Many technology enthusiasts have a worldview that sees the government as bungling or evil. This is both unfair and not helpful in deciding hard policy choices. Read more »
Government agencies will never be as nimble as a Silicon Valley startup, but, at SXSW, Bryan Sivak, CTO of the Dept. of Health and Human Services, describes how the tech world is influencing his agency. Read more »
The Obama administration has shown what is possible when a government becomes a media entity in its own right. But is that good or bad for a free press and for society in general? Read more at paidContent »
Three of the nationwide operators haven’t signed off on the government’s proposal to split time on the federal airwaves between public and commercial users, but they’re willing to consider it. Read more »
There have been calls for a restructuring of the British public broadcaster in the wake of scandals involving sexual-abuse charges against prominent British citizens. But does the BBC just need to be shaken up, or does its entire mandate for public journalism need to be reviewed? Read more »
We’re used to how the social web has disrupted media, but that same wave is moving through other industries, driven by startups like Airbnb, Coursera and Uber — and while regulators and entrenched industries are trying to fight it, the trend behind that wave is unstoppable. Read more »
Open-source principles have helped create a host of useful software, including the Linux operating system and the crowd-powered resource that is Wikipedia — but could the same approach be used to open up the process of producing government legislation? Clay Shirky argues that it could. Read more »
An editor at the Guardian argues that newspapers should be funded by a tax on internet service providers, because public journalism needs to be supported. But there are a host of flaws with the idea, including the fact that large newspapers are not synonymous with journalism. Read more »
The Finnish government has approved the technology behind a new ‘Open Ministry’ platform, which will act as a hub for citizens who want new laws voted on in the country’s parliament. But could that work elsewhere? Read more »
Most of the recent attention around WikiLeaks has been focused on the legal issues surrounding its controversial founder, Julian Assange. But we shouldn’t let that blind us to what the organization has accomplished and the critical role it plays as a “stateless news organization.” Read more »
In an aggressive proposal, the President’s Council of Advisors on Policy and Technology not only wants the administration to double the amount of federal spectrum being targeted for new mobile and wireless networks, but it also wants to make a good portion of those airwaves shared. Read more »
The government’s attempt to keep the president’s trip to Afghanistan a secret was foiled by Twitter — in the same week that the Associated Press apologized to the reporter it fired 67 years ago for breaking the embargo on the end of World War II. Read more »
The UK government has told academic journal publishers it will make freely available online the publicly-funded research they currently charge for, labelling “paywalls” “deeply unhealthy”. Read more at paidContent »
Critics say that a bill called CISPA, which has been passed by the House of Representatives and is on its way to the Senate, is just as bad as SOPA — but others, including Facebook, support the legislation. Should you be concerned about it? Read more »
The UK government considers a law that would allow for surveillance of online activity, U.S. universities admit they track what their athletes are saying on Twitter, and employers are asking for Facebook passwords. At this point, advertisers tracking us online is the least of our problems. Read more »
On Wednesday the web went wild (or dark) and more than 13 million people protested the potential passage of SOPA and PIPA. Fight for the Future offered some stats today to show exactly how wild things got. Read on for the nitty gritty details. Read more »
A bi-partisan group of senators and congressmen is proposing an alternative to the widely-criticized Stop Online Piracy Act. The new bill, known as OPEN, has already won some support from opponents of SOPA, who say OPEN’s approach to piracy is much less damaging to the web. Read more »
A recent U.S. court decision involving the Twitter accounts of several WikiLeaks supporters shows that when push comes to shove, users of social networks and most online services have no expectation of privacy — at least, not if the one requesting the information is the U.S. government. Read more »
The Dutch Senate is going paperless, and the iPad is going to get them there. A new program to replace most of the governing body’s paper documents with a digital app is progressing smoothly and saving money in the Netherlands, two weeks into launch. Read more »
Apple spent $790,000 on lobbying efforts during the second quarter of 2011, according to its most recent disclosure report. That’s up from $560,000 during the first quarter of the year, and more than double the $330,000 Apple spent during the second quarter of 2010. Read more »
Sometimes knowing you are observed is enough to make you behave well. And the recent hoopla over AT&T releasing unredacted merger filings and an FCC request for more data, raise the question of how much transparency the FCC should sacrifice to protect competitive information. Read more »
Amazon Web Services has rolled out a new region, called GovCloud, designed specifically for federal government workloads. The region is designed to meet the myriad regulations that government agencies must meet when deploying new infrastructure, which have proven a hindrance in terms government cloud adoption. Read more »
When most people think about Google and Facebook, they think about California’s Silicon Valley. But according to newly filed disclosure documents, the tech industry’s titans are spending increasing amounts of time and money making their voices heard in Washington, D.C. Are they crossing the line? Read more »
The town of Cornelius, Colo. has found that a new pilot program replacing paper with iPads is saving the administration money and time, helping the environment and increasing government transparency. It’s a good example of how the iPad could replace laptops for many organizations. Read more »
Twitter and Facebook are great tools for reporting on world events — but what happens when we turn those tools on one another? We got a glimpse of that in Vancouver, and it was a glimpse of a future that some would rather not see. Read more »
When the FCC said it was putting together a report on the future of media, many feared it would recommend subsidies and other breaks for traditional media entities, but the report actually provides very little help for media companies, other than some helpful advice. Read more »
New York City’s new Chief Digital Officer Rachel Sterne said New York City is trying to turn the city’s government into a platform that enables developers and individuals to take data about life in the metropolis and use it to create apps, services and other resources. Read more »
Secretary of State Hillary Clinton gave a rousing speech today about the need for an open Internet and freedom of speech, but she made one notable exception: Wikileaks. It’s apparently fine to persecute that organization for leaking diplomatic cables, even though it has done nothing illegal. Read more »
The White House wants to hear from average citizens with big ideas about what projects the government should tackle, and has asked them to respond on Twitter. The responses are being collected by Expert Labs, a non-profit run by former Six Apart executive Anil Dash. Read more »
“Open Government” is an interesting compilation of essays discussing the problems that governments and citizens face as they struggle to catch up with the openness that we’ve come to expect in the era of social media, crowdsourcing and user-generated content. Read more »
