Online Databases: These Crusaders Bring Transparency to Government
This LA Times article takes a look at three people and some of the resources they have helped make available online to make the U.S. Government more transparent. We're happy to report that most of these resources have been mentioned on ResourceShelf in the past. Here's a quick overview with links to resources from the three "crusaders" interviewed in the article.
Malamud, a pioneering insurgent, won a grant in 1993 to place the Securities and Exchange Commission’s EDGAR database of corporate filings online, breaking the near-monopoly then held by the commercial Lexis/Nexis service. A few years later, he abruptly announced he was shutting down his website and invited its devoted clientele to direct their complaints to the SEC. Bowing to the inevitable, the agency made EDGAR available free of charge via www.sec.gov.
This cuts into the courts' PACER revenue of $10 million a year, which may be why PACER has responded with a rather prickly warning about RECAP on its site. Malamud contends, quite rightly, that "the whole point is that the courts should be available to the public. When they don't do that to make money, they're subverting their own purpose."
Our collection includes approximately 647,000 opinions from the United States Supreme Court published in the United States Reports, and from the lower federal courts, particularly the United States Courts of Appeals, as published in the First, Second and Third series of Federal Reporters.
These cases are in the public domain because of the work of Carl Malamud of Public.Resource.Org who works tirelessly to make public information truly public.
Miller maintains, perhaps wishfully, that "the genie is out of the bottle." "There's a cultural change taking place," she told me. "It will be very difficult to stop putting information on the Web. Transparency online for government is an idea whose time has come, and it will not go away lightly. It's hard to make an argument against it."
Founder and Developer of the wonderful GovTrack.us
Josh Tauberer started Govtrack.us as a college undergraduate. It's now a one-stop shop for mashed-up data about Congress, its members and its bills. "It was clear that Congress had lots of information but was horribly underutilizing it," he says.
[Snip]
"There's no way that agencies can single-handedly provide everything the public wants, so you need third parties to come in," Tauberer says. It's not in the mind-set of government webmasters to develop really penetrating tools, he says, nor should it be. "You wouldn't want government to do what Maplight does -- you can't expect government to be its own watchdog."
The birth date of the transparency movement is hard to pinpoint. Some mark it as October 2006, when the nonprofit group OMB Watch, which monitors the White House Office of Management and Budget, launched. FedSpending.org with a $334,000 grant from the Sunlight Foundation. The site allows users to search for information on federal contracts and grants drawn largely from two government databases reaching back to fiscal 2000.
A family of resources to help information workers be more effective, raise the value of information in their organisations and contribute to success. Read more »
Recently I have found myself cooing over visualisation maps (and heat maps) of health and well being resources. The content rich data is overlayed with mapping technologies, and some interesting themes and patterns are emerging.
A lot of the talk around social media in the last year has been around information overload. Social media has provided us with new and exciting ways to create content. But it has also meant learning new ways to manage and engage with social media tools. Are we teetering on the edge of an information overload precipice?
Information overload is a figment of your imagination. Or a failure of your filter. Or a symptom of your technological submissiveness. Depends on who you ask.
What if you had to sort through 3.5 million articles and social media posts a day and try to pull out the most relevant items for your organisation? What if you then had to cobble it all together into something readable for your top groups and executives in your organisation?
Alacra Compliance saves time by aggregating information from both free and fee-based sources and enabling users to conduct an accurate federated search across these sources (coined “simultaneous search” by Alacra).
FreePint Family
Quilting big data threads
The fallacy of information overload
Information overload: fact, fantasy or filter failure? 
