Carl Malamud: 29 Things Government Could Do Today
Lat month, I watched Carl Malamud's excellent Gov2.0 Summit speech on blip.tv. Malamud, a public domain advocate, is founder of Public.Resource.Org.
Public.Resource has posted a text of the talk (pdf) and in the appendix is a list of "29 Things Government Could Do Today." (Hat tip to David Bollier of OntheCommons.)
1. OMB Circular A-130 should be modified to specify 3 levels of distribution for government data: first government makes bulk data available; second, government creates an API to access the bulk data; third, government builds a web site using their own API.
2. The 8 Principles of Government Bulk Data should be encoded into law, supplementing the case-by-case access of the Freedom of Information Act with basic principles of distribution for all government information.
3. The House of Representatives Broadcast Studio contains hundreds of congressional hearings. Congress should make this archive available to digitize so we can re-release this important historical material back into the public domain.
4. When Congress webcasts, they usually use proprietary webcast technologies, such as Real Video. But, all of these proprietary solutions also contain the capability to encode content in less-proprietary formats, such as MPEG4. All committees in the U.S. Congress that webcast should be required to switch to open formats.
5. Broadcast-quality video from Congressional hearings could be made available today for download by FTP for selected committees. Congress should start trials now instead of continuing to delay.
6. Credentials to broadcast or film congressional hearings are controlled by the Radio-TV Correspondents Gallery, governed by a committee of old media stalwarts. It is no surprise “new” media are always denied credentials. Congress should reform the credentials process.
7. The Supreme Court should install their own cameras to provide footage of oral arguments. Allowing print reporters and releasing audio, but refusing to provide video is an artificial barrier on access that is elitist, benefiting those who live and work inside of the Beltway at the expense of the rest of America.
8. All PDF documents entered into the judiciary’s PACER system should be signed by the court indicating when they are received and showing that no changes to the documents have been made since filing.
9. All PACER documents should be made available to the Federal Depository Library Program so that libraries might archive and preserve the records of the federal judiciary.
10. A complete audit of the PACER system for privacy violations, such as Social Security Numbers, names of minor children, and improperly unsealed documents should be conducted as a matter of pressing urgency.
11. Bulk access to the PACER system should be provided to allow download of large numbers of documents.
12. The PACER system brings in far more in revenue than it costs to operate the system. Even if free access is not provided, costs should be immediately reduced to comply with the law.
13. The Federal Judicial Center spends millions of dollars producing video that is only available on J-Net, an intranet that reaches only courtrooms. This educational material should be made available to the public on the Internet.
14. The Librarian of Congress, Smithsonian Secretary, National Archivist, and Public Printer should get together to create a public domain video library.
15. The Government Printing Office should make press-quality PDFs available of any documents they print that are not subject to security or privacy considerations. In particular, press-quality masters for any high-end books should be made available so the private sector can reprint and repurpose them.
16. The Government Printing Office runs an Institute of Federal Printing right next to Union Station. They should dramatically upgrade the program into a U.S. Publishing Academy that provides comprehensive training to the rest of the government on how to publish and communicate effectively.
17. The Government Printing Office has infinite power in its downtown location and is directly on most major fiber routes. GPO should put in an extensive machine room in cooperation with other government “cloud” efforts at GSA and NASA.
18. Congressional computer systems are so antiquated that House mail accounts are limited to 200 Mbytes. The Government Printing Office should provide 1 petabyte of disk to the Congress.
19. The Federal Depository Library Program archive should be immediately scanned and the legislation governing FDLP modified so that dual regional repositories per state are no longer required.
20. The Library of Congress should withdraw copyright assertions and stop charging for bibliographic data and copyright registration databases.
21. Binders for all U.S. Patents should be digitized and released in bulk at no charge. Binders contain the application, any rulings, the grant, and any appeals for a patent.
22. The IRS should stop selling non-profit tax returns as a series of DVDs containing one TIFF file per page and should instead publish PDF files for FTP access at no charge.
23. The CIO in the Executive Office of the President should fund the immediate creation of an open source redaction toolkit built on top of open source OCR software such as Tesseract.
24. The Official Journals of Government should be modified to include basic formatting features such as indented lists, tagging of dates, and tagging of cross-links.
25. The Smithsonian has 6,288 public domain photographs available as high-resolution scans. They should release those photos back in the public domain and lead in the creation of a public domain stock footage library for creative applications such as films.
26. The Smithsonian should host a Maker Faire on the National Mall to spotlight the “risk-takers, the doers, the makers of things” both inside and outside of government.
27. OMB should periodically audit all government web sites for broken links, invalid HTML, and Section 508 violations and publish ranked charts of how different departments compare with each other.
28. The State Department should commission an immediate audit of the U.S. Passport and Secure Travel Document programs to assess if the use of RFID chips pose a danger to the bearers.
29. Private and proprietary law should not be used in federal or state law. Incorporation by Reference of standards from bodies such as ANSI or Underwriters Laboratories should only be allowed if the underlying standards are made freely available.
