Lunchtime Listen: Lessig on Change-Congress
Here is a super way to spend your next free lunch hour: watch and listen to Lawrence Lessig give one of his fantastic presentations:
- Changing Congress: Lessons Learned by a Copyright Activist, Lawrence Lessig. 4/2/2008, UCSB. [streaming video, about 1 hour].
He talks about history, politics, technology, copyright, and much more.
When Lessig found that he could not get reasonable changes to copyright law (even the late, eminent economist Milton Friedman said that the importance of stopping excessive copyright extensions was a "no brainer"), he realized there were bigger problems to confront. If Congress can't make the right decision when the problems are easy, how will it make the right decisions when the problems are difficult?
Lessig's new organization is Change-Congress. It is attempting to build tools that will help citizens ("in our pajamas," as Lessig says) create basic reforms in how our government functions. The Change-Congress home page features an interactive map created with data from the Federal Elections Commission and GovTrack.us and Google maps. The goal of the organization is to create tools that both candidates and citizens can use to pledge their support for basic changes to reduce the distorting influence of money in Washington.
Lessig is a professor at Stanford Law School, the founder of Creative Commons and the author of three very important books: Code, The Future of Ideas, and Free culture : how big media uses technology and the law to lock down culture and control creativity.
There are more videos from Change-Congress at: change-congress.blip.tv
If this is the first time you've seen one of Lessig's presentations, you are in for a treat. A colleague of mine called it "mesmerizing." There is a bit more about Lessig's presentation style in an analysis of it by Chris Tunnell on Lessig's blog: A physicist on the "Lessig style", by Chris Tunnell, April 28, 2008.
Continue readingThe Open Source Center (formerly FBIS) is closed to you
Open Source Center Keeps Public in the Dark by Steven Aftergood, Secrecy News, May 19, 2008. Steven Aftergood reports that Federal Government website, Open Source Center, the successor to the Foreign Broadcast Information Service (FBIS) 'has imposed some rather ferocious controls on its unclassified products in order to shield them from public access. Even when its publications are not copyrighted, they are to be “treated as copyrighted” and in any case they “must not be disseminated to the public.”' Continue reading
Help get CRS reports online
OpenCRS has posted another list of "fugitive" Congressional Research Service reports -- reports that are not yet openly available and online. They ask for your help by requesting them from your members of Congress and then uploading them to the OpenCRS. Check out the list and request one that matches the needs of your own library and upload it today! There is even a facebook group for OpenCRS. Continue reading
Legal Information Institutes: model for free open access.
Free public access to legal information has a long history going back to the earliest days of the Web. John Wonderlich describes some of the background in Legal Information as a Global Movement (Open House Project, May 27th, 2008), which also includes 3 videos about the movement. This is excellent, informative, and inspiring! Tom Bruce describes still more of the history here. Continue reading
IASSIST 2008 conference: the technology of data
As you can see by the flurry of blog posts, Shinjoung and I are trying to catch up after an extremely busy week in which we helped out with the International Association for Social Science Information Services & Technology (IASSIST) 34th annual Conference hosted at Stanford University. The workshops and programs (at least what I was able to attend in between running around, helping attendees get settled and work out their technology issues, helping to stream the video into Second Life ...) were extremely interesting. I even got to talk for a few minutes to Catherine Ruggles, one of the plenary speakers, who's the daughter of Richard Ruggles. I told her about scanning the 1965 report from the Social Science Research Council chaired by her father, which seemed to please her! Now I'll have just enough time to catch up on sleep and then it'll be off to Anaheim for the ALA annual conference. I'll be hosting a preconference called Docs2.0, leading a session on digital collections at the International Documents Taskforce (IDTF) meeting, participating in the Publications Committee (anybody want to be the new editor for Documents to the People (DttP) (.doc) or write an article for the new GODORT occasional paper series?!) and generally being in 2 places at once the whole weekend. Please say hi! if you see me running around. There's always time to chat :-) Continue reading