Less information about Iraq
What the New York times called the "banal bureaucracy of government information" is the day-to-day responsibility of government information professionals. In the last few years, we've seen more and more cases of the government hiding some of the most useful "banal" information. Here is the most recent example:
- U.S. drops Baghdad electricity reports by Noam N. Levey and Alexandra Zavis, Los Angeles Times, July 27, 2007.
As the Bush administration struggles to convince lawmakers that its Iraq war strategy is working, it has stopped reporting to Congress a key quality-of-life indicator in Baghdad: how long the power stays on. ...The change, a State Department spokesman said, reflects a technical decision by reconstruction officials in Baghdad...Continue reading
Creative Commons for Education
Today Creative Commons -- a non-profit organization founded by Laurence Lessig devoted to expanding the range of creative work available for others through copyright reform and the Creative Commons license -- announced ccLearn, a new division devoted to promoting the use of freely copyable materials for classrooms and education. The idea is that in order for Web technologies to truly have a revolutionary impact on education, there needs to be the development of "open educational resources (OER), which in their fullest form should be free, accessible, authoritative, and derivable." Makes perfect sense, no?
Our mission is to minimize barriers to sharing and reuse of educational materials — legal barriers, technical barriers, and social barriers.[Thanks BoingBoing!] Continue reading
- With legal barriers, we advocate for licensing of educational materials under interoperable terms, such as those provided by Creative Commons licenses, that allow unhampered modification, remixing, and redistribution. We also educate teachers, learners, and policy makers about copyright and fair-use issues pertaining to education.
- With technical barriers, we promote interoperability standards and tools to facilitate remixing and reuse.
- With social barriers, we encourage teachers and learners to re-use educational materials available on the Web, and to build on each other’s contributions.
Version control of Congress?
What a great idea! Karl Fogel, an open-source software developer, writer and activist for copyright reform had this to say in a recent New York Times article:
Karl Fogel, president of the Subversion Corporation, which produces open-source version control software, He sees its power to shape public behavior. Think of what version control software could mean for the Congress, he was quoted as saying recently at Tim O’Reilly’s blog . If bills were created under a system where strike-throughs and additions were carefully tracked, the public would know which legislator made which change to a proposed piece of legislation as it made its way through the Capitol. At last, there would be transparency in the legislative process. Best-case scenario, it would shame legislators from inserting language against the public interest and only meant to reward political contributors; at worst, it would make such insertions public and allow the voters to punish the politicians who made them."Crossing Out, for Emphasis" by Noam Cohen. NYT 7/23/07. Continue reading
Hearing On Sensitive But Not Classified Information (1987)
Proving that everything old is new again in terms of information restriction, I came across this title from my federal depository's shelves: Hearing on sensitive but not classified information : Library of Congress, Washington, D.C., Thursday, May 28, 1987 by United States. National Commission on Libraries and Information Science. I thought this part of the introduction was interesting reading:
The difference of opinion was over the means to protect this information. In general, the library and information science communities felt that sensitive material should be classified in order to relieve these communities of the burden of limiting access to information and determining which information should not be made available to foreign nationals or governments. In general, the government and the defense establishment would prefer that the library and information communities exercise a degree of judgement in releasing sensitive data to foreign nationals in order to slow up the flow of valuable technological and other information to the East Bloc. Classifying much of this information would take time and expense for all concerned, as well as limiting the flow of sensitive information to all Americans.In my view the information flowing to the Eastern Bloc couldn't have been that useful since the Warsaw Pact imploded barely two years after this hearing. In this hearing, Sandra K. Peterson of Yale University represented the ALA Government Documents Roundtable (GODORT). Her testimony begins on page 41 of the hearing proceedings. Time constraints keep me from giving you most of Ms. Peterson's testimony, but a key point was that the government's proposed definition of "Sensitive but unclassified" was so broad that GODORT believed "Much of the information that the federal government collects compiles, produces, publishes and disseminates falls within these definitions." Towards the end of her prepared testimony, Ms. Peterson emphasized GODORT's basic position which I believe they hold today. I know we do at FGI:
In summary, GODORT believes that unclassified government information of all formats should be accessible by the American public.Hear, Hear! Now if we could just make the SBU concept go away. Seems like there is more work to do. Continue reading
Emerging geoWeb tools give agencies new ways to put their data to use
This is a really interesting article, particularly for those who have GIS or data mixed in with their government information responsibilities.
- Taking it to the streets by Patrick Marshall, GCN 07/23/07
With the geoWeb, however, the federal government has found itself with two major roles from the get-go. First, federal agencies are providing much of the data behind the geoWeb explosion. Second, government is finding the geoWeb to be an effective way to deliver information directly to citizens via its own Web applications.Don't miss the sidebars: Continue reading