I got three videos through email that make a strong stong point about the international bottom up movement of online information activism that is occuring right now. They’re embedded and linked below, so be sure to check them out. The videos give a brief history of the Legal Information Institute, which has [...]

Another point from a panel I attended this morning…
Apparently, justifying IT and infrastructure spending is difficult, especially given that budget requests come up through administrative structures, themselves anathema to inter-agency coordination.  This is probably why e-government spending in the executive branch is inefficiently distributed among agencies and generally resented.
If those people selecting spending priorities and [...]

Perhaps the most basic way to think about institutions is that they are concentrations of certain kinds of expertise, within stable incentive structures.  Democratizing communications through digital technology normalizes both incentives and membership, by permitting participation on the basis of any sort of incentive, by anyone with any kind of expertise.  As the Cluetrain Manifesto [...]

I wish the Open Access movement were further along, and academic publications were posted in public online, because that would make it easier to share some of the things I’ve learned in the last two days at the Digital Government Society Conference.  Since I can’t link to most of the research I’m learning about, I’ll [...]

Here are my cleaned-up notes from a workshop on electronic rulemaking at the dg.o conference happening now. (still disjointed, but no doubt more interesting posted here than alone on my laptop) I’m interested in the event because of the relevance of structuring deliberative processes online, developing listening tools to make governmental staff jobs [...]

I’d like to go over this in more detail soon, but NARA has published a new digital preservation strategy, described in more detail here. (via NARA’s RSS)

A quick post to point out something I’ve noticed.  Open communications structures lead to expanded roles, which leads to unusual allegiances that form outside formalized power structures.  For this reason, the Open House Project has seen alliances between all of the following despite the immensely different incentives under which they function:

New Media Staff
IT staff
administrators
politicians from [...]

The GAO has just released a report on the development of the Electronic Records Archive under the National Archives and Records Administration.
The ability to find, organize, use, share, appropriately dispose of, and save
records—the essence of records management—is vital for the effective
functioning of the federal government. In the wake of the transition from
paper-based to electronic processes, [...]

(from Sunlight)
Ars Technica has an article up about the “hyperconnected”–defined by the Interactive Data Corporation as those people for whom the line between work and personal has been blurred to the point that they’re “willing to communicate with work on vacation, in restaurants, from bed, and even in places of worship.”
The article offers some criticism [...]

The Library of Congress has published a new Digital Preservation Newsletter (pdf), via ResourceShelf.

It touches on OOXML, the PDF/A format, NDIIPP Partnerships, and the MetaArchive Cooperative.
To subscribe to their newsletter, go here.