At iConference 2010 at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign I organized and participated on the panel, “Future of Government Information” with Tom Bruce (Cornell Legal Information Institute), Daniel Schuman (Sunlight Foundation) and Cindy Etkin (Government Printing Office (GPO)). My slides and notes are online.

Below are a list of places and conferences to which FGI volunteers have been invited to speak about the future of government information.

This promises to be a very interesting conference! If you are going and will be blogging or tweeting, please let us know. (admin at freegovinfo.info)

• LIMITING KNOWLEDGE IN A DEMOCRACY A Social Research conference at The New School, New York City, February 24-26, 2010. www.socres.org/limitingknowledge

Join award winning journalists, distinguished scholars, and policy makers to examine how the U.S. government and other political and cultural institutions distort or otherwise affect the flow of information. What limits on access to knowledge safeguard our democracy and what limits erode it?

Keynote: Seymour Hersh

Featured Speakers:
Steven Aftergood
David D. Aufhauser
Ronald Bayer
Christopher Capozzola
Julie E. Cohen
Daniel Ellsberg
Peter L. Galison
Rebecca Goldstein
Glenn Greenwald
Dale Jamieson
Philip Kitcher
Nicholas Lemann
Eric Lichtblau
Michael Oppenheimer
Daniel Sarewitz
Jonathan Zittrain

Over three days, the conference will investigate how our government and other political and cultural institutions organize, fund, restrict, facilitate, or otherwise affect the flow of knowledge, and examine how limits may support or undermine democracy. Speakers will examine the government and technological structures and mechanisms that limit transparency, the influence of private interests and government over media and the propagation of misinformation, and the host of other powerful forces surrounding policy-making that curtail our knowledge and threaten our privacy.

We will also look at other institutions that significantly affect what we can know, what we ought to know and what we should try to know, including the research community itself, as well as the implicit limits located within our culture that strongly influence what we seek to know and what we are content not to know.

And, we will discuss the role of whistleblowers and investigative journalism to uphold public accountability.

These issues will be addressed from the perspectives of government policy, political science, public health, history, science, economics, media, law, journalism, and philosophy.

This post follows my September 18th post, Gov 2.0 Expo Showcase: Govies Represent.

The Gov 2.0 Summit, sponsored by O'Reilly Media and TechWeb and held in Washington, DC on September 9th and 10th, was a Big Event--particularly for those who were there. Lots of blogging, lots of tech press coverage. It was full of big tech invitees and priced too high for the average local government webmaster or civic hacker. And me. So this is a view from the outside.

Fortunately, videos from many of the conference sessions are available on the Summit website. You can review the full schedule of sessions and click on "Read more" to link to videos and any other material available for a session. One of the highlights, based on the chatter, was Carl Malamud's By the People... talk. The Summit website does not have it, but the video of Malamud's talk has been posted to his own site and is linked from FGI as a lunchtime listen.

Here is a sampling of some of the videos available:

Rapid Fire: Setting the Stage, esteemed panel presents 2.0 examples

GeoEnabling Gov 2.0, Jack Dangermond, founder and president of ESRI

Creating an Effective Platform, John Markoff of NY Times interviews the father of the Internet, the co-founder of Twitter, and Facebook's DC rep

Based on the tweets, the Gov 2.0 Summit attendees seemed to be genuinely ecstatic about the show and new to many of the existing projects and the landscape of government information. Whether they see a market here is another question.

For more coverage, check out the Summit website's long list of links to news articles about the conference.

Last week's Gov 2.0 Expo conference, run by O'Reilly Media and TechWeb, featured over 25 five-minute presentations by people who have managed government projects -- at all levels of government -- that involve Web 2.0 methods. For the summaries and presentation links related to each speaker, see the full Gov 2.0 Expo schedule; each session title is linked to the relevant information.

In 2.0 participatory fashion, attendees texted to vote for the best presentation in each program segment. The winners were:

City of Santa Cruz Offers Blueprint for Solving CA Budget Crisis with Social Media - Peter Koht (City of Santa Cruz)
txts 4 africa - Merrick Schaefer (UNICEF)
Transit 2.0 at BART.gov - Melissa Jordan (Bay Area Rapid Transit)
Utah Department of Public Safety Media Portal - Jeff Nigbur (State of Utah, Department of Public Safety)
Digital Diplomacy: Understanding Islam through Virtual Worlds - Rita King (Dancing Ink Productions)

Of special interest to the FGI audience, Steve Schultze of the Berkman Center for Internet & Society at Harvard discussed RECAP in his presentation, Crowdsourcing Federal Court Transparency. Also of interest, the presentation on EPA's MyEnvironment, MyEnvironment: Environmental Information for Your Community, generated lots of approving noises from the audience.

Tim O'Reilly was everywhere at the conference, quickly and respectfully responding to tweets and blog posts critiquing his "Government as a Platform" catch phrase/vision/conversation-starter.

His keynote:
Opening Keynote: Tim O'Reilly, O'Reilly Media (video, blip.tv)
And his "Government as a Platform" talk recorded prior to the conference:
The Platform for Change (video, blip.tv)

O'Reilly Media must view the Expo Showcase as a success; another has been announced for 2010.

The Expo preceded the main event, the Gov 2.0 Summit. I'll have more on that in a later post.

Related post: Gov 2.0 Expo and the Apps for America 2 Challenge Winners

If you are going to the ALA Annual 2009 Conference in Chicago next week, please come to the "ALA Unconference" where I will be leading a broad discussion on Friday, July 10th from 11:10-12:00 on the library's role in current & emerging trends of civic engagement, transparency, preservation and access to Government information. The supporting materials and presentation will be linked in the Unconference wiki.

Also, please come to the LITA BIGWIG Social Software Showcase to discuss and learn about Government Information Mashups! I will be presenting on this topic and would love to have you help out and/or join in on the conversation! The presentation will be posted on their website but the face to face portion of the BIGWIG Showcase presentations will take place Monday, July 13th from 10:30am - 12:30pm in the McCormick Convention Center West, Room W-184.

A week from today, I (Daniel) will be attending the Reference Renaissance conference in Denver. If you're attending, let's talk. If there's enough of us, maybe we can do a meal or something.

I'm attending for my library and I'm mostly looking for ways to better serve our large number of remote users. But I'm sure there'll be something that can be put to documents use. Assuming there is, I'll do my best to blog about it here.

ALA annual conference is coming up and there are a couple of GODORT preconferences that may be of interest to FGI readers. Since they're on different days, you could attend both!

Want to learn more about Web2.0 technologies and documents librarianship? There's still time to register for the GODORT pre-conference "Docs2.0: emerging web technologies for the government documents community" at ALA Annual conference in Anaheim, Friday, June 27, 2008, 9:00am – 12:30. The 1/2 day preconference will be chock full of both hands-on work and discussion about Web2.0 tools and how they can be used to help documents librarians with their collections and services. FGI volunteers Jim Jacobs and James Jacobs will be presenting about RSS and del.icio.us; Additional speakers on the slate are Amy West, David Oldenkamp, and the keynote will be John Wonderlich, Program Director of the Sunlight Foundation.

The other preconference of interest is entitled, "Got Elections? Informing the Public" on Thursday, June 26, 8:30am - 4:30pm. This is cosponsored by GODORT, ACRL, and LPSS.

At this lively full-day workshop with nationally recognized speakers, attendees will learn Who Decides? (Information on Voters), Who Runs? (Information on Candidates), Who Cares? (Information on Issues), and Who Wins? (Information on Election Results). Help library and online users make sense of the information they find. Transportation will be provided from the Convention Center.

Location: California State University Fullerton, Pollak Library, 800 N State College Blvd.

Speakers: Rhodes Cook, Political Analyst, RhodesCook. com; Stephen Woods, Social Sciences Librarianm Pennsylvania State University; Chris Palazzolo, Librarian for Political Science & International Documents, Emory University; John Hernandez, Politics and U.S. Documents Librarian, Princeton University; Erik Estep, North Carolina Reference Librarian, East Carolina University; Jerry Wong, Information Services Specialist, U.S. Census Bureau

Tickets: Advance: GODORT Member: $125; ALA Member: $150; Non-Member: $200; Student/ Retired Member: $100. Onsite: GODORT Member: $140; ALA Member: $165; Non-Member: $215; Student/Retired Member: $115
Event Code: GO1

I wanted to write about this a few days ago, but have only found the time to do so now.

The Government Printing Office (GPO) started releasing materials from the Spring 2008 Depository Library Conference even before the DLC meeting closed on April 2, 2008. You can find their materials at http://www.fdlp.gov/repository/dlc/spring08/index.html

GPO deserves credit for being prompt for the initial release of DLC materials. It is a refreshing change from a few years ago when people who couldn't make meetings had to wait many weeks for materials to be made available. So thanks GPO!

I hope to go through most of this material in the near future in more detail, but here are some items that seem like they are of special interest:

• Improved Access to EPA Information:Before and After with Web 2.0 by Brand Niemann (in 3 parts)
• Web 2.0 Power Point Presentation by Cindy Etkin of the U.S. Government Printing Office
• Back to the drawing board in Virtual and Real Worlds
• Web Harvesting Update for the Depository Library Council
• Web Scraping Government Information

Go forth and check out! Let us know what you think of what's been released.

Official materials including handouts and some prepared speeches can be found at http://www.fdlp.gov/repository/dlc/spring08/index.html.

Please feel free to send us your notes or recordings of conference sessions.

The GPO has posted a recap of the 2007 Fall Federal Depository Library Conference and Fall Depository Library Council Meeting that includes audio files, photos, and unedited transcripts. Of particular note:Ric Davis, who has been serving as Interim Superintendent of Documents has accepted the job of Interim Superintendent of Documents; the FDSys has been renamed FDSys; and the Depository Library Council is now directly asking "What does FDSys mean for libraries?" Also of note: there were excellent discussions of official and authentic online legal materials and shared models for regional FDLP libraries.

Free Culture and the Digital Library
These are the notes I used for the presentation I gave at the Free Culture and the Digital Library conference and are based on the paper, Government Information in the Digital Era: Free Culture or Controlled Substance? by Karrie Peterson (NCSU Libraries, North Carolina State University) and James A. Jacobs (Data Services, University of California San Diego).

Last week, Shinjoung and I were invited to participate at the Crisis of the California Commons Conference. Our panel discussion was with Megan Shaw Prelinger, Annalee Newitz and Bodo Balazs entitled, "Information Commons: Rebirth or Siren Song?" I think there was a lot of discussion about different commmons (environmental, cultural, information etc) that resonate for librarians in general and documents librarians (keepers of the public domain!). You can access the audio here.

One of the best talks (well besides ours!) was Rick Prelinger's plenary on the cultural commons was especially interesting (at 44:20 of the audio file with Jeff Lustig, Jonathan Rowe, Ruth Rosen, and Iain Boal). Rick talked eloquently about interoperability, sampling, and openness, issues near and dear to our collective heart. Enjoy!

Commons requires interoperability so it can be open to all; you don't need a special key to enter the commons...

Here's some examples of openness taken from the cultural domain:

Openness means not just seeing the image of a bookpage but seeing the text too and being able to grab it, mix it, manipulate it. It means not just watching a movie but being able to download the shots and the edit list and make your own cut. It means not just the music but the MIDI. It means not just the freedom to read, listen, watch, feel, smell, taste, but the freedom to remix in all of these sensory domains. So in the world that we're entering, the digital world, it means that we have to be able to touch the digital object itself and touch the code that makes it play, display, or manifest itself. In other words, not just see things but be able to transform them.

Being the chair of the Alaska Library Association's Government Documents Roundtable is a little like being the Maytag Repairman. There are about 20 registered members, but only about four or five of those folks are active in association activities. Our usual business meetings vary from two to four and last year I didn't get anybody.

Today I was pleasantly surprised. I got a special visit from Cam McIntosh, Seattle-based Information Specialist for the Census Bureau's Seattle field office. Cam is wonderful to work with and a great trainer. If you work anywhere in Cam's region, you should call her office and arrange a training. If you don't work in her five state area, find your nearest Census field office and see what training resources they can offer your organization.

In addition to Cam, three other RT members showed up. Lacking a formal agenda, I put Cam on the spot and she gave us a brief overview of the American Community Survey, which included these helpful tips:

By 2010, All communities in the United States will have THREE population estimates - one based on a one-year sample of population, one based on a three year rolling sample and one based on a five year rolling sample. This combined with the reporting of "margin of error" in populations may make for some interesting educational opportunities for library patrons who "just want to know what the exact population of ___ is."

It is best to report percentages or proportions in the American Community Survey rather than raw numbers. But be sure to say + or - x percent. Cam compared this to political polling as a way to get folks comfortable with the concept of sampling.

Nationwide, the American Community Survey surveys 1 in 464 addresses every month. This proportion is much higher in smaller areas, reaching at least as high as 35% in really small towns.

Data for the 2005 American Community Survey data DID NOT include any numbers for people housed in "group quarters." Group quarters are places like military bases, boarding schools, homeless shelters, prisons, etc.

State Ranking Tables are available for American Community Survey Data and they can be filtered by the criteria of "with statistical significance." This can be a real eye opener and halt some of the jockeying for position some people have for state ranking tables. If I'm right, the phrase "with statistical significance" should link you to a table of 2005 data ranking proportion of people 85 and over. Looks like Alaska is last by any measure.

Aside from Cam's courteous impromptu ACS presentation, I also got to meet a new librarian from Ketchikan and introduce my new federal documents librarian. All in all, it was a fun hour. If you've got a documents roundtable report to share, send it to me and I'll post it LISNews, Alaskan Librarian, and Free Government Information. If you've already posted your report to the web, feel free to send me a link.