Congressional documents — or are they?
With thousands of documents issuing forth from Congress and its committees every year, it's impossible to keep up with them all. And besides the "official" hearings and reports, there's a whole category of Congressional information that doesn't make it into the FDLP or other distribution channels run by GPO. I'm talking about hearings held outside the official committee structure of Congress and reports researched and compiled by committee staffs (usually of a single party) and published mostly on a member's personal website or one established and maintained with party, not government, funds. There have been a great many of these popping up lately, largely because of the current situation of bitter partisanship in Congress. The Republican House and Senate leaders haven't wanted to hold oversight hearings or conduct investigations into activities of the Bush administration and have aggressively opposed any requests from Democrats to do so. Since the committee chairmen are all from the majority party, they and ultimately the Speaker of the House and Senate Majority Leader get to decide who can hold what meetings in which rooms and when, if ever, they can hold them. As a result, any members who want to look into things have to take extraordinary measures to conduct hearings and investigations. One of the most well-known of these so far is Preserving Democracy: What Went Wrong in Ohio / Status Report of the House Judiciary Committee Democratic Staff. It generated enough interest that a paperback version, with an introduction by Gore Vidal, was published by Academy Chicago (even so, OCLC shows only 139 holdings). This attempt to bring to light problems with the 2004 election in Ohio was due to the efforts of John Conyers, the ranking member of the committee (Conyers also publishes similar material on his personal campaign site). He was denied all requests for meeting space until he finally got the use of a tiny basement room that could barely accommodate all the Democratic members of the committee who wanted to participate, let alone witnesses and spectators (the Republicans boycotted the proceedings). Some more recent efforts have come from the Senate Democratic Policy Committee. It has held a number of hearings, several of them on the situation in Iraq, and posted transcripts and videos to the website. From the beginning of our OCLC Digital Archive, NMSL has been capturing some of these documents for long-term preservation. One early one from 2004 was Report of an Inquiry into the Alternative Analysis of the Issue of an Iraq - al Qaeda Relationship. This report simply has Senator Carl Levin, ranking member of the Senate Armed Services Committee, as the author, with a note in the preface explaining that the research and compilation was carried out by the Committee's minority staff. It was posted as a PDF on his Senate web page and, as of this writing, is still there. Of course, it can also be found in the Digital Archive. So are these government publications or not? For my money, they are -- the elected representatives and their staff people are doing their work on the public payroll and using government resources (among others) to gather information. Even if they aren't "official," they're still worth capturing and preserving, in case some of the websites go dark or the content is taken down later. The quasi-official nature of these resources does raise some issues with copyright and may affect our putting some of them in the Digital Archive. For example, some of the hearings of the Senate Democratic Policy Committee have transcripts with a copyright statement from the Federal News Service, a commercial publisher of Congressional transcripts. These will not be harvested for the Digital Archive. We have yet to address some of these copyright issues in depth. Continue reading
When Standards Are Political — ODF (the Open Document Format)
When Standards Are Political -- ODF (the Open Document Format) by James Love (October 21, 2006), Huffington Post. James Love, Director of the Consumer Project on Technology, writes about open word-processing formats, why they are important for open exchange of information, interoperability, re-usability, preservability, and more. This article does an excellent job of explaining why this technical issue is an important policy issue. He compares and contrasts Microsoft's "Open XML" with the truly open Open Document Format (ODF). Continue reading
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