Funny and somewhat scary Fund Race uses freely available data from the FEC on campaign contributions. You can search by zip code, address, or even name, to find who is donating, to which candidate, and how much. Find out if Susan Sarandon puts her money where her mouth is.
Curious as to the success (or failure) of the 2001 No Child Left Behind Act? School Results is a public-private collaboration to provide data from the first rounds of NCLB initiatives and standardized testing. The project is funded by the U.S. Department of Education.
Though the existing data is slim at the moment (only seven states are currently available, and 2/5 of the individual schools I checked lacked sufficient data to provide analysis), this is exactly the kind of use of the web to provide tangible evidence of the results of legislative actions. NCLB was proposed to achieve certain goals, with this data resource easily available, it should now be easier to determine whether those goals are being achieved.
Hi! is an Arabic language aimed at youth in the Islamic world. It is published by the U.S. State Department, and features, from what I can tell of the pictures (it's in Arabic, after all), mainly stories about U.S pop culture.
The first issue came out last summer, but I'm just running across this now and find it very interesting. Check out this State Department press briefing which covers some of the questions that should immediately spring to mind about this venture. (you'll have to do a text search for "hi magazine" since it wasn't the only topic covered during the briefing.
Stumbled across an interesting little utility on the AFL-CIO website. The AFL-CIO is America's largest labor union (for anyone who doesn't know). The utility allows users to track congressional voting on issues of interest to the union. You can the voting record of your individual representative, your state as a block, or by piece of legislation.
They take an unfortunate stance of dubbing a vote in one way or another as "right" or "wrong", but I suppose that is the point.
UPDATE: I had a point, but was too tired last night to remember it when I wrote this (what was I doing up and readin union websites at 2am?). It seems like the AFL-CIO get their information for this utility from something like the Congressional Record and enter it into their own database. I can't say for sure, but it seems like much of the Fed info on the web is hand-cranked. It struck me that it might be useful for the fed to create their own database of bills, committee discussion, testimony, associated documents, voting records, and etc, and then allow that database to be accessed by outside sources, similar to the way Google (for example) allows developers to access their data with APIs.
It would force the fed to place their data in a more structured format, and then allow private organizations to use the information in their own applications, but with the assurance that the underlying data is from a reliable source.
I while back I wrote a little piece about domain names of official State government websites. If you haven't noticed, I spell horrendously, and I misspelled the name of Tennessee's official site, Tennessee Anytime. Apparently, the misspelled version of the name (one "e") redirects to a porn site. Over the last couple months the most frequent search term for visitors arriving at the site through search engines has been people looking for the real official site, yet somehow still managing to misspell the name.
Somewhat amusingly, this Google Search for tennesseanytime reveal that two of the other six results from other misspellings of the domain name come from official Tennessee government websites.
As they do every year, the North American Aerospace Defense Command (NORAD) is tracking Santa Claus' progress across the globe. NORAD used their sophisticated radar and web of satellites to track the progress of Santa Claus, and provides access to both on their website.
Merry Christmas.
Another Google link, but I thought this little find was worthwhile. Uncle Sam is a specialized search engine for government information. It uses Google's API to return results only from federal, state, and local government websites.
Seems like a much better search engine for visible online government information, though FirstGov is going to be the only way to connect to the invisible (grey) web.
Someone has set up a web tool that allows users to enter a keyword/phrase, and then uses Google search results to find how each of the 2004 U.S. Presidential candidate rank on that phrase.
Not very scientific, though a lot of fun, if you are into that sort of thing.
Cash-strapped state and local governments are discovering what millions of eBay aficionados already know: You can sell almost anything on the Internet.
. (link via beSpacific). Many of the agencies say they are netting three times as much as they previously had from their local auctions.
I see nothing wrong with this, other than that authenticity might be a problem. E-Bay's reputation management system goes along way to solve that. Still, shouldn't a forward thinking legislator read an article like this and see the possibility of something like an "auction.gov", where federal, state, and local governments across the country can place items for sale in a single location?
For those of you on either side of the arguement about the restriction of Constitutional freedoms following 9/11, here is a list of Federal legislation related to the attacks that you can use to root out the truth (which is certainly somewhere in the middle).
From the site: "The selection, made by hand, is necessarily subjective, as the September 11th attack had a ripple effect on legislation in the second session of the 107th Congress, making boundaries difficult to draw. "
The list was compiled by the Library of Congress.
As gift giving season is upon us, it seems the perfect time for the Fed to releaseRecalls.gov, a portal for information on recalled consumer items, motor vehicles, recreational boats, food, medicines, cosmetics and pesticides.
As I was reading about this, I had one of those Tim Berners-Lee moments, imagining setting up a user agent to check my credit card purchasing history against the Recalls website, and then sending any matching items directly as a text message to my cell phone. But thats the future.
For now the site, which is a coalition between the Consumer Product Safety Commission, Coast Guard, Environmental Protection Agency, Food and Drug Administration, Food Safety Inspection Service and National Highway Traffic Safety Administration, has a partnership with over 20 retailers, trade groups, and consumer advocate groups to help promote awareness of the resource.
Check out the Digital Government Document's Clearinghouse, a project of the American Library Association's Government Documents Round Table.
The goal of the project is to collect information to facilitate cooperation and partnerships between libraries for digitization projects. They hope to do so by providing a centralized database of digital resources for local, state, federal, and international government documents that are currently planned, in progress, or already completed.
You can add a project (not necessarily your project) to the database, or search it by keyword (though I'm certain they'll have more sophisticated retreival of the information once the project is completed). From what I can tell, there are already in excess of 150 digitization initiatives already entered into the database.
The Center for Democracy and Technology's 10 Most Wanted Government Documents. It is no wonder the number of judicial documents on list considering the stranglehold Lexis and Westlaw have on the legal information database market. One of the biggest issues in the next several years (though I hope it is raised sooner, rather than later), is the use of free government information by private services, that then turn around and provide those services to consumers at exhorbitant rates.
Currently, the policy is that if the vendor attaches enough added value to the information, such use is allowed. Lexis certainly provides value to the government information contained in its database. But, there should be a time, and soon, when more judicial information is available online, through better interfaces, and directly from the government, and it'd be a shame if Lexis' juice prevented that information from being made available for free (which it seems is currently the case).
Some "entertaining" facts facts about Thanksgiving, from the fun folks at the U.S. Census Bureau.
The National Archives and Records Administration has released an online version of the Warren Commission Report, presumably in conjunction with the 40th anniversary of the JFK assasination last week (link via beSpacific).
The reminds me of a couple years ago when the Starr Report was published online and so many millions visitors hit the site. It was, for many people, their first interaction with eGovernment. People love a scandel, but if it encourages the citizenry to interact, ask question, and become aware of resources otherwise unfamiliar, I'd have to say that's a good thing.
I've been doing a little reading about the use of top level domains (TLDs) by government agencies. Some use .com, others .org, and others .gov, and that makes it difficult to a) find information you need, and b) judge the authenticity of information once you find it. The last I've read of the ICANN rules, .gov domains were meant for federal agencies only, but the format should, technically, be something along the line of "whatever.gov.us", which is how other nations configure their systems.
I ran across a list of all the official state websites (via the eGovernance Institute. About half the states use a format of "state.two state abbreviation.us" - for example "www.state.al.us" for Alabama. It is great to see the beginings of uniformity with the URL naming conventions. Unfortunately, the rest of the state sites use any variety of formats - including some that incoprorate marketing speak - like TennesseAnytime.org and YourOklhaoma.com.
Personally, I'd like to see something along the lines of "TwoLetterStateAbbreviation.gov.us" for states, "city.TwoLetterStateAbbreviation.gov.us" for city and county governments, and "agency.fed.gov.us" for national government. But maybe that's just me.
The first batch of outdoor Internet pay phones debuted in New York City earlier this week. The phones allow users to make voice calls at the usual rates, but also provides high speed internet access at 25 cents per minute. People can check email, visit websites, though pornography is blocked (it'd be interesting to learn what filtering method they use), and even send digital photos via the built in webcam for an additional charge.
What makes this news relevant here is that (although it wasn't mentioned in the article) access to the City's website is available for FREE through these terminals. There are hardly enough of these terminals to significantly bridge any digital divide. Imagine stopping into one of these phones to check traffic conditions, pay parking tickets immediately after receiving them, always be able to locate the nearest subway station, or any number of other services available on the City's website.
A UN sponsored report looked at the municipalities across the world and rated their level of eGovernance based on number of metrics. The study looked at 80 large cities and analyzed them using 92 measures in five core areas: 1. Security and Privacy, 2. Usability, 3. Content, 4. Services, and 5. Citizen Participation.
Four of the overall top five cities came from Asia (1. Seoul, 2. Hong Kong, 3. Singapore, 4. New York, and 5. Shanghai).
The full report is available here, and a table listing the cities in their rankings in each category is available here.
The District of Columbia has gotten a very nice revamp. According to this article from GCN, they didn't add much new content or functionality, merely reorganizing of the information already on the site. One of the major flaws in most websites is that sturcture of the site mirrors the organizational heirarchy, rather than the matching the needs and expectations of the users. This is especially true of some government websites, which, predictably skew much more toward the beurocratic than the usable. The navigation of DC's new site is task-centered, and much easier to get around. It also promintently features access to Ask's natural language search engine.
Inside Politics is dubbed a "Your Guide to National and State Politices," and is just that. There is a wealth of information here, mostly financial data about US legislators and research/polls performed by Brown University, which only makes sense considering the site is compiled by Darrell West, a profesor at Brown's Center for Public Policy. What should be of particular interest to anyone who'd be stopping by here are the Urban, State and Federal, and Global eGovernment reports. I wont offer any critique, since I haven't poured through them all yet, but I feel safe sharing the links since this is the third year West has performed this survey, and each of the reports seems to offer a very detailed analysis. The Global eGovernment report, for example, looked at 1,197 iniatitives in nearly 200 hundred countries.
It is staggering to hear, but US portal FirstGov does not currently use a Content Management System (CMS). Each page on the site is hand-coded, but not for much longer. the General Services Administration recently signed a half million dollar contract for use of Vignette's CMS software.
To illustrate why a CMS is so important, here is a quote from M.J. Jameson, s GSA associate administrator:
"When the Columbia shuttle tragedy happened, we took 24 hours to get up what we needed to get up," Jameson said. "If we had had this content management system, the people who do that for FirstGov could have done it from home within 20 minutes."
Not only do CMSs save time and money, they allow the technically illititerate to update without calling in tech support, the dynamic generation of content, and easier changes to design/site architecture. I'm really shocked they would still be hand-coding.
The license is governmentwide, which is also pretty amazing. Any government agency that is still hand-coding is wasting money, and should be strongly encouraged to make the move to Vignette as soon as possible (not that I have any pull in that regard).
The Ohio House of Representative may pass bill that would limit government agencies ability to provide free information on their websites. The bill, HB 145, had been voted down last year, but was attached to this year's budget bill without any debate.
The bill is based on non-compete laws, the idea that government agencies should not compete without private enterprise. If the bill were to pass information provided by at least two private corporations, would not be also legal to post on any government websites. This article from the Cleveland Plain Dealer explains it more.
A silly example - if you can wal into a rest stop along any Interstate in Ohio and pick up a free roadmap, provided by the state, despite the fact that if you'd walked into the gas station only a few steps away, you'd have to pay for a similar map. But if you wanted to download an Ohio map online, you couldn't because Mapquest and Expedia already provide that service.
This really punctuates the continuing mind-set of some legislators that the Internet is somehow outside the scope of traditional government services, rather than what it really is, just an extension of those services in a new form. Citizens are legally entitled to free government information. Yet, somehow when that information is provided online, in a more readibly available manner, it is subject to different rules.
(links via (beSpacific)
Does your Congressman have a website? Look for your Representative or Senator.
I didn't count, but it looks like all the Senators and most, if not all, of the Representatives have their own websites. It is interesting that, while all the congressmen are hosted within the Senate and House website, each is designed and maintained seperately, and some are pretty awful. It seems like it would be more efficient to provide a template (or a choice from a number of templates), and a content management system. Kind of like Blogger here.
This would certainly make it easier (and cheaper) to develop and maintain each Senate/Rep site. And though most users wouldn't need to visit the sites for any Senators or Representative other than their own, an arguement can definitely be made that a uniform template would make site navigation much simpler.
Last week the Council for Excellence in Government released a report on the attitudes and expectations of eGov. The study found that half of all Americans and 75% of all Internet users have interacted on some level with an eGov website.
The research found that those performing tasks, like renewing their drivers licence, were easier online, which is a pretty obvious conclusion. Actually, all the findings were obvious - users would like to complete tedious tasks (like filing taxes, and paying parking tickets) online, they felt eGov would only get better over the course of years, but there were some privacy issues. Still, it is sometimes worthwhile to do a survey like this to confirm that end-users and developers are actually on the same page as far as expectations and desires.
This isn't strictly about eGov, but it is related. The Internet Library of Law and Court Decisions is a database of over 300 court decisions shaping the law of the web. Each case includes an extensive summary filled with facts, analysis and pertinent quotes. Topics addressed include "copyright, trademark, dilution and other intellectual property issues, jurisdiction, linking, framing, meta tags, clip-art, defamation, domain name, e-mail, encryption, gambling, click-wrap agreements, shrink-wrap licenses, spamming," and more.
I was a bit wary of this material, since it is collected and written by a law firm, but the site has been approved by Scout, so it is definitely on the level.
From what I can tell, Europa is the official portal for information about the European Union. In addition to news, legislation, etc, about the EU, they provide handy links to all official European gov't websites.
Also, they recently released a collection of reports on case studies and best practices of EU eGov initiatives. So far, there are 14 reports from 10 countries, covering local, national, and international projects.