Huang Qi, Journalist, Formally Arrested

Daniel X. O'Neil
7:52 AM | bio | Comments: 0

Huang Qi, the Chinese dissident who had been working to uncover information about school buildings that collapsed during the May 12 earthquake in Sichuan, China, was formally arrested last week for illegally possessing state secrets. He had been in detention for weeks. Huang had already served five years in prison on charges of inciting subversion after publishing many articles critical of the government on his Web site, http://64tianwang.com/. He claimed that he was badly beaten in jail, and suffers headaches and depression. The parents of children who died in collapsed school buildings have been considered a possible threat to the... continued...

Topics: Government & Politics, Technology
Tagged: building permits, china, earthquake, huang qi

Independent Government Observers Task Force Non-Conference, August 4 - 5 in Chicago

Daniel X. O'Neil
5:43 PM | bio | Comments: 0

I wrote earlier about the IGOTF, a "non-conference structured around three sets of working group activities": 1. Case Law (Working Group Chair: Carl Malamud, carl at media dot org). This working group brings together individuals groups involved in the day-to-day work of putting the courts on-line. Topics that will be considered include markup of citations in cases, "universal resolvers" for mapping citations to URLs, recycling of PACER and other documents, and other subjects as appropriate. 2. Municipal Governments (Working Group Chair: Daniel X. O'Neil, danx at everyblock dot com). This group will focus on issues involved in citizens attempting to... continued...

Topics: Government & Politics, Participation
Tagged: chicago, citizen journalism, igotf

Open Government Data and the EveryBlock Project

Daniel X. O'Neil
6:30 PM | bio | Comments: 4

At EveryBlock, where my main role is to work with municipal governments to uncover new data sets, we're experimenting with a new form of journalism where we treat freshly updated public records as block-level news. It's a big job to acquire ongoing feeds of government data, and we have a broader goal of spreading the gospel of open data. The two objectives: Get more datasets for EveryBlock so it can be a better Web site Convince governments to share that data with everyone, not just us can lead to some cognitive dissonance in the minds of government leaders. They have... continued...

Topics: Government & Politics
Tagged: data, everyblock, journalism, open government, opengov