The Friday post at Whitehouse.gov is a little livelier — a little more voice, a little more air. Heck, it’s even got a broken link! (The link to the Energy-Housing partnership is a bridge to nowhere.) The post points to an OMB post that I thought was terrific, explaining and defending the reduction in charitable deductions for the 5% wealthiest Americans. It features a photo of Gaza (promoting State’s question of the week) that isn’t all about happy Israelis and holding hands with happy Gazans. (THat’s why we have Photoshop, people.) And the post points to the ever-lively TSA blog, one of the voicier government blogs around.

The next step I’d take if President Obama made me Blog Czar — I keep writing to him and asking! — is having the people who actually write the blog sign their posts. Baby steps, but that’s how you learn to walk. Next, no press releases! Then, invite in a sequence of non-WH bloggers to blog for a week at a time. Eventually, carefully open up the comments. Then start a flame war with, say, the Belgians, and we will have arrived.

[Tags: whitehouse blogging obama egov e-gov ]

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Announcement from the Sunlight Foundation or St. Sunlight, as I think of it:

Washington, DC -Today, the Sunlight Foundation announced ReadTheBill.org, a grassroots campaign to create a more transparent government by calling for all non-emergency legislation to be publicly available online for at least 72 hours before Congress begins debate. Joining Sunlight in supporting its ReadTheBill.org effort is a bipartisan group of individuals and groups, including Newt Gingrich, Joe Trippi, the Electronic Frontier Foundation, Public Citizen and the Federation of American Scientists.

[Tags: sunlight_foundation egov e-gov transparency congress ]

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Aaron Swartz reports that the stimulus bill requires that government agencies use RSS [LATER: or Atom] to report on the stimulus money they disperse, so that those who are interested can get automatically updated. And those who are interested will include institutions and individuals aggregating that information so that the alarms can sound … and, we hope, the bouquets can shower down.

[Tags: rss stimulus e-gov egovernment egov transparency obama everything_is_miscellaneous metadata ]

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Boston University has decided to set up an open access archive for scholarly work produced there. Yay. This seems to stop short from mandating that academics there are required to put a copy of their published work into the archive, but it’s a good step.

On the other hand, the Open Access Blog reports:

Congressional Representative John Conyers (D-MI) has re-introduced a bill (HR801) that essentially would negate the NIH policy concerning depositing research in OA repositories.

Here are the first three points in a letter posted by Jennifer McLennan:

H.R. 801 is designed to amend current copyright law and create a new category of copyrighted works (Section 201, Title 17). In effect, it would:

1. Prohibit all U.S. federal agencies from conditioning funding agreements to require that works resulting from federal support be made publicly available if those works are either: a) funded in part by sources other than a U.S. agency, or b) the result of “meaningful added value” to the work from an entity that is not party to the agreement.

2. Prohibit U.S. agencies from obtaining a license to publicly distribute, perform, or display such work by, for example, placing it on the Internet.

3. Stifle access to a broad range of federally funded works, overturning the crucially important NIH Public Access Policy and preventing other agencies from implementing similar policies.

Here’s a draft letter opposing it.

[Tags: open_access boston_university copyright copywrong john_conyers nih ]

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Christopher Beam at Slate has a lively article about the Republican National Committee’s meeting to come up with new ways of using the new media to build the party back up. The article gives the sense of a group that simultaneously is Getting It and Floundering in It.

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Live blogging a Florida meeting. Hope for the White House blog…

[Tags: ego e-gov obama ]

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From the Wikileaks’ post:

Wikileaks has released nearly a billion dollars worth of quasi-secret reports commissioned by the United States Congress.

The 6,780 reports, current as of this month, comprise over 127,000 pages of material on some of the most contentious issues in the nation, from the U.S. relationship with Israel to abortion legislation. Nearly 2,300 of the reports were updated in the last 12 months, while the oldest report goes back to 1990. The release represents the total output of the Congressional Research Service (CRS) electronically available to Congressional offices. The CRS is Congress’s analytical agency and has a budget in excess of $100M per year.

Open government lawmakers such as Senators John McCain (R-Arizona) and Patrick J. Leahy (D-Vermont) have fought for years make the reports public, with bills being introduced–and rejected–almost every year since 1998. The CRS, as a branch of Congress, is exempt from the Freedom of Information Act.

CRS reports are highly regarded as non-partisan, in-depth, and timely. The reports top the list of the “10 Most-Wanted Government Documents” compiled by the Washington based Center for Democracy and Technology. The Federation of American Scientists, in pushing for the reports to be made public, stated that the “CRS is Congress’ Brain and it’s useful for the public to be plugged into it,”. While Wired magazine called their concealment “The biggest Congressional scandal of the digital age”.

A mere scan of the list of titles is fascinating. For example, here’s what our representatives have been told about the number of civilian casualties in Iraq. Here’s 1998’s Sono Bono Copyright Act explained in terms our legislators could understand. Here are the legal basics of the Elian Gonzales case. Here is the background our reps got on Israel’s 2005 disengagement from Gaza.

This stuff looks even-handed and informative. And, had it been made public at the time, not only would we citizens have been educated, we could have enhanced, disputed, and corrected oversights and biases.

Not to mention the effect these might have had as “social objects.” If they had been released publicly when they were given to Congress, they might have shaped public debate around dispassionate starting points. [Tags: csr transparency e-gov egovernment egov ]

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The new rumor is that Vivek Kundra will be made administrator of e-government and IT for the U.S. Office of Management and Budget (OMB), not the federal CTO as previously rumored.

This would be good news, although it would leave the rumored good or bad news about the national CTO open to rumor.

[Tags: vivek_kundra omb obama cto e-government e-gov egov ]

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NPR.org is running a post of mine that says we should expect e-gov to come from we the people faster and better than what will come from the government. (If it’s not obvious, the post started life intended as a spoken commentary for All Things Considered.)

[Tags: e-gov e-government obama egov ]

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The National Journal says that Obama has picked Vivek Kundra, DC’s CTO, to fill the national post. This would be fantastic news. Vivek is all about transparency.

It’s just a rumor. But it’s a rumor that makes me happy.

[Tags: national_cto vivek_kundra obama transparency e-gov egov e-government ]

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