Web Sites Push For More Transparency and Accessibility In Government, By K.C. Jones, InformationWeek, June 23, 2008.

This article describes the work of OpenCongress and MetaVid, which give citizens an open window into government activities.

OpenCongress ...gives readers access to more detail and depth of information than traditional news stories. The free, open source, nonpartisan site does so by combining traditional news stories, summaries of bills, sponsors, status, roll calls on the latest issues put up for votes, and an area for user comments.

...MetaVid... archives video from proceedings in the U.S. House of Representatives and the U.S. Senate. Citizens who want to see what their representatives said on a specific issue can search for and play the specific footage they see.

Today, The Sunlight Foundation announces a new project called Capitol Words which gives an at-a-glance view into the daily proceedings of the United States Congress through the simplest lens available-a single word.

For every day that Congress is in session, Capitol Words displays the most frequently used word in the Congressional Record.

For more about the project see John Wonderlich's post on The Open House Project website.

Of course, it has a widget (see below what it looks like and get the code here), an RSS feed, and an API. Try it, use it, re-use it!

The first two parts of a three part series on how the military is adapting to the Internet are online: from the Air Force banning access from official networks to many blogs (because they are not "established, reputable media"), to the Army setting up its own, password protected version of MySpace ("MilSpace"?).

The Military's Internet 'Civil War' by David Axe, The Washington Independent
• Part One: How the Army Found Middle Ground to Embrace the Internet, 05/30/2008
• Part Two: How the Coast Guard Botched Its Online Start, 06/03/2008

National Academy of Public Administration (NAPA) has launched The Collaboration Project, "an independent forum of leaders committed to leveraging web 2.0 and the benefits of collaborative technology to solve government's complex problems. Powered by the National Academy of Public Administration, this "wikified" space is designed share ideas, examples and insights on the adoption of Web 2.0 technologies in the field of public governance."

See also: NAPA launches collaboration Web site, By Anne Laurent, The Agile Mind blog, NextGov, 05/09/08. "The site is a great example of collaboration, chock-a-block as it is with case studies, a long discourse on government 2.0 by Don Tapscott, Anthony Williams and Dan Herman, authors of Wikinomics: How Mass Collaboration Changes Everything (Portfolio Media, 2006), a blog and plenty more. There’s even a catchy slogan: 'Ask not what your country can do for you. Ask what we can do together.'"

Our report on our experiment in using del.icio.us to tag EPA documents originally harvested by GPO is now completed and available for your review and comment at http://freegovinfo.info/node/1825.

For more information about this project, including a list of tags assigned to documents by project participants, please see http://freegovinfo.info/epatagging.

Our thanks to the project participants!

What is a Member of Congress to do? Embedding a YouTube video on on an official House or Senate web page is against the rules (See The Wrong Way to Talk About Member Web Sites), yet many do it anyway. The House and the Senate both have their own video technology for official sites but it is, uh.... slow..... And even pointing to YouTube is against the rules.

But recently, the Franking Commission has come up with a compromise idea. House Speaker Nancy Pelosi's office put out a request for a commercial-free video zone for Congress. YouTube was the only one that responded to the request, but it should be up and running within a month.

For details, see: Et Tu, YouTube? Lawmakers to Get Their Very Own Sites for Videos, By Jonathan Weisman, Washington Post, April 11, 2008; page A19.

What will that do to our view of "official government web sites"? Will videos be considered in the scope of Title 44 by GPO? Will they be scheduled for acquisition by NARA?

Our friends over at GovGab have started a conversation about web 2.0 tools at http://blog.usa.gov/roller/govgab/entry/government_in_the_web_2 we think you should join.

After some introduction that I encourage you to read on their site, they say:

So, America, I pose a question to you… What do you think of government agencies using social media tools like blogs, RSS feeds, podcasts, YouTube, Flickr, widgets, and microblogs to reach out and give you information? Is it good? Bad? Are there ways you’d like the government to provide information that we haven’t thought of or addressed yet? After all, we’re public servants and we’re here to serve, so let us know what you want and need.

So far they've got nine comments, all of them interesting. Some are from government employees explaining why their agencies aren't terribly social. Sometimes there good reasons. Read Ray's comment dated 4/11/2008, 2:05pm to see an example.

The thread has also shown that the GovGab folks are really listening. A poster called lentigogirl noted that GovGab's Flickr pictures were tagged "All Rights Reserved" when photographs produced by the government should be public domain.

Within a few hours, GovGab blogger Sommer came back with this response:

lentigogirl,

Thanks for the heads up on the Flickr photos. I hadn't noticed the photos were labeled "all rights reserved" before. Whenever I view our photos I'm logged into the account and that piece of information isn't displayed to you on your own account.

I've done some research on Flickr and they don't offer an option to set your photos for the public domain. The closest I can come for now is designating them "Attribution-NoDerivs Creative Commons" (for more info http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nd/3.0/). Also see the Flickr Help Forum for more information on this topic: http://www.flickr.com/search/forum/?q=photos%20in%20public
%20domain
Based on comments in the Help Forum I think the best solution might be to just tag all our photos with a "public domain" tag.

Thanks for teaching me more about Flickr -- it really is all about communicating with each other!

Have a great weekend!
Sommer

Now THAT is responsiveness. As regular FGI readers know, I've really enjoyed GovGab from day one. I think they do a terrific job. So now that they're asking for input on Web 2.0 stuff, I hope you'll take a moment to help them out by sharing your opinion. Then I hope that more agencies will use GovGab and the USA.gov as service benchmarks for responsiveness.

This will be my last entry as your Blogger of the Month for March. I have learned so much about government information and I have enjoyed learning from all of you as well. Thank you for letting me, a newbie in Government Documents, be a part of all this! But this isn't a goodbye, as I'll post my musings every now and again here at FGI. I'm addicted now, so you are not going to get rid of me so easily. *wink*

Before I sign off, I want to let you know about my department's wiki page that I am working on (more will be added as the years go by, I'm sure) on "Gov Docs 2.0" Resources as well as a link to my presentation that I gave at the Louisiana Library Association. If you would like to contribute information to the Gov Docs 2.0 Resources page, let me know. I can give you a password to access just that part of the wiki. So far, the page contains mostly Web 2.0 resources but I would like to include examples of other Government Depositories using Web 2.0 technologies too. I know the GODORT wiki , the Ning Library 2.0 and Government Library 2.0 group, and here at FGI there are some pages and directories about this topic too (I'll link to them from my wiki).

If Gov Docs 2.0 interests you, be sure to attend the Docs 2.0 pre-conference at ALA Anaheim! I wish I could be there, but I'll be busy being an "Emerging Leader" that day at the EL 2008 Workshop. If I could split myself in half in order to attend both, I would!

Ok, one more shameless self promotion before I go...feel free to stop by and read my depository's blog, Gov Docs on the Bayou. I welcome all comments and discussion!

Until next time,
Rebecca Blakeley

Library of Congress tests Web 2.0 photo archive, By Wade-Hahn Chan, FCW.com, March 24, 2008. "The Library of Congress has turned to the popular online picture-sharing community of Flickr for help with tagging the library's voluminous photo archives."

Library of Congress Photos on Flickr, Library of Congress Prints & Photographs Reading Room. "We invite you to tag and comment on the photos, and we also welcome identifying information—many of these old photos came to us with scanty descriptions!" See also the FAQ.

The Library of Congress' photos, Flickr. "Yes. We really are THE Library of Congress."

See also: EPA Pilot Project Tagging Project.

GPO will be presenting information about its internal communications at the conference Strategic Internal Communications In Government - West: Engaging Employees To Drive Change in June in San Diego, CA.

Jeffrey S. Brooke, ABC, Director of Employee Communications, and Terri C. Ehrenfeld, Employee Communications Specialist will be presenting. Here is the abstract of their presenation:

Ghosts, New Years’ Resolutions and Other Agency Information: How To Create Simple Employee Polls That Gather And Distribute Important Information

The U.S. Government Printing Of?ce (GPO) started polling employees on October 31, 2007 with this question: Do you believe in ghosts? From this humorous beginning, a weekly employee poll located on the home page of GPO’s intranet site caught on like wild?re. GPO’s Employee Communications Of?ce uses their weekly polls to gather business-related information, to solicit suggestions, to entertain – and to provide education and resources.

In this presentation you will learn how to:

• Use simple, commercially-available software to launch your own employee polls
• Promote the poll site to employees and encourage participation
• Create a mix of questions that gathers and distributes valuable information – and uses educational entertainment to keep employees coming back for more

This session will provide a live demonstration to show how easy it is to create your own employee poll.

Have you visited FDA.gov lately? *swoon*

According to the FDA, they redesigned their home page because, "In a nutshell, we listened to you. We tested the usability of our Web site by asking our key audiences".

This site should serve as a model for other government agency websites to follow, in my humble opinion. The content avoids jargon and everything is structured in a way that makes it so easy to scan and find what you need.

I finally found some good news to cheer me up after writing the last two posts. ;-)

UC Berkeley Library used wiki software to create a congressional research tutorial called Congresearch. It includes Flash tutorial videos on finding a bill, a hearing, a congressional debate, etc. This one is my favorite. Over time, more tutorials will be added. You can offer them feedback too.

The tutorial homepage also contains links to current congressional news, recent votes and a link to their customized Congressional Search Engine created with Google CSE to create a focused Google search on current official U.S. Congressional websites and news organizations focusing on Congress.

I am in Gov Doc 2.0 Nerd Utopia.

Here is a great example of "Government Documents 2.0" in action: OpenCongress.org offers several Web 2.0 tools such as the OpenCongress Facebook application, where you can put bills that interest you on your Facebook profile. You can show your support or opposition to each bill, or simply remain neutral by selecting the "just following" option. Each bill links back to OpenCongress, so your patrons or friends can get all the information they need in order to understand and become involved with the issues themselves.

One of their Web 2.0 tools that I use for my GovGuides Wiki (a work in progress, mind you!), is the "Bill by Issue Widget". I created one for the Environmental Law GovGuides Wiki page I'm working on. It displays the latest bills introduced in Congress on anything to do with environmental law enforcement.

If you are not familiar with OpenCongress, it's a free, open-source, non-profit, and non-partisan web resource "with a mission to help make Congress more transparent and to encourage civic engagement". OpenCongress is a joint project of the Sunlight Foundation and the Participatory Politics Foundation. It uses data provided by GovTrack.us, which collects data from official government websites, such as Thomas. For more info, see previous FGI posts about OpenCongress: My OpenCongress, Congress Remix, and FGI's "Remixes page".

OpenCongress makes it easy to understand each bill by giving a brief summary, who sponsored it, its status, and related bills. And yes, there are links to the full text of the bill and its voting history from Thomas. However, I do encourage students in my instruction classes to cite the original sources that OpenCongress leads them to, such as the full text of the bill from Thomas, congressional record references, or the homepages that OpenCongress links to for various committees and congressmen, etc. And of course I remind them that not everything is online, especially older government information, so they must turn to the print sources that I show them how to locate and use. By that time, the students are much more apt to pay attention and understand the importance of the exotic experience of handling/using the 1945 volume of the Monthly Catalog of U.S. Government Publications or a Congressional Record volume from 1918. ;-)

I find OpenCongress to be a very user friendly and a convenient "one stop shop" for learning about legislation. Students in my library instruction classes seem to love using it, so if it gets them excited about government information, then I love it too!

While browsing ThinkProgress, I came across a reference to CDC Chatter, which says it is for:

ABOUT CDCChatter.net

Welcome to CDCChatter.net, an unofficial blog for employees of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), external partners and others who are interested in CDC. This blog was established for CDC employees and others to post information, express opinions, make comments and otherwise communicate about decisions, changes, events and other issues that are occurring at CDC. This blog is intended to provide a forum for people to express their views. It is not intended as a forum for disclosing classified or confidential information nor is it intended in any way to compromise the mission and efficacy of CDC.

The site statistics they post on their front page suggests they get good traffic:

Site Statistics
Thru January 2008
561 - Stories
6,373 - Comments

For the month of January:
16 - New stories
250 - New comments
6,477 - Unique visitors
1215 - Average visits per day
14,175 - Average hits per day

Some of the most recent news/discussion topics included:

• A reader has written expressing concern that in times of tightened resources, NCCDPHP leadership is not marshalling its energies to continue to address the threats of chronic diseases.
• With the impending budget cuts what are some ways CDC can cut its budget and still provide the public with the healthcare knowledge and service they deserve?
• CDC CAREER DAY - Setting People up for Failure?
• Congress to probe CDC for withholding report

Looks like an interesting resource for those interested in the federal health community. Also looks like a way to get a potentially unfiltered view of government operations. I would how a GPOChatter.net would work out?

Slate has an interesting article titled "Digg, Wikipedia and the Myth of Web 2.0 Democracy" in which the author, Chris Wilson, talks about how a few people are responsible for most of the entries in Digg and Wikipedia and various permutations of having an open-access site.  He makes that point that  "Despite the fairy tales about the participatory culture of Web 2.0, direct democracy isn't feasible at the scale on which these sites operate. Still, it's curious to note that these sites seem to have the hierarchical structure of the old-guard institutions they've sought to supplant."