If you were at PdF '09 in New York City, you heard the idea floated that "public means online." In other words, if the law or regulation requires some document or other resource to be "public," you can no longer get away with stuffing it in some filing cabinet that citizens have to make an appointment to go see. You gotta put it online.

Here's a neat development in that space. The Sunlight Foundation just announced this morning that Rep. Steve Israel (D-NY) is introducing the Public Online Information Act -- or, naturally, POIA -- today.* In brief, POIA would require that within three years, federal agencies will have switched to the presumption that what they publish is accessible online, and that a federal advisory committee will be established to ensure that "public means online" is an operating principle that all three branches of the federal government abide by. (Using the Freedom of Information Act's shorthand as a guide, the correct pronounciation of POIA should be "poy-ah.")

Sunlight put together the below video to explain the whys and hows of POIA. The bill is expected to head to the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee, chaired by New York Democrat Ed Towns.

*Note: Our Andrew Rasiej and Micah Sifry are senior advisors to the Sunlight Foundation. And if I'm remembering correctly, it was Andrew who kicked off the thinking on "public means online" at the conference.

The White House has just released its Open Government Directive, long-awaited by transparency and "government 2.0" advocates, and at first glance, the meat on the bone looks pretty juicy. (Or, if you prefer a vegan metaphor, the sauce on the seitan looks pretty, um, creamy?) Nancy's got a sharp and detailed write-up here, and since I've been stuck in a meeting all day, I'm only going to add one additional wrinkle on a topic close to my heart that I think is worth highlighting, nay, hailing.

To me, one of the most important parts of the new directive is in this paragraph, in the section on "Publishing Government Information Online":

b. To the extent practicable and subject to valid restrictions, agencies should publish information online in an open format that can be retrieved, downloaded, indexed, and searched by commonly used web search applications. An open format is one that is platform independent, machine readable, and made available to the public without restrictions that would impede the re-use of that information.

There’s a very interesting confluence of conversations taking place at the moment on the topic of how technology is changing politics. One is on the idea of government 2.0, or government-as-a-platform. The second is on whether the net is better for campaigning than governing. And the third is on what happens when you open up the process with real-time transparency. Let me see if I can combine the threads. (And sorry, this is a bit of a long post, thanks to all the traveling in DC I did last week.)

Clay Johnson and his team at Sunlight Labs have won the 2009 Google-O'Reilly Open Source Award at OSCON 2009 in the "Best Community Builder" category.* Not bad for a bunch of civic-minded government geeks. Interesting note on the evolution of the web: OSCON didn't even have a community category award back in 2005. It has since morphed from "Best Community Activist" to "Best Community Builder" to "Best Community Amplifier" and back again to the builder designation this year.

*Note: Our Andrew Rasiej and Micah Sifry are senior advisors to the Sunlight Foundation.

An interesting Recovery.gov-related detail bubbles up from our comments. I noted in a post yesterday that the Recovery and Accountability Transparency Board had posted the Statement of Objectives for the multi-million dollar overhaul of Recovery.gov. But the Sunlight Foundation's Luigi Montanez pointed out in a comment that the Scribd document I had linked to was actually a copy of the SOO that posted by Sunlight Labs.

I scratched my head for a minute, and then figured out where the confusion came from. In discussing the contract on Recovery.gov, the RAT Board -- the official government entity charged with overseeing the $800 billion federal stimulus -- is not using its own internal materials. It's instead linking off to a version that Sunlight scanned in from a hardcopy and posted to Scribd. (See the last line on this Recovery.gov page.) Montanez points out that Sunlight's hardcopy scan is no replacement for a digital version of the source document. Montanez also has some great info on what's next in the Recovery.gov redesign process:

The contract is [FOIA-able], and Devaney has indicated that he wants to publish it even without a FOIA request, as soon as the mandatory "Award Dispute Period" is over, which is today. The strange irony behind that is the contract is forbidden to be published during the period when it is supposed to be able to be disputed.

Stay tuned.

One imagines the conversation in Sunlight Labs HQ went something like this: "We can rebuild it -- we have the technology." And for far less than six million dollars! Saying that they were inspired by Data.gov but believe that their role as outsiders puts them in a position to make it even better, the folks in the watchdog group's experimental wing have announced plans to improve upon it by building a National Data Catalog:

Because of politics and scale there's only so much the government is going to be able to do. There are legal hurdles and boundaries the government can't cross that we can. For instance: there's no legislative or judicial branch data inside Data.gov and while Data.gov links off to state data catalogs, entries aren't in the same place or format as the rest of the catalog. Community documentation and collaboration are virtual impossibilities because of the regulations that impact the way Government interacts with people on the web.

Government officials have discussed growing Data.gov to somewhere near 100,000 data feeds, but something is slowing that progress; the site currently hosts just under 400 original data sets. There's a discussion group starting up where you can learn about and participate in Sunlight's effort to do government one better.

Note: Our Andrew Rasiej and Micah Sifry are senior advisors to the Sunlight Foundation.

Calling all developers: The Sunlight Foundation, Google, O'Reilly Media and Techweb are launching a new contest, Apps for America 2: The Data.gov Challenge, to celebrate the launch of Data.gov today.

The set-up for tomorrow's "Privacy and Analytics on Government Web Sites" event in Washington DC promises a refreshing blend of techno-utopianism and cyber conspiracy thinking. The Center for Democracy and Technology, the Electronic Frontier Foundation, and the Sunlight Foundation are planning to explore the question of what it means to live in a world where the President of the United States wants to be your Facebook friend and the FBI is reading your tweets. The groups will also be announcing a joint report on how the federal government can properly balance the use of social media with respect for the privacy desires and creepiness tolerance of the American citizenry. RSVPs are requested, and you can do so here.

Tomorrow marks the final day for submissions into the Sunlight Foundation's Apps for America contest. There are about a dozen apps submitted thus far, and the prize money is not insubstantial (not to mention the glory and the invaluable sense of having put your programming chops to use on behalf of your country and fellow citizens). Let's have a quick look at some of the apps in the running. Represented By is a Facebook app that keeps tabs on your congresspeople and connects you to friends similarly represented. GovPix links bits of data from zip codes to last names to the photos of the relevant elected officials. And the intriguing Know Thy Congressman uses a bookmarklet to create a graceful overlay that offers a snapshot of the member in question, pulling in API-provided information from New York Times, Flickr, Capitol Words and elsewhere. (Perhaps worth pondering: what it says about Know Thy Congressman's orientation that they've chosen as their poster child the legendarily verbose early 1900s' Arizona senator Henry Fountain Ashurst -- a politician whom Time magazine once described as having "a gift for making two long words do the work of one short one.")

A while back, techPres contributor Mark Drapeau coined the term "Goverati" -- which, for all its skin-crawling connotations, does capture something about this historical moment. Never, perhaps, since Teddy Roosevelt's civil service reforms has open government been so gosh darn sexy. Cases in point: more than 500 people are registered to spend all weekend at the Government 2.0 "uncamp" in DC. And the Sunlight Foundation announced another round of funding in the form of $4 million from the Omidyar Network.