Won’t Get Fooled Again: Day 23
Tapping back into the "raw power" theme, I just read the New York Times article on Carl Malamud mentioned here by Jim Jacobs. I found the article curious for the simple reason that it equates "free" access to massive amounts of court records with power, and a good form of power, or what he calls the "operating system for democracy." Though this kind of rhetoric sparks the necessary energy to get people to leave their couches and join the open government brigade at the barricade, I think it also paints a too simplistic picture of the complex arrangement of constitutional and legal traditions that favor a highly evolved civic engagement. Missing from the newspaper article's description of what happened to the PACER pilot project and its sudden suspension is the more messy aspects of democracy that try to balance privacy with open access, free access with the necessary infrastructure (that requires money and personnel to function) to sustain long-term availability of "raw data." This balancing act depends on a series of relationships between the courts, users, the GPO and its depository libraries. Simply downloading millions of pages, as one person did in California is not a relationship, it is simply a power surge that may or may not be made useful by people on the information grid. However, as the article points out, Malamud does demand some level of privacy protection in these court documents, he puts that responsibility squarely back on the shoulders of the courts by pointing out that is the court's duty, and heavy lifting, to make sure this private information is not made publicly available. What I would expect to see, if indeed Malamud is interested in becoming a future Public Printer is less focus on the power aspects of the information grid, and more focus on the redistribution stations necessary to make government information understandable, accessible, and sustainable over long periods of time. Libraries have done this for several millennium, and they will continue to do so with the different technologies now being deployed. It isn't a race to see who can make the most government information available. It should be a long engaged relationship between those in power and those the power serves to assure that the knowledge, information and necessary data are understood and usable by the citizen. Power without breakers or distribution centers only overwhelms, it does not inform. Continue reading
Won’t Get Fooled Again: Day 22
The thing that strikes me as I look through the hundreds of pages of the "American Recovery and Reinvestment Act" is simply this -- how is any normal human being going to deal with this mishmash of legalese, policy descriptions, and billions upon billions of dollars in budget figures? When we speak of the power of "raw data" the positive and pragmatic benefit of government information distribution rests primarily on the ability of people to do something with it. This action can not be determined by the power's distribution mechanism (much in the same way ComEd here in Illinois can't tell me which devices in my home I can and can not turn on -- they just charge me for the overall electricity I use.) Traditional libraries (paper and print universe) functioned much the same way -- people picked and chose information or media depending on what their particular needs might be. Librarians may intervene by limiting who can use the services, how many items can be used, or help users sort out what they might want to use. The power of text clouding, or the ability to pull out different stands of information from a large and complicated information object -- such as what ProPublica did for the stimulus bill -- moves the power relationship from one of passive distribution dominated by personal choices to passive distribution influenced by deliberative contextualizing by a third party. In other words, this third party takes the "raw data" and refines it into another kind of information by-product that might be more significant or meaningful to users. In fact, I would argue many traditional government information sources (i.e. Public Papers of the Presidents, congressional committee reports, Foreign Relations of the United States, Federal Register, or the Code of Federal Regulations) are of this type. What the web offers is the opportunity to make and distribute a wider variety of public information by-products. See you Day 23. Continue reading
Still no official word on PACER project
An article in the New York Times adds a little more to the story of the Public Access to Court Electronic Records (PACER) saga. The article also says of Carl Malamud: "Mr. Malamud said his years of activism had led him to set a long-shot goal: serving in the Obama administration, perhaps even as head of the Government Printing Office."
- An Effort to Upgrade a Court Archive System to Free and Easy, By JOHN SCHWARTZ, New York Times, February 13, 2009.
Those courts, with the help of the Government Printing Office, had opened a free trial of Pacer at 17 libraries around the country. Mr. Malamud urged fellow activists to go to those libraries, download as many court documents as they could, and send them to him for republication on the Web, where Google could get to them. Aaron Swartz, a 22-year-old Stanford dropout and entrepreneur who read Mr. Malamud's appeal, managed to download an estimated 20 percent of the entire database: 19,856,160 pages of text. Then on Sept. 29, all of the free servers stopped serving. The government, it turns out, was not pleased. A notice went out from the Government Printing Office that the free Pacer pilot program was suspended, "pending an evaluation." A couple of weeks later, a Government Printing Office official, Richard G. Davis, told librarians that "the security of the Pacer service was compromised. The F.B.I. is conducting an investigation." ...At the administrative office of the courts, a spokeswoman, Karen Redmond, said she could not comment on the fate of the free trial of Pacer, or whether there had been a criminal investigation into the mass download. The free program "is not terminated," Ms. Redmond said. "We'll just have to see what happens after the evaluation."See also Why was PACER suspended? and More on PACER. Continue reading
The Stimulus Deal: The Latest Tally
The reporters at ProPublica have done a great job of comparing the House, Senate, and Conference versions of the Stimulus bill as best they can given that we don't yet have a copy of the final version of the bill. Check out their chart of changes:
- The Stimulus Deal: The Latest Tally, by Michael Grabell, ProPublica, February 12, 2009.
Well, we wanted to tell you what’s in the final, $789 billion stimulus package, but guess what? The bill still hadn't been released as of late Thursday. So the best we can do is this partial account, which is based on summaries released so far. Where an item is blank, it means we don't yet have the figure.Continue reading
A non-partisan U.S. Census Bureau
For fascinating, provocative reading about where the Census Bureau will reside in the federal government organization, read the Feb 10, 2009 Wall Street Journal: "Why Obama Wants Control of the Census: Counting Citizens is a Powerful Political Tool" (author: John Fund). http://online.wsj.com/article/SB123423384887066377.html. Serious changes may be happening, and more quickly than imagined. Even the seven former Census directors who support turning the Census into an independent agency recommended doing so after the 2010 Census. To quote the article, "[S]tatisticians at the Commerce Department didn't think [Obama's changes] would mean having the director of next year's Census report directly to the White House rather than to the Commerce secretary." Lots of food for thought. Continue reading