Live blogging Naomi Klein: the shock doctrine
Hi all. I'm visiting the University of IL at Urbana Champaign. Lucky for me Naomi Klein is speaking tonight. I'll do my best to keep up with her. If you've not heard Naomi speak, I highly recommend it. Here's her recent interview with Dr Helen Caldicott.
What the Next President Needs to Do for the Internet
There is a great blog post over at the Center for Democracy & Technology's Policy Beta Blog: "Innovation, the Open Internet, and the Next President". It gives an overview of what our new President should do (or not do!) in regards to encouraging innovation and openness of the internet. Some points include:
One of the new president’s first tasks will be to select top officials for executive branch positions. The FCC, the FTC, DoJ, NTIA, and the new Intellectual Property Enforcement Coordinator (created by recently passed legislation) all will have a hand in policies with potentially significant impact on the Internet...
The president also should avoid new copyright policies that fail to protect emerging forms of free expression in the digital realm...
If the next president wants to encourage innovation, preserving the open character of the broadband Internet should be a top priority, right up there with the commonly cited goal of continuing to improve the nation’s broadband infrastructure.I would also add that our new President needs to support digital preservation technologies and standards, as well as digital authentication of documents online. Here is another post on a similar vein: "Next President Has 'Open' Opportunity". The Center for Democracy & Technology also has a page entitled "The Internet in Transition" with a blueprint for keeping the internet open, innovative, and free. Continue reading
Numbers Aren’t Enough: Providing Context
In my first post, I wrote about making information useful for ordinary people. It's been a pleasure and an honor to guest blog here for the past month, and as the month of October is nearly gone, I figure it seems fitting to come back to this subject as my reign as "Blogger of the Month" comes to an end.
Large numbers in particular are difficult to comprehend and the world of government information is full of them: earmarks range from hundreds of thousands to tens of millions of dollars, Barack Obama's fundraising totals have eclipsed six-hundred million dollars, and the $700 billion dollar bailout package had pundits scrambling to describe things that cost $700 billion. The difficulty of explaining just how big some of these numbers are was seen to an absurd end when CNN presented a calculation as to how many McDonald's apple pies could be purchased for each US citizen with such a sum.
One of the most useful ways of putting information in context that I've seen involving government information or anything else are the sparklines at watchdog.net:
These graphics show the statistics of each lawmaker in context, as well as the general shape of the distribution of Congress as a whole. Knowing that a congressperson requested $147 million in earmarks may sound like a lot, but seeing that it puts them outside of the top 100 may provide some useful and much needed context to these numbers. The shape of the line also shows if there is a smooth trend or a sharp jump with a small handful of lawmakers raising or spending drastically more than others.
Hopefully more and more presentations of government information will follow the lead of the terrific watchdog.net and attempt to surround information with relative context so that government information isn't simply available, but understandable.
Continue reading
EconomicRecovery.Gov
www.EconomicRecovery.gov is a resource for the American people to find help to keep their homes, find jobs and protect their savings. It is a multi-agency site supported by the White House, Treasury, Commerce, USDA, Labor, HUD, SBA, and the FDIC. The url redirects to http://www.commerce.gov/NewsRoom/EconomicNews/index.htm?er=true and I found that the site seemed busy and loaded slowly... Continue reading
What to Expect When You’re Electing
We are only one week away from Election Day, and with record turnout expected, there are no doubt still a number of people that have no idea where their polling place is or exactly what will be on their ballot. Campaigns and PACs pay large sums of money to vendors that sell information on district boundaries, and even the US House of Representatives uses a commercial vendor to provide the data that powers their "Who is my Representative?" service. There is no reason why this information should be this difficult to obtain. Google recently announced a project to help voters find their polling locations that makes use of data that a group called the Voting Information Project has asked all states to provide. The Voting Information Project encourages Boards of Elections to standardize and share their voting information including what is on the ballot, where the polling locations are, and the boundaries for all the various jurisdictions. So far only a handful of states (Iowa, Kansas, Maryland, Minnesota, Missouri, Montana, North Carolina, North Dakota, and Ohio) as well as Los Angeles County have published the requested information. Voting information is some of the most important information to help the average citizen participate in our democracy, and the Voting Information Project is doing important work to ensure that this information is as open and widespread as possible. The states already participating should be applauded and the remaining states should be sure that by the time the next election season rolls around, they too are participating fully in the Voting Information Project. For more information on the efforts of the Voting Information Project: visit their website. Continue reading