Building on my earlier post about listing collaborative options for government or congressional agencies, I’m thinking about useful ways to distinguish between different types of government information, and what that implies about records management.
At the recent IPDI Politics Online panel on radical transparency, Peggy Garvin made a great point about one fundamental distinction that can [...]

From the OHP google group:
I wouldn’t be surprised if, over the next few years, governmental and
congressional administrators are approached, or presented with a mandate,
that says: You must initiate a pilot program to incorporate public input
into your (agency’s, committee’s) Web site.
I expect that administrators and online communications directors will
increasingly be in the position of scrounging around [...]

I was somewhat disturbed this morning to hear on NPR about campus police that claim to be exempt from public scrutiny (and FOI laws). It seems to me that if you get to put the flashing lights on your car, and that if I need to obey you as a police officer, then you [...]

John Wonderlich wrote:
After defining (and normalizing) the likelihood that words appear in text, you could start making comparisons between bodies of work, and creating interesting tag-cloudish visualizations of what distinguishes some text you’d like to analyze. You could build a widget for your blog that says “the following are the words that are more than [...]

I wrote a post earlier about brainstorming models for language processing, and I’d like to clarify the content.
All words or entities usable online constitute a very large set. Any given body of words (a speech, blog post, news article, or book) contains a subset of that first set, with each word occurring a [...]

Could one first determine the word instance frequency in different contexts based on historical usage, such as the English lexicon (all words equally distributed with likelihood of one), the text of NYT front page stories (“Bush”, or “Russia” all having much higher likelihood of mention than “domino” or “recalibration”). Specific social contexts could be [...]

I’d like to know whether the government, NGOs and others are doing a sufficient job explaining the rights and responsibilities of citizens. I’ve been informally reviewing the explanatory guides designed to make congressional information more accessible, but I’m struck at the overall lack of another type of explanation.
While I’m happy to focus primarily on [...]

I like to be devil’s advocate among my friends, and since MAPLight and Sunlight are some of my friends, they can’t get out of a careful look over their analyses. Ellen writes on her blog about an analysis provided by MAPLight of the correlation of contributions to representatives and their vote on H.R. 1424 (bill [...]

A flurry of new disclosure related legislation from the Senate Judiciary Committee:
The Sunshine in Litigation Act requires that judges consider public health in deciding whether to release the results of litigation.
The bipartisan “Sunshine in Litigation Act� was prompted by dozens of cases in which hazards and threats to public health were not disclosed during court [...]

A shiver, well at least a small one, goes down my spine every time I see transparency and claims about fairness mixed in with party politics. There are two big issues running around, the first being superdelegates, the back-room deals, and uncertainty over the fairness of a confusing multi-level delegate-based system to choose party candidates. [...]