Recently, I read an article in Newsweek that surprised me. It was titled “Your Pass to Good Government” and it was about eGovernment initiatives around the world. What surprised me was that the countries that were lauded as forerunners of eGovernment service delivery were South Korea and Estonia. This was not what I would have expected. My biased perception was that countries with longstanding democracies, like the U.S.

I have always endorsed open government and accountability in my postings on this blog. I fervently believe that the more open to inspection government processes and government information are, the better our democracy will work and the less corruption there will be. However until I recently started a job as a programmer in an institution of higher education, I never appreciated the costs of all this accountability.

Google recently announced on its official blog that it was releasing a new Government Request tool using Google Maps to list requests received by Google from governments wanting data or content removal.

One explanation I have heard for why librarianship is not taken seriously as a profession compared to say accountants, lawyers, and financial advisors, is that librarians appear to give their services away for free. To a large degree, I think that this is true. This is why I continue to be skeptical of the open source software movement. I understand that open source software really means “freely accessible and modifiable” and not free as in “free beer.” Still, a lot of open source software is free to download for personal use.

I have been curious about what libraries could do with XML ever since I read Roy Tennant’s controversial article MARC Must Die (Library Journal, 10/15/2002) where he argues that the MARC format for library catalog records should be abandoned in favor of a new XML standard. It wasn’t until I started my programming degree that I actually understood much about what XML is and how to use it. Recently, I began learning about ONIX, the XML DTD standard for book publishers.

Earlier this year I wrote about Government Interoperability as the idea of managers and IT professionals working together to more effectively coordinate government information and services. Today in the news I read about an excellent real life example of this concept. The city of Madison, Wisconsin launched a new web site called the Neighborhood Indicators Project.

I began hearing about Carl Malamud on the FreeGovInfo Blog back in February when he started his campaign to be nominated for the position of Public Printer of the U.S. Government Printing Office. I have not had the time to go back and read all the position papers about open access that he submitted to the Obama transition team, so tonight I listened to an interview with him produced by O'Reilly publishing company.

Today I discovered a new feature on the U.S. State Dept. web site called Travels with the Secretary. It is an interactive map that shows the travel itinerary for Sec. Clinton. Each destination that she visits has an annotated link that describes who she will be meeting with and what she will be doing. The annotations contain further links to photos, video and speech transcripts for each of her visits. The site is built with Google Maps.

The Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) is a group that has been tirelessly advocating for civil liberties in the digital world for years. They address issues related to freedom of speech, privacy, intellectual freedom, and transparency. One of their transparency related projects is the FOIA Litigation for Accountable Government project.

Government interoperability is the mix of policy, management, and technology
capabilities needed by a network of organizations to deliver coordinated government programs and services.

I came across this term in an interesting report by the Center for Technology and Government that I read today entitled Improving Government Interoperability: A Capability Framework for Government Managers.