Yesterday's first public meeting of the Food and Drug Administration's new Transparency Task Force was dedicated to brainstorming ways to make the FDA more accessible, knowable, and accountable, and thus the question came up: What can be done about the agency's notoriously glacial response to Freedom of Information Act requests on drug approvals, food recalls, and medical device oversight? One idea floated was that FDA documents, once published once through official channels, be posted on the FDA website for all the world to use and peruse. If the FDA decides to go that route, there's a new model coming out of a different world -- the news business -- that might help to flesh out what public document sharing might look like in the modern age.

It's called DocumentCloud, and it just received a two-year grant for a considerable $719,500 from the Knight Foundation's Knight News Challenge...