The Federal Communications Commission outlined more details of the comprehensive broadband plan it plans to deliver to Congress later this month, laying out a series of recommendations for using Web-based technology to drive civic engagement with the government.
The commission will call on all branches of government to continue the early efforts underway in the executive branch to bring more data online, and urge government officials to accelerate the use of social media tools to engage the public, Eugene Huang, the director of government operations at the FCC's broadband task force said on Monday.
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Huang praised the administration's efforts in creating Data.gov, an online clearinghouse for federal data in machine-readable format, though he said that it was at best a good first step.
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Federal court documents, for instance, are currently available online through a fee-based system known as PACER (short for Public Access to Court Electronic Records), which charges eight cents per page. Huang said the broadband plan will recommend that those records be made available online at no charge.
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The FCC will also call on federal IT administrators to take a more active role in deploying social media tools, which run the gamut from setting up Facebook and Twitter accounts to maintaining a blog and posting videos to government Web sites and YouTube.
Many of the recommendations Huang outlined echo the open government directive (available here as a PDF) the administration released in December, which called on the heads of executive agencies to brings more data online and develop new methods of engaging the public through their Web sites and other online channels.
In addition to making more data available to the public, we believe that the primary legal documents of the federal government should be made free and publically available online. While this might seem obvious to some, this is not currently practice. For example, in the federal judicial system, the Public Access to Court Electronic Records system, or PACER, still charges for access to federal district, appellate and bankruptcy court records. The U.S. federal courts themselves pay private contractors $150 million annually for electronic access to judicial documents. We believe that these types of barriers inhibit a principle of democracy – that every person who is subject to the laws of this nation should have free access to those laws online.
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