The OpenHouse Project Op-Eds at The Hill
The first article in a weekly series, exclusively in The Hill, exploring the recommendations of the Sunlight Foundation's Open House Project, which advocates online transparency in Congress is now available.
- Give bloggers Capitol access, by Robert B. Bluey, The Hill, April 30, 2007.
Google + state government documents
"Google and four U.S. states have partnered to improve the amount of data Google indexes from their Web sites and makes available to users of its search engine." "The search giant helps four states get online data indexed and helps create custom search engines for government Web sites." Here are some different perspectives on the work Google is doing with state governments:
- Google courts government sector webmasters Infoworld April 30, 2007
- Google pushes U.S. states to open public records CNN.com / AP April 30, 2007
- Google Helps States Surface Government Information by Chris Sherman, Search Engine Land Apr. 30, 2007
- Googling state government documents By Elinor Mills CNET News.com April 29, 2007
Another remix of speeches
Although this is not, strictly speaking, government information, it is about the presidential race and is an interesting complement to US Presidential Speeches Tag Cloud (more on that here: remix: US Presidential Speeches Tag Cloud). This is another good demonstration of how interesting things can be done with information that is easily re-usable.
- Tag Clouds for the Democratic Debate, Pollster.com, April 27, 2007
Why Privacy and Confidentiality Are Important
Don Wood at Library 2.0 has a good, short post on Why Privacy and Confidentiality Are Important. He notes that "For libraries to flourish as centers for uninhibited access to information, librarians must stand behind their users' right to privacy and freedom of inquiry." If libraries do not have copies of digital government information, users will be faced with retrieving that information from government-controlled web servers where there is no guarantee of privacy (Will GPO guarantee user privacy? Can it?). If libraries want to flourish as centers of uninhibited access to information, they need to have copies of digital government information. [Editor's note 2/18/09: The link to Don Wood's blog appears to be dead. However, I found a copy in the Internet Archive. The link above has been changed to go to the archived copy of the page.] Continue reading