Shortly after President Obama's inauguration, he issued a memo on transparency directing his top officials to develop plans for an Open Government Directive to promote transparency, participation, and collaboration. The Sunlight Foundation has created this page in order to add a public element to the crafting of this Open Government Directive that is itself transparent, participatory, and collaborative.
We encourage you to submit ideas for what the Directive should address, and to vote for your favorite submissions below.
Digital deposit of govt information to libraries
the Federal Depository Library Program (FDLP) is a network of 1250 libraries around the country that have been successfully giving access to and preserving government publications for over 150 years. Digital deposit of govt information continues this successful distributed preservation and access model in the digital age. Digital deposit is recession insurance for continued free and open access to government information! For more, see http://freegovinfo.info/taxonomy/term/3
Submit a New Idea for the Directive
Posting new ideas has been disabled for this site.
To jump start this project, the Sunlight Foundation has also independently developed recommendations listed individually to the left, and detailed here.
3 Comments
With cost cuts that may impact the distribution of paper-based information at libraries, complete digital access to government documents is crucial to keeping the American public informed on all aspects of government and the directives, legislation and current laws that impact their daily lives. Access through public libraries is imperative to provide the public with these services
It has come to my attention that print sources and electronic sources of government documents do not always contain the same information. From what I understand, the electronic version may have extra information. However, I would suggest that appropriate care is taken to ensure that any bills, directives, and the like should be digitally published completely and if print editiions are still being used, that it should be duly noted on the print version that the expanded version is available on the web.
I grew up in a community of about 25,000, about 120 miles northwest of Chicago. Our local public library was one of those governmental depository libraries. Unfortunately, it didn't have much. It had a big; Chicago telephone book size catalog sent to the library about four times a year. To obtain a major report or congressional hearing transcript, one needed to know the catalog number and it would be ordered, usually coming from the University of Illinois. This took several weeks. I learned the truth about the Central American wars through reading very truthful federal reports and congressional hearing documents. We are now in the electronic age with the ability for immediate communication. Why should those outside big cities wait until their library gets a catalog a few times a year so the government documents can be ordered and shipped? The documents were produced on a computer. Why not use computers to make these documents available to the citizens for all as soon as possible? Your system of shuffling around government documents is now obsolete and archaic. The people need to know what is going on and be able to act upon it. This can't happen if folks are waiting months for catalogues and weeks for documents.