Idea Lab

Report from Gov 2.0: A Nerd, Suit, Spook, and Database Smoothie

by Christopher Csikszentmihályi
2007 Knight News Challenge Winner

I had not planned on attending O'Reilly's Gov2.0 conference, which is an exposition and dialog about new forms of government and information technology. But at last week's Foo Camp (another O'Reilly event) I met a number of people in the field, and I became pretty excited with what I heard. For example, I attended a session on government and data and sat next to a deputy CTO from the White House. I was surprised by the sincere and urgent dialog that was taking place with information activists and coders. The White House and geeks? What's not to like? As I...

• September 10, 2009
• 2 comments

Change Tracker

by Amanda Hickman
2009 Knight News Challenge Winner

This one is for the "wish I'd thought of that" files. Brian Boyer at ProPublica got the bright idea to write a wee widget that uses Versionista to track changes to a handful of White House websites including whitehouse.gov. Since I heard about Change Tracker on Twitter I've been following it on Twitter. They're still getting their bearings: I was surprised to see that the biography of Andrew Jackson was edited on March 4. and couldn't resist looking up the edit, which turned out to be a change to the site navigation. Not all that interesting. Luckily, ChangeTracker had a...

• March 6, 2009
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Government Data: File Not Found

by Gail Robinson
2009 Knight News Challenge Winner

Earlier this month the district attorney in Albany, New York, released thousands of pages of documents related to his investigation of a scandal involving former Gov. Eliot Spitzer. This goes back to the days when Spitzer's alleged improprieties involved misuse of the state police, over-the-top aggressiveness and a lust for smearing political opponents. Not as titillating as the governor's later transgressions, perhaps, but still of interest to those of us who follow the sad state of government in the Empire State. State political reporters salivated -- until they heard how DA David Soares was issuing the material. Instead of putting...

• August 25, 2008
• 2 comments

CMLP Legal Guide: Accessing Government Info

by David Ardia
2007 Knight News Challenge Winner

Back in January, the Citizen Media Law Project began rolling out its Citizen Media Legal Guide. So far, we've published major sections of the guide covering Forming a Business and Getting Online, Dealing with Online Legal Risks, and Newsgathering and Privacy. This week we began rolling out the section on Access to Government Information, which highlights the extensive amount of information available through government sources and explains how both traditional and non-traditional journalists can use various public access laws to gather and make effective use of this information. To whet your appetite, I've pasted the first part of the...

• April 2, 2008
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