• Italy | Is transparency compatible with “robots.txt”?
  PDF friends David Osimo and Alberto Cottica point us out a story from Italy about a “transparency project” launched by the Italian government.
  The initiative, launched some time ago, aimed at publishing relevant information about civil servants, such as paycheck and days of absence. But, as this article points out, most part of this data (including those about the ministry itself) has been published in a directory which is not possible to reach by search engines – using the robots.txt file with “disallow:/operazionetrasparenza/”.
  Here’s David’s take on the story: “The implication is that searching with google the name of a person, you will not find these data. You will have to know that the person is employed by a public administration, and visit the website and check the name. This is obviously limiting the real transparency of the public data.
  I assume the excuse is related to privacy: there are different privacy implications if a personal information is searchable or not. This is an important matter, which I would like to understand better. Yet in this case it appears as an excuse. Real transparency needs machine-readable data, and using robots.txt is a clear contradiction of the principle of transparency."
  Plus, David has another point to make: why is transparency applied first of all to (against) public sector workers and their behaviour instead on how the P.A. spend public money?

Wondering what's going in European techpolitics? Starting today, PDF Europe will tell you more - three days a week!
Links and suggestions are welcome both by email and on twitter.
(thanks to Nancy Scola).

EU | Are you ready for (y)EU?
Julien Frisch introduces the Web Communications team of the European Parliament.

Almost three months ago, the City and County of San Francisco launched a site called DataSF where they publish data sets from a variety of city departments for public consumption and application development. The initiative, led by Jay Nath in the Department of Technology, was inspired by President Obama's transparency directive on his first day in office. They then looked at what had been done with Apps for Democracy in Washington, D.C.

Mark Pesce, digital ethnographer from University of Sydney Australia, asks, "What do we do to make the idea of participation so alluring so seductive that people want to participate?" Hear the author of Open Source Democracy and Life Inc Douglas Rushkoff respond. Both Pesce and Rushkoff were speakers at PdF2009 conference in New York.

PdF 2009 in New York we asked "If you could ask the PdF audience one question, what would you ask?" We would like to hear your answers to the insightful questions that were asked at our 2009 conference. Please post your comments below.


Interested in hearing more from Mark Pesce or Douglas Rushkoff? Watch Pesce on The Dangerous Power of Sharing at PdF2009, or watch Douglas Rushkoff on the New Renaissance at PdF 2008.

Hear what Beth Noveck White House Office Science and Technology wants to know about how the government can create useful feedback loops with crowdsourcing. Rasmus Kleis Nielsen, a graduate student at Columbia University who studies the use of new technology in politics, offers his response. At PdF 2009 in New York we asked "If you could ask the PdF audience one question, what would you ask?" We would like to hear your answers to the insightful questions that were asked at our 2009 conference. Please post your comments below.
Interested in hearing more from Beth Noveck? Hear what she said to PdF 2009 in her keynote titled Innovation in Government, Obama-Style: Participation and Collaboration.

Taking a close look at the White House, it's not difficult to see that they're fairly quickly shifting focus from the "Why?" aspect of open government -- that is, making the case for why a more participatory, collaborative, and transparent democracy is a positive, progressive development -- to a "So, how exactly do we go about doing this open government thing?" phase. They're setting their mission big. If they ultimately succeeded with even part of what they have in mind, it's probably on the safe side of hyperbolic to say that they would be putting the United States at the leading edge of participatory democracy. Below are a trio of insights from the last few days into what the Obama Administration is thinking, doing, and inviting us to do on the way to a future of more engaged and engageable government...

What is written here is a rough account of the session taken from our note taker during South by Southwest, and from this information we will be submitting a report to the White House on recommendations for the future growth of Whitehouse.gov as well as for open government and transparency in general. We appreciate feedback and additions if there's anything we missed in this article that occurred during the conversation.

Monday at 3:30 at the South by Southwest Interactive conference, Nancy Scola and I will be facilitating a Core Conversation entitled "Whitehouse.gov 2.0: Upgrading to Open Source Government." We'll provide an overview of the concepts behind employing open source principles to government through technology and how the new administration is running with their campaign promise to improve government transparency online. Then the majority of the session will comprise a discussion about what participants want to see coming out of government in terms of information, and how people most want to be a part of providing input.

Over in the Open Government Google Group (which you might want to consider joining) Alexis Madrigal admits that the Wired story on open government he's been working on wasn't working: "The actual mode of journalism with its traditional endgoal of a 'finished product' article that tells people how it is wasn't up to the task." So, he figured, hey, what's good for the government is good for the writer, and went open source with the project. Be sure to check out Wired's new How-To Open Government Data wiki, built on MediaWiki. The goal is pick a wide assortment of brains on specific areas where data sets the government produces should be put to better use for lay citizens and government employees alike, like turning USDA spreadsheets on crops and cattle into far more user-friendly XML feeds.

Madrigal's wiki joins a suddenly more crowded field of folks working to help incoming CIO Vivek Kundra figure out to marshall the information the government has at its fingertips. The W3C (World Wide Web Consortium) eGovernment Interest Group is holding a meeting in DC March 12th and 12th aimed at "develop[ing] a road map for developing Web standards to realize open and interoperable solutions."

We came, we saw, we ate slightly frightening amounts of Pizza Boli. Transparency Camp '09 happened in Washington DC this weekend. At any given moment, you could step out in the hallway of GW's Media and Public Affairs Building and see a Library of Congress web dude chatting up an advocate for persistent legislative tagging...who's standing next to GSA's web director...who's chatting with Tim O'Reilly...who just finished a conversation with a DHS procurement guru...who spent the morning session brainstorming with the guy who built StimulusWatch...who spent breakfast kibitzing with Recovery.gov's lead architect...who's sneaking away to whiteboard with an open-source advocate...who will spend the afternoon deliberating with the author of Obama's Open Government Directive...who just shared ideas with the new New York Senate CIO...so on and so forth. Sure, for an open-government event, the un-conference snuck under the radar of many people who might have liked to attend. And there's a good chance that you could have counted on two hands the number of John McCain voters in the 300-plus person crowd.

But after two days of brainstorming and back-and-forth, you might be forgiven for looking upon the scene and indulging in some grand thoughts like Craig Newmark's reflection that you were "watch[ing] actual big history being made in real-time" -- or at least signs that a certain transparency-driven model of governing was getting much closer to critical mass. (You Golden Bough fans out there might get a particular kick out of the fact that Transparency Camp kick-off was held in the very same auditorium where the Carville/Novak/Begala/Carlson show Crossfire was filmed.)

I'll point you to roundups and recaps by attendees as they get written, but for now you might like to dip into the Twitter stream. Or, if time is of the essence, check out this tweet word cloud. A Google Group has been established to keep conversations going. And most importantly, here's where you can order commemorative stickers. Next up, in slightly different fashion, is Government 2.0 Camp later this month. Video after the jump.

(Photo credit: kenyaoa)