Tomorrow morning, the Constitution Subcommittee of the Senate Judiciary Committee will hold a hearing on Secret Law and the Threat to Democratic and Accountable Government. In Chairman Feingold’s words: Senator Feingold is talking about memos put out by the Office of Legal Counsel (OLC), a part of the Department of […]

(crossposted from Sunlight)
I’d like to elaborate on an important point about the IG reform measure that just passed the Senate.  The measure includes a requirement that the Inspectors General post their reports on their Web sites.  This requirement places the responsibility of disclosure on the agencies themselves, rather than on citizens looking form […]

Boing Boing is quoting a talk by Clay Shirky on what they’re calling the “cognitive surplus”, or the amount of human thought not taken up by necessary pursuits.  (I think I’d call it “discretionary cognition”, for a financial comparison).  They calculate the human-thought-hours taken up by wikipedia, and find:
So how big is that surplus? So […]

Since coming across a CRS report on efforts to strengthen the Offices of Inspectors General (OIGs, and IGs), I’ve been interested in executive oversight structures and the laws that govern them. A section of PublicMarkup.org’s Transparency in Government Act even covers IG report publication. It looks like the Project on Government Oversight (POGO) […]

More concretely on digital permanence, the House Oversight Committee Subcommittee on Information Policy, Census, and National Archives held a hearing on Wednesday on digital preservation procedures for executive branch materials, HR 5811, or the “Electronic Communications Preservation Act” (as previewed by the American Association of Law Libraries blog). […]

I once heard a historian suggest that every Member of Congress should carry a digital recorder in their pocket, have it always turned on, and make a copy each night, to be released some years in the future, as a record of what they really did. This suggestion, while unlikely to be […]

Similar to the OMB page on IT regulations, (discussed here), NARA has a helpful collection of federal documents management guidelines, laws, and regulations.  Looking over the laws that govern the practical aspects of transparency leaves me predictably disappointed, however, in online access to legal information.  In trying to track down the Federal Records Act, the […]

I’ll put the moral of this story up front: data is nice, but the problem is the media.
Today is the primary election in Pennsylvania, and I intend to go over to vote in a few minutes. But it occurred to me only this morning that more things may be on the ballot than the presidential […]

I’d like to share my current reading list: I’m halfway done with Patrice McDermott’s Who Needs To Know? - The State of Public Access to Federal Information (link).  I wish I had started reading it sooner; it’s packed with public access substance–explanations of laws, the fights that led to their passage, their weaknesses, how […]

Via freegovinfo (via twitter), the New York Times has posted a story about the close relationship between media figures and the current administration.
From an information perspective, I’m impressed (again) by the New York Times development team, who has devised a way for a video news narrative to have original documentation pop up throughout […]