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 National Broadband Plan (pdf) being presented to Congress today is an important foundational document in the future development of the Internet in this country -- which is our way of warning you that we're going to be boring you with some of the details in the days ahead. But as promised yesterday, here are two more aspects of the plan that particularly touch on the ideas of open government, interactivity citizen participation:

• The National Broadband Plan proposes that the Federal Communications Commission should create an online database containing information it collects on the broadband speeds and services available to Americans, searchable by Internet service provider (AT&T, Verizon, Joe's Wireless), street address, so on and so forth.
• The plan also proposes that the federal government should structure the data it collects with the goal in mind that third-parties will use it to build decision-making apps to help citizens and businesses figure out which broadband service option best suits the way they actually use the Internet -- whether they're night-only light users, hard-core gamers, video watchers, or whatever the case may be.

The bigger problem is that, in many cases, people in the U.S. have one or two broadband providers to choose from. Three is considered an embarrassment of riches. But solving that is what the rest of the plan is for.

Bonus: Now that we have a PDF version of the plan, we can get a peek at what the online Spectrum Dashboard we talked about yesterday will look like. The FCC promises that this is the beta version:

Credit: The National Broadband Plan, FCC

As the New York Times' Brian Stelter reports, C-Span is declaring victory over the creation of a comprehensive online library of government-related video going back, in full, to the Reagan years, and with caches of content from even earlier. C-Span reports that they've digitized and uploaded nearly half a million videos since 1987, comprising about 160,000 hours of video footage. Fire up the archive when your kid is a baby, sit down and watch non-stop, and you'll be done when she's ready to leave for college. It's all online now at C-SpanVideo.org.

Good news for bloggers: a great deal of the C-SPAN clips are embeddable. As for copyright, a perennial question when it comes to what C-SPAN provides, it appears to remain the same for this resource. In other words, whatever happens on the floor of the House and Senate is public domain. Whatever happens at non-floor government events, including congressional hearings and White House events, they're claiming copyright over -- and they're generally cool with that copyright protection being honored by leaving the C-Span logo on the footage. They claim full copyright over documentaries and other original productions.

There's enough in there to keep a history teacher (or history geek) busy for quite a while. I'd never seen Al Gore's concession speech to George Bush from 2000, for example, but that's in there. There's quirkier fare too; C-Span has visited the gravesite of every deceased American president, and that's in there too. Dive in.

At an FCC briefing this morning, I got my hands on a copy of the long-awaited National Broadband Plan that was set to be released tomorrow morning. And as it appears that Politico has broken the midnight embargo, instead of a leisurely, contemplative lunch before heading back up to New York, I'm in a Capitol Hill Cosi type-type-typing away. Thanks Politico! Anyway, we'll be digging through the plan for parts relevant to what we do here, but here's a taste. As part of their national broadband strategy, the FCC is soon going to be releasing a beta version of an online Wireless Spectrum Dashboard:

Concurrent with the National Broadband Plan, the FCC is launching a beta release of a spectrum dashboard. This Internet-based software enables user-friendly access to information regarding spectrum bands and licenses, including those that may be suitable for wireless broadband deployment. The initial version includes general information about non-federal use of spectrum bands in the range of 225 MHz to 3.7 GHz as well as more detailed information about bands of particular relevance to broadband.

The spectrum dashboard will allow users to browse spectrum bands more easily, search for spectrum licenses, produce maps and download raw data for further analysis. For the first time, through a single FCC portal, users may access basic information on the licenses (e.g., license name, contact information, frequency bands) as well as descriptions of allocations. Further, the dashboard includes information not previously available through the FCC website, such as the capability to search for licenses based on commonly recognizable names of companies (e.g., AT&T, T-Mobile, Verizon, etc.) and the amount of spectrum held by licenses on a county-by-county basis for many types of licenses.

The wireless spectrum is a national resource owned by the people, even if it isn't always treated as such. And this is one instance where the Obama administration's affection for online dashboards (see, IT Spending Dashboard, Open Government Dashboard) is potentially pretty significant. Applying the principles of open government -- raw data, visualizations, and the rest -- makes that spectrum more knowable, shifting the balance a power of bit between those who currently license and make money off the spectrum, and upstarts, innovators, and the American people.

The Washington Post's ombudsperson Andrew Alexander has an apology to make. He's super sorry that the Post doesn't do a better job exposing its readers to government data:

[T]he era when paper records were kept in dusty file rooms is fading. Today, "freedom of information" has been expanded to encompass the right to instantly tap vast quantities of public information in electronic form. The contents of these databases, from restaurant health inspection reports to toxic waste citations, help citizens improve their communities and their lives.

The Post has a journalistic obligation and a business imperative to provide easy online access to the data through its Web site. But it's fallen far behind at a time when its readers have a growing number of alternatives.

It's intriguing that some people within the Washington Post enterprise are interpreting the organization's mission these days as being a portal onto minimally-processed government data, and doing it with a thinly-veiled reference to the good ol' days of Watergate. That's reinterpreting "newspaper" to be a news organization, yes. But it's also rethinking "news organization" to include acting as a go-between between the stuff that government produces and the stuff that citizens might like to know about. But hey, as Alexander points out, today kicks off Sunshine Week across the country. No time like the present to start getting better at serving up to readers the source materials of government.

If not for the good of the country, then for the good, says Alexander, of the Post:

The Post should help its readers by becoming a robust online gateway to digitized information. If not, readers' loyalties will shift to another brand.

Credit: daleonsouth (Photo caption: "Discovered I was without internet a couple of days ago...")

Just days before the Federal Communications Commission is set to make its über-exciting announcement of its new national broadband strategy, the Commission has launched a pair of web tools that empower citizens to measure the current state of American broadband.

The first new web tool from the FCC is the Broadband Speed Test. Input your street address, and the tool uses either the Ookla or M-Lab measuring programs to assess just how fast your Internet connection is, on four metrics -- upload speed, download speed, latency, and jitter (which seems to measure the stability of your hook-up). The exciting bit there is that, accompanied by a push for broadband labelings akin to nutrition labels, consumers might now have a better sense of just how big and steady a pipe they're paying for, and how big and steady a pipe they're actually getting.

The FCC's second new web tool is a "Broadband Dead Zone" tool with which Americans can let the federal government know that they're not getting broadband in their homes, and whether or not they'd like to be.

On one level, the Broadband Speed Test and Broadband Dead Zone finder are a pair of nifty consumer-empowering tools. But they're also more than that, in an institutional sense. Accurate real-time data on where broadband runs in the U.S., how expensive it is, how reliable it is -- that's treated like the Queen's jewels by the telecom companies. Coping with the current state of U.S. broadband is difficult when you're oblivious to what the current state of U.S. broadband really is. What we're looking at here is an attempt to give the government a bit more of an even hand in that relationship.

Not bad for a couple of basic web tools.

Out in the great state of Minnesota, the forward-thinking legislature there is attempting, by statute, to create an official position of state webmaster, so that there's one single point person who is responsible for maintaining and spreading public data on the web. The benefit of putting it into law: so that even should political power change, there's an established place in the bureaucracy for a data captain. But that, my friends, has folks with some of your bigger proprietary software companies a little anxious. Politics in Minnesota reports:

A bill for the innocuous-sounding purpose of establishing the position of state webmaster is reportedly attracting the nervous interest of high-tech lobbying interests, most notably Microsoft. The bill, which is being carried in the Legislature by Sen. Don Betzold and Rep. Phyllis Kahn, the chairs of the Senate and House State Government Finance committees, would create the position of state webmaster to oversee the development of coordinated, information-generous state government websites and to make the data presented there more readily accessible and useable for the public.

In short, what's making companies like Microsoft worried is that standardizing public data, as provided for in the bill, is but a slippery slope towards interoperability, which only ends in a pit of open-source software -- and away from locked packages of the sort that Microsoft sells.

As important as this legislative wrangling is for Minnesota's prospects of a getting an official public data master, it potentially has a much further reach. It's probably safe to predict that other states seeking to enshrine an open public data regime into state law would/will face a similar battle.

Credit: The Long Now Foundation

The Long Now Foundation is the group of folks out in San Francisco who concern themselves with considering how the world might play out over the next 10,000 years, so it makes sense that when Deputy U.S. Chief Technology Officer for open government Beth Noveck headed there to give an address recently, her mind was on the long term -- as in, how political decisions with perhaps generations-long impact are made by people who might be out of power in two years (if not sooner). "Very long term decisions that affect the fate of our planet, the fate of our economy, the fate of our major systems of health care and education," Noveck said, "are being made by people who are in very short term political positions."

It's a problem that others have identified. But Noveck comes at it from an intriguing angle. If decisions are made quickly but people with a distinct lack of long-range vision, then we can help ameliorate the situation by going deep -- that is, pulling into service a wider range of people to act collaboratively. It's the spirit, in many ways, of Rep. Tim Walz's project to group-vet 98 earmark requests we profiled yesterday. It might come across as tech-tinged West Coast froo-froo thinking. But as Noveck points out, it's not exactly new. She tells an annecdote about how, when in the 1790s Thomas Jefferson headed up the U.S. Patent Office back, he was having trouble with a patent, and so wrote a friend who was a professor at the University of Pennsylvania and said, Hey, I don't know anything about alchemy. Can you help me out?

As for what the Obama administration has accomplished in the collaborative government space, Noveck points to things like Data.gov, Recovery.gov, the posting of White House visitor logs, the Sunlight Foundation's annotation of the health care summit video stream distributed by the White House, Apps for the Army, and more. You'll notice that a heavy emphasis on transparency/disclosure, rather than actual collaboratioin, in that batch of accomplishments. And Noveck admitted that the trick of engineering experiences to produce constructive participation is one that the Obama administration is still practicing. "People have to know what's being asked of them," she said. "And we have a long way to go to learn how to do that."

One additional thing that jumped out from Noveck's talk is that her focus on tech-centric "open government" actually shares a great deal in common with the broader current discussion over ending the filibuster, calling a consitutional convention, and otherwise rethinking the instutitons of government. Noveck, for example, used an Alexis de Tocqueville quote: "I am tempted to believe that what we call necessary institutions are often no more than institutions to which wehave grown accustomed." The rest of that quote? "And that in the matters of social constitution the field of possibilities is much more extensive than men living in their various societies are ready to imagine."

Go ahead and grab the audio of Beth Noveck's Long Now talk here.

(One fun little tidbit from her address: as Noveck puts it, the Obamas "crowdsource" the weeding of the White House vegetable garden. Those working for the White House can sign up for a volunteer shift. Noveck notes that there's no shortage of volunteers, and nary a weed in site.)

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 putting out a house fire. They're the wrong tool for the job, mostly because they've stayed stagnent while the way that people use e-mail, cell phones, SMS text messaging, and more has rapidly evolved; we've reported, for example, on efforts by open government advocates to deal with the device-to-device BlackBerry messages popular in many government buildings but which largely fall outside the range of public disclosure laws.

Which brings us to Sacremento. There, reports the San Jose Mercury News' Denis C. Theriault, the State Assembly's brand new Democratic speaker, John Perez, has made waves by saying in his inaugural address on Monday that, from this point forward, text messages between lobbyists and lawmakers are "banned" during floor sessions or committee business. Here, exactly, were Perez's words:

Starting today, text messages from lobbyists are banned while we're on this floor or in committee doing the people's business. Californians expect us to pay full attention to the issues and to each other -- and they deserve to know who is involved in the debate. They need not worry that special interest lobbyists are secretly sending messages of opposition or support to us as we deliberate.

That might come across as an encouraging development, but some critics quoted in Theriault's piece are appropriately worried that a death-to-lobbyists'-texts edict but be satisfyingly full of sound and fury, but, really, not all that meaningful.

Better, they say, would be for Sacramento to do what the San Jose city council just did:

[T]he San Jose City Council on Tuesday unanimously approved a policy that watchdogs consider one of the state's most far-reaching when it comes to disclosing text messages and other electronic communications about public business -- even if sent on private devices or accounts.

The city policy requires council members to disclose communications received on their personal e-mail or cell phones during meetings -- either from lobbyists or from others with a financial interest in the matter under discussion.

The concern is that if these electronic disclosure laws aren't made both nimble and powerful, then savvy folks will just adapt their electronic practices to avoid them. Why would that be a concern? Well...

Lobbyists, as they filed out of the Assembly chambers after Perez's remarks Monday, were joking with one another about the ways they could find to escape the ban.

 

Credit: Twitter/Brett Ligon

It's been widely reported that the District Attorney of Montgomery County Texas, Brett Ligon, is using Twitter to post the names of people arrested for Driving Under the Influence offenses. (via OhMyGov!) And indeed, Ligon, who was elected Montgomery County DA in 2008 as a Republican in an uncontested general election, is doing just that. For example:

No Refusal DWI 1st Charge filed in CCCL 5 on Christopher T_____ in cause number 09-255064.

(We've blanked out the last names of the involved parties. Ligon, though, is posting the particulars, to be sure.)

But Ligon is going beyond tweeting simply the details of those alleged to have put their fellow drivers at risk. He's also posting on Twitter notes about other cases pursued by his office, such as:

Luke W_____ gets 60 years prison from jury for Assasult-Domestic Violence in Judge Hamilton's court. Prosecutor: Nicole C_____

These are public records. Open government advocates often make the case that transparency in the 21st century requires posting things online, not simply making documents "available to the public" by sticking them in a filing cabinet in some courthouse. But that's powerful because the flip-side is also true: public records posted online assume a new level of availability and ubiquity.

Ligon, or @MontgomeryTXDAO, has only 673 Twitter followers. But as others have mention, the growing presence of real-time search through Google, Bing, and other tools changes that equation. Twitter search results on a person's name, for example, now routinely pop up as some of the first items returned in a Google search.

Ligon's use of Twitter in this case raises the question, you can use social media to share information more broadly, but should you?

Here's a fun fact turned up by a Google search. Ligon happens to be the original prosecutor in the original 1998 Lawrence v. Texas case that sought to punish two men for having consensual sex inside one of the men's own home. You see, Google never forgets.