open government

Wikileaks' release of 76,000 government documents about the Afghanistan war is already provoking a firestorm of debate -- Will it help or hurt the war effort in Afghanistan? What will be the diplomatic and political fallout?

Could we be reaching a turning point in history where the monopoly on societal communication enjoyed by governments and corporations is finally broken? Will the commoners be able to share information freely without risking jail, civil penalties or authoritarian retribution?

Sometimes it just takes a determined set of commoners to get the job done. Impatient with the lethargy of the federal government in making its own films and videos available online, info-activist Carl Malamud has launched the International Amateur Scanning League. Dozens of volunteers are digitizing government-produced DVDs on everything from agricultural advice to presidential addresses, and putting them on the Internet.

What if government were treated as an open platform available to everyone — much like the Web — rather than as a closed, semi-proprietary platform that serves those private interests with the money or insider access? That was the premise behind a major conference in Washington, D.C., on September 9-10 hosted by open-source champion and book publisher Tim O’Reilly and Richard O’Neill of the Highlands Group.

In earlier guerilla raids on inaccessible government information, public-interest crusader Carl Malamud has "scraped" public-domain documents from poorly designed and fee-based government websites and re-published them on his own servers. It’s proven to be a highly effective tactic. It embarrasses the government agencies by exposing how non-transparent and citizen-unfriendly they really are.