CITP Blog - Formerly Freedom to Tinker

Tag: Government transparency

  • Judge Declares Some PACER Fees Illegal but Does Not Go Far Enough

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    Five years ago, in a post called “Making Excuses for Fees on Electronic Public Records,” I described my attempts to persuade the federal Judiciary to stop charging for access to their web-based system, PACER (“Public Access to Court Electronic Records”). Nearly every search, page view, and PDF download from the system incurs a fee ranging…

  • Reflecting on Sunshine Week

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    Last Wednesday evening, I attended the D.C. Open Government Summit: Street View, which took place at the National Press Club in conjunction with Sunshine Week. The Summit was sponsored by the D.C. Open Government Coalition, a non-profit that “seeks to enhance the public’s access to government information and ensure the transparency of government operations of…

  • Local Expertise is Exceedingly Valuable- Principle #7 for Fostering Civic Engagement Through Digital Technologies

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    One of the most rewarding and enjoyable aspects of my research has been my series of conversations with innovators in civic engagement in various cities across the country. These conversations have been enlightening for me as I think about how Washington, DC can maximize its natural advantages to foster civic engagement in its neighborhoods. The…

  • Government Needs to Embrace the Social Web – Principle #6 for Fostering Civic Engagement Through Digital Technologies

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    As Rahm Emanuel said, “You never want a serious crisis to go to waste. And what I mean by that – it’s an opportunity to do things you think you could not do before.” The Federal government shutdown has, at least temporarily, shed light on the valuable day-to-day work done by the Federal government and…

  • The New Ambiguity of "Open Government"

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    David Robinson and I have just released a draft paper—The New Ambiguity of “Open Government”—that describes, and tries to help solve, a key problem in recent discussions around online transparency. As the paper explains, the phrase “open government” has become ambiguous in a way that makes life harder for both advocates and policymakers, by combining…

  • What We Lose if We Lose Data.gov

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    In its latest 2011 budget proposal, Congress makes deep cuts to the Electronic Government Fund. This fund supports the continued development and upkeep of several key open government websites, including Data.gov, USASpending.gov and the IT Dashboard. An earlier proposal would have cut the funding from $34 million to $2 million this year, although the current…

  • Assessing PACER's Access Barriers

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    The U.S. Courts recently conducted a year-long assessment of their Electronic Public Access program which included a survey of PACER users. While the results of the assessment haven’t been formally published, the Third Branch Newsletter has an interview with Bankruptcy Judge J. Rich Leonard that discusses a few high-level findings of the survey. Judge Leonard…

  • Broadband Politics and Closed-Door Negotiations at the FCC

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    The last seven days at the FCC have been drama-filled, and that’s not something you can often say about an administrative agency. As I noted in my last post, the FCC is considering reclassifying broadband as a “common carrier” service. This would subject the access portion of the service to some additional regulations which currently…

  • Release Government Data, Early and Often

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    One of the key axioms of modern open government is that all public data should be published online in a raw but usable form. Usability in this case is aimed at software programmers. By making government datasets more usable, programmers are more likely to innovate in the civic sphere and build technologies, using the raw…

  • CITP Expands Scope of RECAP

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    Today, we’re thrilled to announce the next version of our RECAP technology, dramatically expanding the scope of the project. Having had some modest success at providing public access to legal documents, we’re now taking the next logical step, offering easy public access to illegal documents. The Internet Archive, which graciously hosts RECAP’s repository of legal…