors to extract content from those servers and c) reformat it for preservation sounds like very bad planning to me. Surely we need governments to start taking their own communications seriously and create preservable records rather than try to re-create records in order to preserve them. The idea of creating hard-to-preserve records using commercial services and having to go through extra steps to re-capture and re-format the information is doing two things wrong instead of one thing right.
- Web Archive, Solicitation Number: WHO-S-09-0003, Agency: Executive Office of the President, FedBizOps (Aug 21, 2009).
- Administration wants help archiving its Facebook, Twitter content, By Ben Bain, Federal Computer Week (Sep 02, 2009)
- Administration issues solicitation to archive social media content, By Gautham Nagesh, NextGov (09/03/2009).
Happy Labor Day, U.S.!
September 7, 2009 is Labor Day in the U.S., where it is celebrated by not laboring. It's Friday noon on the East Coast, and already I see the drop-off in emails and tweets. Get the facts from: Labor Day Facts for Features from the Census Bureau Labor Day press packet from the Labor Department Continue reading
The Civic Literacy and Public Engagement Buzz
I haven't blogged for FGI in three years. They've made the blogger interface so much sexier (so why don't you volunteer next month?) since 2006, but otherwise all is familiar. And that's the feeling I get when going through the recent stream of reports about civic literacy and public engagement. Not the sexy part, but the fact that some of it is new (or newly documented), but most of it is familiar territory. Three reports discussing civic literacy and citizen engagement recently came out, all within five days of each other. Here's a quick look. Pew Internet released The Internet and Civic Engagement [PDF] on September 1. The report compares the demographics of those traditionally involved in their community affairs and politics offline with the demographics of those actively participating online. It turns out those two groups look pretty much the same until social media use is measured. That's where we find the new netizens. (The report compares groups that have internet access; the focus is on a civic divide rather than a digital divide.) The Association of Research Libraries published Public Engagement, SPEC Kit 312 on August 31. Government or political engagement is not the focus but is one of various types of academic library community outreach discussed. You have to buy the publication, but the table of contents and executive summary [PDF] are online for free and, from what I see, the Government Information Online virtual reference service is mentioned. Finally, the federal government's Institute of Museum and Library Services released Museums, Libraries and 21st Century Skills on August 28. The IMLS report [PDF] covers civic engagement as part of its broader mission "to engage libraries and museums, community stakeholders and policy makers at the national, state and local level in a concerted effort to meet the educational, economic, civic, and cultural needs of communities." The Skills Definitions section of the report identifies the scope of civic literacy as the ability to "participate effectively in civic life through knowing how to stay informed and understanding governmental processes; exercise the rights and obligations of citizenship at local, state, national, and global levels; and understand the local and global implications of civic decisions." Do any of these reports provide you with ideas for action, fodder for justification, or inspiration to ask new questions? Continue reading
POTUS tracker
The Washington Post has an RSS feed called, The POTUS Tracker. It lists events location and events for the President of the United States. There is also a more traditional Calendar view of the President's activities and you can view events by issue, type, and attendees. Continue reading