K Street Cafe

Think Globally, Tweet Locally: British Town Council In Midst of 24 Hours of Tweets (Tech President)
The Walsall Council in West Midlands, U.K. put together a a 24-hour project to post notes to Twitter about as many activities of local government as possible.

NARA Names 3 to New Leadership Positions
(Federal Computer Week)
Archivist of the United States David Ferriero announced the formation of a new open government unit to use Web 2.0 and digital media.

Why Open Government Is Good for Politicians (and Their Careers) (Fast Company)
Many are making headway in the open government space, such as San Francisco’s crowdsourcing of wasteful spending alerts and New York’s sophisticated open-source bill tracking platform.

A New ‘Toolkit’ For Opening Up Civic Life (Tech President)
Citizens who believe their government is open and transparent are more likely to be satisfied with civic life, according to recent research.

Looking for What Works: Best Online Organizing Reads of 2010 (The Huffington Post)
A compilation of articles from 2010 that enriched the entire field of online organizing and digital social change-making.

New Hampshire Opens its State’s Legislative Data (Tech President)
New Hampshire’s General Court started releasing data on legislation and legislators in a way that web developers and researchers can easily process and explore.

What Wikileaks Means for “Open Government”
(Tech President)
Could Wikileaks’ release of U.S. State Department cables indirectly deal a blow to the cause of open government?

A Facebook Founder Begins a Social Network Focused on Charities (The New York Times)
A new venture called Jumo aims to connect people with nonprofits and charitable organizations.

Open Government: Idling in the Driveway (Sunlight Foundation)
Earlier last week as part of the Open Government Directive, the rubber was supposed to hit the road with respect to agencies releasing data. Unfortunately, some agencies avoided the requirement altogether, while others simply stated that  a plan on how to identify and release data would be created. 

Mobile App Developers Tackle Africa’s Biggest Problems (CNN)
Mobile app developers are sprouting in Africa to help tackle some of its biggest problems, many creating applications that can be used with phone text messages.

This weekend, nearly 300 top transparency and open government experts from non-profit, technology developer, and government staff communities gathered at George Washington University to attend the Sunlight Foundation’s Transparency Camp 2010. The purpose of this second annual “unconference” was to clarify the needs for making government transparent, both from a philosophical and a how-to perspective.

As with all of these self-organizing, “barcamp-style” unconferences, participants are actively tweeting their thoughts throughout the sessions. The depth of these sessions and Twitter discussions is such that this article cannot adequately cover them. Thankfully, the tweet-stream is available online here (or you can follow the hashtags #TCamp2010 and #TCamp10 yourself).

Some of the key points raised in sessions include:

1. Making government data accessible in online, machine-readable format is essential.

2. Transparency is essential to improve trust in government by making it more accountable.

3. Transparency is a long-term need, so building a strong foundation to ensure it continues to develop is essential.

4. Building a foundation for transparency means we cannot use as a short-term success metric how many people use what we are building now (that audience will grow over time).

5. Digital divide issues remain important and they are building universal broadband network, getting computers and mobile devices into the hands of underserved communities, training them on how to use these tools, and developing a culture that encourages people to use these resources.

The conversation will continue on Twitter and elsewhere, so book mark the Tweetstream link, follow along, and add your thoughts.