Author: David Robinson
-
Stimulus transparency and the states
Yesterday, I testified at a field hearing of the U.S. House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform. The hearing title was The American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009: The Role of State and Local Governments. My written testimony addressed plans to put stimulus data on the Internet, primarily at Recovery.gov. There have been promising…
-
Possible Opportunity for Outstanding Law Graduates
We are constantly looking for scholars of digital technology and public life to join us at the Center for Information Technology Policy. We’ll be making several appointments soon, and look forward to announcing them. Meanwhile, I wanted to highlight a possible opportunity for graduating law students who have a strong scholarly interest in cyberlaw (reflected…
-
New Podcast: CITP Conversations
Over the last few months, as the pace of activity at CITP has increased, we’ve fielded a growing number of requests from points around the web, and around the world, for podcasts and other ways to “attend” our events virtually. We hear you, and we’re working on it. Today, I’m very pleased to announce a…
-
Final version of Government Data and the Invisible Hand
Thanks to the hard work of our patient editors at the Yale Journal of Law and Technology, my coauthors and I can now share the final version of our paper about online transparency, Government Data and the Invisible Hand. If you have read the first version, you know that our paper is informed by a…
-
The Future of News: We're Lucky They Haven't Tried Macropayments
Regular readers will know that the newspaper industry is in dire shape: revenues off by 20% in just the last year, with more than 15,000 jobs lost in that period. This map tells the story better than any writing could. The market capitalizations of newspaper firms, which reflect investor expectations about future performance, have fallen…
-
New USACM Poilcy Recommendations on Open Government
USACM is the Washington policy committee of the Association for Computing Machinery, the professional association that represents computer scientists and computing practitioners. Today, USACM released Policy Recommendations on Open Government. The recommendations offer simple, clear advice to help Congress and the new administration make government initiatives—like the pending recovery bill—transparent to citizens. The leading recommendation…
-
The (Ironic) Best Way to Make the Bailout Transparent
The next piece of proposed bailout legislation is called the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009. Chris Soghoian, who is covering the issue on his Surveillance State blog at CNET, brought the bill to my attention, particularly a provision requiring that a new web site called Recovery.gov “provide data on relevant economic, financial, grant,…
-
Satyam and the Inadvertent Web
Satyam is one of the handful of large companies who dominate the IT outsourcing market in India, A week ago today, B. Ramalinga Raju, the company chairman, confessed to a years-long accounting fraud. More than a billion dollars of cash the company claimed to have on hand, and the business success that putatively generated those…
-
Taking Advantage of Citizen Contrarians
In my last post, I argued that sifting through citizens’ questions for the President is a job best done outside of government. More broadly, there’s a class of input that is good for government to receive, but that probably won’t be welcome at the staff level, where moment-to-moment success is more of a concern than…
-
Government Shouldn't "Help" Citizens Pick Tough Questions for Obama
A couple of weeks ago, Julian Sanchez at Ars Technica, Ben Smith at Politico and others noted a disturbing pattern on the incoming Obama administration’s Change.gov website: polite but pointed user-submitted questions about the Blagojevich scandal and other potentially uncomfortable topics were being flagged as “inappropriate” by other visitors to the site. In less than…