Grants.gov is Windows-only
Here is another example of a government agency making a technical decision based on economic constraints and time constraints. The Washington Post reports that, when the government outsourced the building of the grants.gov system, the contract demanded full implementation within seven months and the result is a system that works only with the Windows operating system instead of conforming to open standards. While PCs are common and pervasive, as Gene Spafford says "Common does not mean 'standard.' That there are more Windows machines out there does not mean that Windows is the standard." Further, according to the report, "Macs constitute about one-third to one-half of the computers scientists and academicians use."
The new "Grants.gov" system, under development at a cost of tens of billions of dollars, aims to replace paper applications with electronic forms. It is being phased in at the National Institutes of Health, Department of Housing and Urban Development and other federal agencies. All 26 grant-giving agencies are supposed to have their application processes fully online by 2007. The problem: Although many U.S. scientists and others depend on graphics-friendly Macintosh computers, the software selected by the government is not Mac-compatible. And it is expected to remain so for at least a year.As I've said before (What the Copyright Office / Internet Explorer rule tells us about government information) Technical decisions are usually driven by non-technical requirements and to keep government information freely available we must focus on policy first and technology second. By avoiding policy decisions and forging ahead with the technical matters of its Future Digital System, GPO is setting itself up to create a system that could be good technically while creating bad policies. (See also, "Policy neutral" does not mean "neutral policies".) Continue reading
Bush’s budget proposal would close most EPA libraries
The Public Employees for Environmental Responsibility (PEER), a national alliance of local, state, and federal resource professionals, released this story based on internal documents from the EPA Library Network Workgroup, which is made up of representatives from the various EPA regions. According to PEER:
Under Bush’s plan, $2 million of a total agency library budget of $2.5 million will be lost, including the entire $500,000 budget for the EPA Headquarters library and its electronic catalog that makes it possible to search for documents through the entire EPA library network. These reductions are just a small portion of the $300 million in cuts the administration has proposed for EPA operations. EPA currently operates a network of 27 libraries operating out of its Washington, D.C. Headquarters and ten regional offices across the country. The size of the cuts will force the Headquarters library and most of the regional libraries to shut their doors and cease operations. Each year, the EPA libraries – * Handle more than 134,000 research requests from its own scientific and enforcement staff; * House and catalog an estimated 50,000 “unique†documents that are available nowhere else; and * Operate public reading rooms and provide the public with access to EPA databases.One of the documents linked to from the PEER site, outlines available options for regions that "choose" to close their physical libaries. They can purchase library services from any region libraries that remain open (on what would be left of the scavenged budget); or, they could pass on costs to their customers -- themselves. Reminds me of a bumper sticker I saw the other day. "This isn't a democracy, its an auction." Continue reading
Those Pesky Gov Docs
Unlike emails related to the Plame case, the Bush Administration did not "fail to preserve" incriminating email records that impugn claims that it did not learn of levee failures in New Orleans until the following day. According to today's headliner in the New York Times:
This chain of events, along with dozens of other critical flashpoints in the Hurricane Katrina saga, has for the first time been laid out in detail following five months of work by two Congressional committees that have assembled nearly 800,000 pages of documents, testimony and interviews from more than 250 witnesses. Investigators now have the documentation to pinpoint some of the fundamental errors and oversights that combined to produce what is universally agreed to be a flawed government response to the worst natural disaster in modern American history.Continue reading
MIT & Alternet Challenge the Conventional Dumbdom
Through a series of reports by the best foreign policy thinkers at MIT's Center for International Studies and in collaboration with the progressive news publisher Alternet as a distribution channel, entrenched tenets of US foreign policy are being systematically scrutinized. Consider the following from Ben Friedman, PhD student in MIT's Political Science Department and a member of the Security Studies Program, from his report The Real Cost of Homeland Security:
Despite this threat inflation, spending on homeland security remains tiny compared with defense spending. The homeland security budget for fiscal year (FY) 2006 is $49.9 billion, including the Department of Homeland Security ($42 billion), up from $32 billion in FY 2001. States only spend about $1-2 billion a year on homeland security in addition to federal outlays. Private corporations spend, at most,another $10 billion. In total then, the U.S. spends about $60 [billion] annually on homeland security. The defense budget for FY 2006, without the costs of the wars, is $440 billion, an increase of $135 billion over FY 2001. The extra spending goes to weapons and personnel that have little to do with terrorism. Widespread fear of terrorism has primarily benefited the budgets of part of the national security landscape that has the least to do with it.Check out other foreign policy papers from MIT that have appeared on Alternet. For a more extenisive listing, go to the source itself -- the Center for International Studies at MIT. Continue reading
(SC) Foreign Relations of the United States
The Government Documents Department located in Dacus Library, Winthrop University has a variety of patrons - both students and the general public. One day a Veteran came in searching for documents regarding his service to our country. He wanted to see the documents that lead up to his involvement and to see if he and his fellow military friends’ names were included. Until he found the documents pertaining to his involvement he had no idea what the conflict was about. We found most of this information in the Foreign Relations of the United States. I was pleased to help him and quite happy to know I had found exactly what he wanted. Patricia A. Stafford Library Technical Assistant Dacus Library, Winthrop University South Carolina Continue reading