Wikis as legislation builders
I heard a great little radio piece last week on Against the Grain -- a show that's played on KPFA, my local Pacifica radio station. Please listen to the interview with Matt Gonzalez (who ran for SF mayor on the Green party ticket last year) and Dave Grenell. They found in their work that it was very diffficult to find out what other municipalities were doing in terms of good environmental and social legislation. So the've put together the Good Legislation wiki (Reader beware: the site is still in beta and may or may not be accessible at this time; I saw the site a few days ago, but today was blocked. Check back frequently). The site is a place to share the best progressive state, city, county and international legislation, and the most successful grass-roots community programs. Anyone can add legislation to the wiki by creating a free user name. This is a really interesting use of wikis. By sharing information on successful (or unsuccessful) local/county/state programs, it can help other municipalities build on those successes or avoid those pitfalls associated with poorly thought-out legislation. Kudos Matt and Dave!
Wed 9.06.06| Good Laws, Good News What if there was one place you could go to find the best progressive laws, practices and programs in the world? Matt Gonzalez and Dave Grenell are building that place, as we speak, online.Continue reading
FCC ordered 2004 study critical of concentration destroyed
According to the Associated Press (September 14, 2006), "the Federal Communications Commission ordered its staff to destroy all copies of a draft study that suggested greater concentration of media ownership would hurt local TV news coverage, a former lawyer at the agency says." This is despicable. The FCC under Michael Powell and now Kevin Martin has been trying to change the rules for media ownership for several years so that large media corporations could have monopolistic control over local TV/newspaper/radio markets. But, oops!, their own study, paid for at taxpayer expense, found that localism is beneficial to the public and that media concentration has detrimental effects on public access to news and information. Sen. Barbara Boxer, D-Calif. is on the case and has said she will call for an investigation if answers are not forthcoming. Read on at Fair and Crooks and liars. The document is attached as well. See this FGI post for more on suppressed FCC documents. Continue reading
Not just blogs: delicious FGI!
This week’s “not just blogs†installment will highlight the FGI Del.icio.us project. Some of you may have noticed the "Del.icio.us FGI" link in the top toolbar or the various blue links in the left column. These words are tags from FGI's account on Del.icio.us. The tags lead to all of the Web sites we've collected/bookmarked for future reference. Del.icio.us is a social bookmarking service. It offers a way to save and describe (i.e., tag) Web sites for later access. The nice thing about del.icio.us is that you can see who else has tagged the site, what terms they've used, how they've described it and what other sites *they've* tagged under the same term. So if you go to del.icio.us you'll see the most recent sites tagged as well as the most popular. This is a great way to discover new sites of interest, and share sites of interest with the community. "So what?!" you might say. We think that del.icio.us can be a very useful tool for the library community. By using del.icio.us, we're trying to create a defacto portal of sites of interest to the government documents community. And by using del.icio.us, we can collaboratively collect sites of interest. Imagine if librarians use del.icio.us to tag the sites they frequently use as they go about their reference work? In no time, you'll collect lots of sites that you can then share with your users and your colleagues. You can link to your del.icio.us account on your library's Web site or display your tag cloud for your community :-) Additionally, we're testing out a social hack of delicious by creating and using some common tags -- a controlled vocabulary if you will! If you'd like to help us out, start using the common tags listed below. That way, whenever someone tags a Web resource with, for example, "FGI:blogroll", it'll show up here and the whole FGI community can work together to collect Web sites and resources of interest. The other way you can help is by using the tag "for:freegovinfo" which will automatically send the link that you've tagged to our delicious account. FGI:articles FGI:blogroll FGI:document FGI:library FGI:organizations FGI:research for:freegovinfo We hope you'll explore the sites we've tagged, help us build the collection by using those common tags, suggest sites for us to explore by using the "for:freegovinfo" tag, and add us to your network so we can all keep track of what the community is tagging. Librarians are all about collecting, describing and giving access to information, and del.icio.us is a great way to do that online! For background on delicious, see Melissa Rethlefsen's article in Library Journal and check out the delicious-iana I'm collecting. Questions? Still not sure why del.icio.us is useful for libraries? Leave a comment or email us at: admin AT freegovinfo DOT info. Continue reading
“Internet Watch List” of Legislation to be Stopped in 2006
The Center for Democracy and Technology (CDT) has released their "Internet Watch List" of Legislation to be Stopped in 2006. According to CDT, as midterm elections near, a "number of bills that threaten the bedrock of Internet privacy and civil liberties could either come up for votes or worm their way into larger legislative packages that end up being rushed into law." And further:
"We always see bad bills moving in the waning days of the session, but this year's crop is particularly troubling," CDT Executive Director Leslie Harris said. "Taken together, these measures threaten to undermine our First and Fourth Amendment rights; weaken our privacy; hobble technological innovation; and change the fundamental nature of the Internet for the worse. If even one of these misguided legislative gambits succeeds we will all be the worse for it."Of the 9 items on the CDT watchlist, 5 could have potentially damaging effect on libraries: 1) Data Retention 2) Wiretap-Friendly Design Mandates for the Internet 3) Telecom Bill Without Internet Neutrality 4) Broadcast Flag 5) Audio Flag Continue reading
Superintendent of Documents Russell to retire
The volunteers at Free Government Information were surprised to learn of the impending retirement of Ms. Judith Russell, Superintendent of Documents at the Government Printing Office (GPO). Although we have disagreed with Ms. Russell on a number of issues, we believe she shared our overarching goal of public access to government information. Our disagreements were on methods rather than core values. As such, we applaud her long-term commitment to the documents community. Here are some highlights of things that happened on her watch that we find especially commendable (we're sure the list is longer, but these immediately come to mind ;-) ):
- Issuing the first ever Biennial Survey to include questions on library's local storage of electronic federal documents.
- Starting up the GPO LOCKSS pilot project.
- The first ever webcasts of Depository Library Council events.
- Surveying libraries on possible future PACER access.