Emily Feldman at the AALL blog has an update on the EPA hosted public data conversation:
The Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) has opened up a blog seeking comments on improving access to EPA’s environmental information. The blog, the Partner Blog for the National Dialogue, will be open for comments this week, June 9-13, 2008.
The topics open [...]

Add another tally to the list of public conversations about federal data availability. The Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services, part of Health and Human Services, is hosting another in their series of “Open Door Forums“, to discuss Medicare Part D Data regulations. (See here for CMS’s description of the new rule and [...]

I’ve been writing and rewriting a more formal response to the paper, but I’d like to share my thoughts first, especially as “The Invisible Hand” gets more coverage (with an Ars Technica article today).
First, I’d like to say that I’m delighted to see this topic addressed in an academic setting, and I also see nothing [...]

Something pretty exciting is happening over at honda.house.gov; (Congressman Mike Honda’s Web site). They have posted their new education related legislation on the site, along with justifications, background, endorsements, and even the ability to leave public comments through the blog area of the site.
This approach to introducing and building support for legislation recognizes the [...]

The current Harper’s first selection features stunningly direct testimony about data. This particular Senate committee receives scalding criticism over the way the GDP is used by the government and the media to measure societal well-being, for which purpose he argues the GDP is wholly inadequate, rather than to measure economic activity, which it actually [...]

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 [...]