Public Documents as Blogs
Mark Simpkins, who works for the BBC and describes himself as someone who also works "hacking for democracy in his spare time," will present this session at the 4th Annual O'Reilly Emerging Technology Conference that will be held March 14-17, 2005 in San Diego. Simpkins notes the disadvantages of governments releasing documents in PDF format only -- particularly the difficulties the format creates for online discussion of parts of those documents. Simpkins also points to the interesting blog consultationprocess.org which has the slogan, "opening up public documents to the blogosphere." Continue reading
Issues
There are many issues surrounding the future of government information. FGI has identified the three core and overlapping issues of access to, preservation of, and privacy for users of government information. See the pages below for more information on each of these issues. Continue reading
About Us
The future of government information is in peril from many economic and political forces. Free Government Information was initiated by Jim A. Jacobs, James R. Jacobs, Shinjoung Yeo, three librarians at University of California San Diego, along with Daniel Cornwall, librarian at the Alaska State Library, and James Staub, librarian at the Tennessee State Library, in order to raise public awareness of the importance of government information and create a community with various stakeholders to facilitate an open and critical dialogue. James R. Jacobs and Shinjoung Yeo moved to Stanford University Library in December, 2005 as International Documents Librarian and Communications Bibliographer/Reference Coordinator respectively. Shinjoung is currently (as of September, 2008) a PhD student in the Information in Society program at University of Illinois at Urbana Champaign. In October, 2008, we expanded the number of FGI volunteers with the inclusion of Rebecca Troy-Horton. Rebecca was the head of the Government Information Department at the McNeese State University Library in Lake Charles, Louisiana until 2011. She is currently a Reference Librarian at the New Hampshire State Library. Continue reading
Organizations of interest to FGI
Below is a list of organizations which we have found to be of interest to the FGI community. If you know of others, please contact us at admin at freegovinfo dot info.
- Alliance for Taxpayer Access
- beSpacific: law and technology news by Sabrina Pacifici
- Californians Aware
- Center for American Progress
- Center for Democracy and Citizenship
- Center for Democracy & Technology
- Center for Digital Democracy
- Center for Economic and Policy Research
- Center for Internet and Society
- Center of Open Source and Government
- Coalition of Journalists for Open Government
- Coalition for Open Government
- Common Cause
- Creative Commons
- Election Science Institute
- Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF)
- Electronic Privacy Information Center(EPIC)
- The Government Accountability Project (GAP)
- The Memory Hole
- Minnesota Coalition on Government Information
- National Center for Open Source Policy and Research
- National Freedom of Information Coalition
- National Institute on Money in State Politics
- National Security Archive
- OMB Watch
- Omidyar
- OpenCRS: Congressional Research Reports for the People
- Open Access News
- Open Access Project
- Open Government Services
- Open House Project
- Open Knowledge Foundation
- Open Source Software Institute (OSSI)
- OpenTheGovernment.org
- Project on Government Secrecy (Federation of American Scientists)
- Public Knowledge
- Public Resource
- RISKS Digest: Forum On Risks To The Public In Computers And Related Systems
- Scholarly Publishing and Academic Resources
- Sunshine Week
- Union of Concerned Scientists(UCS)
