Saving Democracy With Web 2.0
A nice article on how free government information, unencumbered by Digital Rights Management technologies, and designed for use and re-use in the Web 2.0 environment can "re-democratize our democracy."
- Saving Democracy With Web 2.0 by Jennifer Granick, Wired News (October 25, 2006).
The Technical is Political
As much as we'd like to think that information policies are free from politics, it just isn't true. It is not often that the press deals with how politics affects information policy, but it is increasingly easy for the press to deal with the issue when it comes to issues of technology. And so we have an article in this week's Government Computer News:
- Election could affect IT programs -- New leadership could alter Congress -- focus on data, health privacy and security By Mary Mosquera, Government Computer News (10/23/06 issue)
- The Technical is Political by James A. Jacobs and Karrie Peterson, Of Significance... 3(1) 2001, p.25-35. Association of Public Data Users. (Full text PDF file)
In the realm of government information, technical decisions about data format, access software and public distribution methods are inherently political decisions. They affect what kind of data can be accessed, how, by whom, and for how long into the future it will be available. To evaluate and respond appropriately to policy changes by government producers of data, technical issues must also be looked at in the light of social values shared by the data-using community. How does a newly decked-out data product fare with regard to open access? Privacy of individuals? Documentation that allows the data to be correctly cited, tested for reliability, re-used in the future? Social and political concerns also come into play when the flexibility offered by distributing raw data is balanced against locking the data into a "user-friendly" software, and when products traditionally produced by the federal government are privatized. As private industry pushes harder for information to become a commodity - something that can be sold for profit - it is important for data users to push back with a strong philosophy of information as a social good, and to evaluate data products and access in light of their value to society, rather than on strictly narrow technical grounds.Continue reading
Former FCC chairman dismisses net neutrality as distraction
Former FCC Chairman William Kennard published an opinion piece in the New York Times on Saturday, October 21st. On the one hand, Kennard rightly points out that there is now a "broadband digital divide" (we have written about the digital divide and govt information before on FGI) and that there needs to be a "full-scale policy debate" about the direction of broadband internet. But then in the very next sentence, he blows off the net neutrality debate as "effectively preventing Congress and the public from dealing with more pressing issues." It's as if he doesn't even realize that without net neutrality in place, the digital divide chasm will only grow deeper and wider -- and the companies that Kennard works for or sits on the boards of will be the ones with the backhoes! He DOES disclose that he works for the Carlyle Group, but does not say that he is also on the board of Sprint Nextel Corporation, Hawaiian Telcom and Insight Communications (a cable provider). These companies will benefit directly if the FCC/telco/Kennard triumvarate succeeds in getting Congress to forget Network Neutrality. Lessig has a good response to Kennard. On a side note, this is a good example of how to argue with statistics, and also why fact checking and data literacy are such important skills for readers. I still agree with Lessig's basic premise on net neutrality, but notice that he used OECD stats to show that students in the US are not as computer literate as, say Greece, Poland, Portugal, and the Czech Republic. His OECD citation was unfortunately from the 2003 Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA) which probably used data from 2001 -- perhaps a bit out of date. Then a commenter confused the issue even more by pointing to newer OECD data on numbers of broadband subscribers rather than Lessig's original computer usage statistics. Both broadband market penetration to end users and computer literacy per se are kind of beside the point when arguing for net neutrality IMHO, but numbers are like shiny objects to crows. The numbers that would be really relevant to the net neutrality discussion -- I haven't looked to see if they're available -- would be cost/bit, up/download bit rate comparison and telco profit margins between the US, South Korea, Denmark, Netherlands etc. and then an extrapolation of how much it would cost broadband users for premium rates vs non-premium rates as well as projected telco profit margins in Kennard's unregulated broadband future/present where large swaths of the country will have either no broadband access or monopolistic control over access. Those would be interesting numbers! Profit is one thing, but obscene profit at the expense of user access and future innovation is just that: obscene. Continue reading
remix: US congressional staff salaries
Here is a new "remix" -- public information more easily available from a private source than from the government itself.
Storming Media, a private, independent reseller of Pentagon and other US federal government reports on many subjects, is now making available, for free, US congressional staff salaries in an easy to browse web interface. They obtain the data from the official record books: the Secretary of the Senate and the Clerk of the House reports. Continue readingSites for election junkies
I've been checking electoral-vote.com fairly regularly for the last 2 weeks. The votemaster (aka Andrew S. Tanenbaum, a professor of computer science at the Vrije Universiteit in Holland) tracks electoral votes state by state based on polls from across the political spectrum. Today, CNET published a story saying that Google plans to release its Google Earth election mashup, a new data layer available on the Google Earth appliance (download Google Earth here). "Google Earth 2006 election resource tool indicates the country's 436 congressional districts with stars on the popular 3D map of the country. Clicking on a star pops open a bubble window that has information on the candidates in that race." Anyone know of other election tracking sites? Please post them in the comments. Continue reading