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Tags > government
Only Connect - Should Broadband Access Be a Right? - Finland makes broadband access a right, $7 billion US stimulus for rural broadband improvements
By Joshua-Michéle RossOctober 19, 2009
As our economy continues to lose mass in favor of information-based goods (U.S. exports lost 50% of their physical weight per dollar from 1993 to 1999*) and we continue to see the decoupling of workforce from workplace, connectivity is a critical factor in economic exchange and competitive advantage. Countries that build wide, fast networks to the last mile will have a huge leg up. This week gave us two reasons to reconsider the state of broadband connectivity in the US.
Law.Gov: America's Operating System, Open Source
By Carl MalamudOctober 15, 2009
Public.Resource.Org is very pleased to announce that we're going to be working with a distinguished group of colleagues from across the country to create a solid business plan, technical specs, and enabling legislation for the federal government to create Law.Gov. We envision Law.Gov as a distributed, open source, authenticated registry and repository of all primary legal materials in the United States.
Government Ambassadors For Citizen Engagement
October 13, 2009
To the average person, government is represented by an anonymous person on the other end of the phone, a pile of mandatory paperwork, and perhaps at best a friendly neighborhood postal carrier. If you ask the average American not living inside the Beltway to name a single individual who works in the federal government, how would they reply? My guess is that the broad majority of them couldn't give you the first and last name of a federal government employee. In reality they would find it much easier to name their local pharmacist, garage owner, or supermarket manager. From the perspective of the government, this is a shame. How might emerging social technologies help to bridge that gap, in combination with a modification in thinking about government public relations?
Larry Lessig and Naked Transparency
By Carl MalamudOctober 12, 2009
Larry Lessig had a dream. In this dream, he was standing on K Street, preaching in the dark. Suddenly, a naked posse on Segways went whizzing by, shining their flashlights in people's faces. Bystanders were all blinded by these random lights and lost their night vision. When Larry turned around, the naked posse was racing towards the White House for an open government rally, trailed by a screaming mob of marijuana-smoking birthers. Larry Lessig wrote up his dream in a cover article for the New Republic entitled "Against Transparency: The perils of openness in government." I suspect that this article will cause some angst inside the Beltway, where you're either with us or against us. But, before the posse turns into a lynch mob, it is important to give the article a careful read.
Questions (and Answers!) About the Federal Register
October 7, 2009
When the White House retweets Cory Doctorow, you know something unusual has happened. As many of you saw, the Office of the Federal Register announced that source code for the Federal Register is now available in bulk - for free - and has been converted to XML. Ed Felten's shop at Princeton created a site called fedthread.org to see what you can do with the data and Public.Resource.Org helped the Government Printing Office in testing early stages of the XML work.
Fallacious Celebrations of Facebook Fans
September 17, 2009
Publishing "top 10" lists is unfortunately a staple of modern journalism. But alas, writers must drive readers' eyeballs, even when discussing serious topics like the government. And so we find a new list that mixes Web 2.0 with the government: "Top 10 agencies with the most Facebook fans." For the record, this list is topped by the White House with 327,592 fans, followed by the Marine Corps, Army, CDC, State Department, NASA, NASA JPL, Library of Congress, Air Force, and Environmental Protection Agency. Congratulations to all these hard-working agencies. But what exactly are we celebrating here?
Computerization in Nilekani's Imagining India
September 2, 2009
Imagining India: The Idea of a Renewed Nation promises to occupy a central position in discussions about India as well as the world economy this year. Author Nandan Nilekani can speak with quite a bit of authority on computers, having founded and led Infosys, an early success story in modern Indian commerce and a major player in the historic rise of outsourcing. Particularly relevant to this blog are the book's observations on computers' role in the economy and society.
What Does Government 2.0 Mean To You?
August 27, 2009
As many of you know, I've built a new conference, Gov 2.0 Summit, around the idea of the government as platform: how can government design programs to be generative, to use Zittrain's phrase? How do we get beyond the idea that participation means "public input" (shaking the vending machine to get more or better services out of it), and over to the idea that it means government building frameworks that enable people to build new services of their own?
Seeing the Future of Mapping in Crimespotting
August 21, 2009
This week Stamen Design released San Francisco Crimespotting. It's a crime map and notification system that allows for time and crime trend analysis. SF Crimespotting has launched just over two years after the release Oakland Crimespotting (Radar post). Stamen had been waiting for crime data all this time and with the launch of DataSF they are able to use an official API for crime data. SF Crimespotting is very similar to the initial release for Oakland.
Privacy and open government: conversations with EPIC and others about OpenID
By Andy OramAugust 3, 2009
A few days ago I proposed a way to offer more privacy to people visiting government web sites. This blog builds on that proposal, which was largely technical, by examining the policy and organizational issues that swirl around it. My ideas are informed by a discussion I had with Lillie Coney, Associate Director of the Electronic Privacy Information Center. The blog is also inspired by two comments on the earlier blog and brief email I exchanged with one commenter, which intertwine with Coney's in intriguing ways.
Shortening cookies: Using OpenID to improve government privacy online
July 31, 2009
For almost a decade, thanks to privacy laws, U.S. government web sites have been prohibited from using cookies to maintain information on visitors between sessions. (Session cookies are allowed because of their short duration.) Because so many useful features are enabled by cookies, the Office of Management and Budget released a request for proposals this week seeking new perspectives on the cookie policy and ways to enable the features that will make public participation in government more appealing. I took the opportunity to re-examine the federal approach to privacy, and submitted the proposal that follows in this blog.
Making Government Transparent Using R - Danese Cooper thinks it will be an important tool in Open Gov
By James TurnerJuly 14, 2009
With Open Source now considered an accepted part of the software industry, some people are starting to wonder if we can't bring the same degree of openness and innovation into government. Danese Cooper, who is actively involved in the open source community through her work with the Open Source Initiative and Apache, as well as working as an R wonk for Revolution Computing, would love to see the government become more open. Part of that openness is being able to access and interpret the mass of data that the government collects, something Cooper thinks R would be a great tool for. She'll be talking about R and Open Government at O'Reilly's Open Source Conference, OSCON.
Open Gov Is a Dialogue, Not a Monologue
July 8, 2009
At last week's Personal Democracy Forum I had a conversation with someone working for a city (I won't say which city), who was tasked with opening up that city's data. We were talking about the Apps for Democracy contests held recently in Washington D.C., and he explained his feeling about them: "There were some interesting apps in there, but overall they didn't meet with the mayor's agenda for the city."
Dear Congresswoman DeGette: A Question Regarding Your Intolerance Of New Ideas
By M. David PetersonJuly 7, 2009
Inspiring. Thought-provoking. Invigorating. Life-changing. These are just a few of the words we've heard used to describe the Aspen Ideas Festival, the action-packed, weeklong exploration of some of the most important ideas and pressing issues we face presented by the Aspen Institute and The Atlantic magazine. So begins the overview for the Aspen Ideas Festival, a yearly event devoted to the promotion of ideas -- new or old -- related to "some of the most important ideas and pressing issues we face" as a society. Ideas related to some of the most important ideas and pressing issues? You would think that such a bill would garner some serious attention. And given the lineup of speakers, certainly respect from someone representing the good people of Colorado's 1st Congressional District, right?
Naming an Emerging Movement
By John GeraciJune 26, 2009
There's a movement going on around the world. We don't have a name for it, though. Gov2.0, e-gov, e-democracy, open gov--these are all names that get applied to what is happening. And they are great for describing a certain aspect of this movement, the aspect that actually deals with government. Recalling my post last week about the four pillars of an open civic system, these "gov" names--e-gov, gov2.0, open gov--focus on the G2C aspect of what is going on, to the exclusion of the other aspects of this open civic system that is emerging. So what do we call this new thing?
Personal Democracy Forum ramp-up: adaptive legislation can respond to action in the agora
June 24, 2009
If legislatures could rely on public participation during the implementation of the law, they could write laws that embrace such input.
Dramatic Increase in Number of Tor Clients from Iran: Interview with Tor Project and the EFF
June 19, 2009
The Tor Project produces an anonymous proxy services which allows users to evade surveillance. In this interview, Andrew Lewman talks about the Tor Project and discusses some statistics that show its increased use from with Iran. This article also includes some questions and answers with the EFF about the legal implications of running an open proxy server.
Twenty-five hundred years of Government 2.0
June 19, 2009
New practices in government transparency are just intensifications of things democracies have done for a long time: public comment periods, expert consultation, archiving deliberations, and so forth. So let's look back a bit at what democracy has brought to government so far.
Sarah Milstein on Iranian Protests and Twitter
June 18, 2009
In this 10 minute interview, Sarah Milstein, co-author of The Twitter Book, discusses Twitter's impact on the Iranian protests, the emerging relationship between Twitter and breaking news stories, and she addressed the fear of inadvertent transparency within immediate social messaging communications media.
Interesting Questions Raised by Iranian Twitter Activism
June 17, 2009
Development (4:10 PM CST): The State Department has been in contact with Twitter to make sure that the service remained available for protestors in Iran (reuters). Last Friday, Twitter started to digest the Iranian election results, and the tool became a powerful vehicle for protest and coordination for student protestors within Iran and interested parties outside the country.
Personal Democracy Forum ramp-up: from vulnerability and overload to rage, mistrust, and fear
June 16, 2009
The grand vision for government/public collaboration is a set of feedback loops that intensify the influence of the collective will on government policy. But will the White House have the time and resources to establish a foothold for a solid and lasting open government program?
The Four Pillars of an Open Civic System
By John GeraciJune 15, 2009
Everyone is talking a lot about open government and transparency these days. It's exhilarating stuff, and it's even more exciting to see governments get behind it, creating sites like data.gov in the U.S. for the public to access government information via APIs. But every time I hear someone say something like "our organization is really into transparency" (which is often)...
The Myth of Macroinnovation
By Nat TorkingtonMay 26, 2009
An idea is making the rounds and appearing in articles like this New York Times piece, and it goes roughly thus: the age of the small inventor is over because to work on stuff that matters requires the largescale coordination of people and materiel that only governments and large corporations can provide. This notion that we're entering a Golden Age of Macroinnovation is bunkum, I'm happy to report.
Local forums to implement high-speed networks (broadband): proposal open for votes
By Andy OramMay 26, 2009
I've posted a proposal titled Local forums to implement high-speed networks (broadband) to a forum on open government put up by the White House. I ask this blog's readers to tell other people who might be interested, and vote up the proposal if you like it. The Open Government Dialog site where this proposal appears is part of the White House's implementation of the Memorandum on Transparency and Open Government that Obama signed on his first day in office. Hundreds of ideas have already been posted. Many are very specific and some look quite worthy, but I think mine stands out for the reasons listed in my justification.
Visualizing the U.S. Senate Social Graph, 1991 - 2009 [Part 1]
![Visualizing the U.S. Senate Social Graph, 1991 - 2009 [Part 1]](http://broadcast.oreilly.com/2009/05/05/visualizing-senate.png "Visualizing the U.S. Senate Social Graph, 1991 - 2009 [Part 1]")
May 5, 2009
Arlen Specter's party switch was big news, but a quick visualization technique shows it was a long time coming. What other surprises might lurk in the Senate Social graph?
Forge.mil Update and DISA Hacks Public Domain
By Jim StogdillApril 29, 2009
Progress of open source initiatives at DISA.
News Industry on Twitter: Full of Crazies, Not Reliable
By Timothy M. O'BrienApril 28, 2009
There's a Twitter "backlash" at the moment as news organizations like CNN start to react to the way people are communicating about the Swine Flu on Twitter. What is behind this reaction, and is it valid? Is Twitter a "petri dish" for hysteria and insanity? Or, is it a useful tool for the distirbution of public health information?
Update on Twitter Awareness Metrics of Swine Flu
By Timothy M. O'BrienApril 27, 2009
A quick update on the Twitter Awareness numbers for the Swine Flu. As of Monday @ 1:57 PM. Swine flu accounted for 2.68% of all Twitter activity, and the @CDCemergency Twitter account continued to experience rapid growth posting a 300% growth over the last two days. In addition to these trends, there have emerged unofficial Swine squatters, do these additional sources of information help or hurt the official effort to distribute public health information?
Twittering the Swine Flu (Follow @CDCemergency)
April 27, 2009
The Centers for Disease Control and the Red Cross are using Twitter to get the word out about Swine Flu. Can something as simple as Twitter make a difference when fighting a potential influenza pandemic?
Tracking and Graphing Awareness of Swine Flu with Twitter
By Timothy M. O'BrienApril 26, 2009
As the Swine Flu story develops, Twitter is an invaluable, open-platform for gathering data and graphing trends of awareness. As the CDC investigation into this emerging virus uncovered more cases in CA, KS, TX, @CDCemergency experienced a rapid +85% jump in followers as Twitter became a conduit for critical public health information. While the government tries to get the word out about prevention stragies and instructions for care for the sick, services like Twist and Twitterholic can be used to measure the impact and reach of these public health messages.
Why Aneesh Chopra is a Great Choice for Federal CTO
April 20, 2009
The news has now been leaked that President Obama intends to nominate Aneesh Chopra as the nation's first Chief Technology Officer. Chopra may not be a Valley guy, but Silicon Valley is going to like him a lot. He's energetic, insightful and can speak the language (again, watch the video). He's no bureaucrat. Aneesh Chopra is a rock star. He's a brilliant, thoughtful change-maker. He knows technology, he knows government, and he knows how to put the two together to solve real problems.
The Change We Need: DIY on a Civic Scale
By Tim O'ReillyApril 17, 2009
I've been working a lot lately to imagine what Government 2.0 might look like. One of the most inspiring and thought-provoking stories I've read recently might not look like a Gov 2.0 story, but it is: Island DIY: Kauai residents don't wait for state to repair road. We've gotten used to what Frank DiGiammarino of the National Academy of Public Administration recently called "vending machine government" - the idea that we put in our taxes and fees, and get out services: $28 for a driver's license, $1 million for a mile of interstate highway, $1 Trillion for a war or a financial rescue.
W. David Stephenson on the Federal CIO: Vivek Kundra
April 8, 2009
W David Stephenson discusses his experiences with the new Federal CIO: Vivek Kundra. Stephenson talks about his experiences working as a consultant for Kundra in the DC government and he outlines what we can expect from Kundra during his tenure as Federal CIO in the OMB.
The Future of Our Cities: Open, Crowdsourced, and Participatory
By John GeraciApril 6, 2009
Guest blogger John Geraci has spent the last six years making life in cities better with the use of web technologies. His latest project, DIYcity.org, has web developers and urban planners all over the world teaming up to create open source tools for residents of cities everywhere. Prior to DIYcity, Geraci co-founded the hyperlocal news network Outside.in. Back in...
Transforming the Relationship Between Citizens and Government: Making Content Findable Online
By Vanessa FoxMarch 24, 2009
Thursday on this blog, Congressman Honda asked, "how can congress take advantage of web 2.0 technologies to transform the relationship between citizens and government?" He asked for input on what web 2.0 features he should add to his website to take advantage of today's online world. The most important feature government web sites can add isn't really feature at all. But it would absolutely transform the relationship between citizens and government and make an amazing array of public data available. What's this magic feature?
Request for ideas: Crowdsourcing the Evolution of Congressional Websites
By Mike HondaMarch 19, 2009
Guest blogger Rep. Mike Honda, D-San Jose, serves in the U.S. Congress on the House Appropriations subcommittee on the Legislative Branch. Tim recently asked readers of this blog to help provide me with guidance on the best way to make official legislative databases available to the developer community. The question, which also made its way onto Slashdot, led to a...
The Paradox of Transparency
March 18, 2009
In his memo on transparency and open government, President Barack Obama made a down payment on his transparency promise by hiring Vivek Kundra, the CTO of Washington D.C., for the new post of government CIO. Kundra's visionary application of technology to the procurement process had attracted national attention, and with recovery.gov the centerpiece of his plans to give the public a view into how stimulus money was being spent, it looked like we were off to a good start. Then reality intervened.
Vivek Kundra: Federal CIO in His Own Words
March 5, 2009
This article contains several audio excerpts and transcripts from Vivek Kundra's first conference call as the newly appointed Federal CIO. After weeks of speculation it was formally announced today that President Obama has appointed Kundra, who had previously been serving as the CTO for Washington D.C.. In his previous position, Kundra pushed the boundaries of Information Technology and set the standard for transparency and accountability adopting Google Apps as a collaboration platform, video taping vendor interactions, and instituting a rigorous regime of metrics and accountability for government contracts.
Quick Video Survey of Vivek Kundra's Policy and Experience as DC CTO
March 5, 2009
Who is Vivek Kundra? This article assembles a few representative videos from YouTube that give you a sense of the policies and experience that Vivek Kundra brings to the newly created office of the Federal Chief Information Officer. From Google Apps to radically transparent interactions with vendors, Kundra has set a new standard for a City's IT infrastructure.
Interview with Infoworld's Paul Venezia on the Terry Child's Case
February 26, 2009
If you are a network engineer, you might want to pay attention to the continuing case of Terry Childs in San Francisco. In this 15-minute interview, Paul Venezia discusses the inconsistencies in the case, and why every technologist should be paying attention to the outcome of the Childs case.
Interview: Carl Malamud's Grassroots Campaign for Public Printer of the United States
February 25, 2009
Carl Malamud, an advocate for goverment transparency, is starting a grassroots campaign to become the Public Printer of the United States, a position responsible for the Government Printing Office (GPO). As Public Printer of the United States, Malamud would be responsible for publishing information about the federal government. In this interview, Malamud discusses his seven point platform and his 20 years of experience fighting for government transparency.
eGov Watch: Recovery.gov Goes Live
By Kurt CagleFebruary 18, 2009
Within minutes of Obama signing into law the economic stimulus bill (formally, The American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009 (ARRA)), the web gnomes at the White House flipped the switch on a new website - Recovery.gov. If there is any question that Obama understands the medium of the Internet, its one that he (and his team) is rapidly dispelling: there has been more new web efforts debuted in the last three weeks than there was during the last eight years of the Bush administration.
Stimuluswatch.org; The Falling Cost and Accelerated Speed of Group Action
February 16, 2009
Stimuluswatch.org is a great example of how easy it is today for people to, as Clay Shirky says, “organize without organizations.” Stimuluswatch.org began after Jerry Brito attended a mayor’s Conference and posted this request: "Let’s help President-Elect Obama do what he is promising. Let’s help him “prioritize” so the projects so that we “get the most bang for the...
XBRL Becomes Mandatory - This Should Be Interesting
February 8, 2009
The announcement came quietly, a briefly worded memo from the SEC in December that as of the the third fiscal quarter of 2009 (starting in June), companies over $5 billion in assets would be required to start reporting their earnings using the Extensible Business Markup Language, or XBRL. Other companies would be required to follow suit according to whether they use GAAP (which have a one year grace period) or IFRP (starting 2011).
What Does It Mean To Be An Internet President?
January 22, 2009
FDR was our radio president, JFK was our television president and Barack Obama will be our Internet President. Quietly at noon yesterday, as the world was fixated on the televised inauguration of Barack Obama, some obscure IT managers flipped a switch (metaphorically) and transferred Change.gov to Whitehouse.gov... While the inauguration spectacle was inspiring and the speech lived up to its...
Government Transparency is Our Responsibility: Apps for America
January 21, 2009
Great, we have an Administration that is embracing electronic transparency. Getting the data is only half the struggle. Now, it is your turn to make sure that this data is parsed, distributed, and displayed in compelling ways. If you are looking for something "important" to contribute your time to, take a look at Sunlight Labs' "Apps for America" contest. We're at the ground floor of a revolution in open-source, political technology, and this is your chance to contribute.
change.gov Becomes whitehouse.gov
January 21, 2009
In all the excitement of the inauguration today, I wanted to call out one amazing success story. Today, change.gov became WhiteHouse.gov. For those of us in tech, this is an amazing affirmation. Not only did the Web 2.0 principles of user-engagement, viral outreach, rapid development, and real-time intelligence help Obama to win the presidency, he's bringing the same principles and...
Inauguration Tech: change.gov -> whitehouse.gov
January 20, 2009
That was fast? The Obama Administration launched the new whitehouse.gov as soon as the new President was sworn into office. Here are the before and after pictures. What do you think of the new site? What is your advice for the new Administration's webmasters?
Transparent Tax Law
By chromaticJanuary 13, 2009
Three ideas converged. Why aren't tax laws available online in easily reusable formats?
An Infrastructure for Big Data
By Kurt CagleJanuary 12, 2009
The potential benefits of being able to expose even a portion of data that businesses and organizations produce in a compatible manner would be huge - it would, indeed, be a major boost for businesses that are built on or around the Internet as well as provide the framework to turn much of the economy into a Mashup Economy. The problem, of course, is standardization.
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