Department of Disclosure update: I'm pleased to announce that I've joined the volunteer board of the Public Laboratory for Open Technology and Science. Founded in 2011 by a collective of seven, Public Lab, as it's known in short, is a community that develops and applies open-source tools to environmental exploration and investigation, like balloon mapping and kitchen-table spectrometers. By democratizing inexpensive and accessible “Do-It-Yourself” techniques, Public Laboratory is nurturing a collaborative network of practitioners who are actively re-imagining the human relationship with the environment. Read More

Posting the calendars of elected officials was one of the earliest calls to come out of the open government movement, but the Consumer Financial Protection Board's Matt Burton suggests one possible reason pick-up has ... Read More

From the transparency-in-action files, observed: popping up on congressional committee websites now are the "Truth in Testimony" declarations that are newly required to be posted within a day alongside ... Read More

Politico's Morning Tech has some great reporting on Google's request for the Federal Election Commission to clarify how online political ad disclosure requirements, an in particular the application of disclosures that ... Read More

The Pentagon is busily adjusting to a new world-order where it makes sense for it to negotiate with a loosely-knit Iceland-based web entity over the release of war documents, but it's doing so without much enthusiasm and ... Read More

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Disclosure as a regulatory tool in political finance will not soon come under extensive re-consideration. Its virtues are largely unquestioned, except in the rare case where identifiable minority interests are plainly, ... Read More

Where do our public political lives overlap with our online selves? Is professional versus personal a useful or reasonable distinction anymore in the share-everything-everywhere age of new media? What do ... Read More

Today is "Better Know Your Social Media Settings" on the blog, it seems. Read More

Across the country we've been seeing good government reformers slowly coming to the terms with the fact that existing electronic discolsure laws are about as effective at ensuring transparency as a water gun is at ... Read More