Craig Newmark, founder of Craigslist and Sunlight board member, has written a thoughtful piece on service and volunteerism for The Huffington Post. The catalyst for Craig’s piece is the reference by the Barack Obama platform, outlined at Change.gov, to their volunteerism plans as “a craigslist for service.” Craig uses this opportunity to outline possible aspects of “a craigslist for service” from his point of view, such as offering to help an established charity, or use sites like VolunteerMatch.org, DonorsChoose.org and Kiva.org to find ways to donate your time and money in useful and thoughtful ways, along with other ideas.

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Change.gov has released another ground-breaking feature.

This time, it’s “Open for Questions“, a digg-like feature for voting up questions for the administration-to-be.

Somewhat similar to the example set by the British mysociety.org, No. 10 Petitions, Open for Questions is part petition, part comment thread, and part internet press conference.  By allowing anyone to submit questions, and then allowing votes on the best questions to rise to the top, the transition team is experimenting with one answer to the question “What are you going to do with all of those comments?”

This is a real question, since the healthcare conversation, as of this writing, has racked up over 5,000 comments.  A reporter asked me today how one can possibly benefit from an overwhelming number of comments.  My answer was that it can be a challenge, especially as the response increases.  More important than initially designing a perfect system, though, is to experiment with what might work.  Expertise and knowledge are distributed throughout the country, and no matter how extensive the team’s outreach efforts, tapping into all of the ideas is impossible.

Tools like Open for Questions are at least one step toward solving that problem, of creating more meaningful interaction between citizens and government.

As Sunlight consultant Micah Sifry wrote on TechPresident this morning,

At the risk of sounding like a broken record, the lesson of the story is we collectively need much better tools for mass collaboration than we now have. How do we scale up relationships of trust and accountability? Are we bound by what our brains are capable of–face-to-face relationships with a few hundred peers at best? Or can we develop effective communications and reputation systems that would enable much larger groups to connect effectively?

While the answers won’t always be obvious, addressing them can only happen through measured experimentation.  We’re happy to see another step in that direction.

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Public.Resource.org, founded by Carl Malamud, is a nonprofit working to make government information more accessible. (Sunlight has provided the group funding in the past.) As Tim O’Reilly wrote when Public.Resource.org launched, “Carl Malamud has this funny idea that public domain information ought to be… well, public.”

Change.gov, the Obama-Biden transition team, has invited ideas, as long as the presentations are no longer than one page. Public.Resource.org has submitted five. Carl has some really good ideas:

1. Rebooting.gov. How the Government Printing Office (GPO) can spearhead a revolution in governmental affairs.

2. FedFlix. Government videos are an essential national resource for vocational and safety training and can also help form a public domain stock footage library, a common resource for the YouTube and remix era.

3. The Library of the U.S.A. A book series and public works job program to create an archival series of curated documents drawn from our cultural institutions, with full-quality masters of the books and research materials made available for other publishers to draw on. The program would employ the GPO master printers and would recruit writers, archivists, artists, and other creative workers through a national call for participation.

4. The United States Publishing Academy. GPO should expand current training programs such as the Institute for Federal Printing and combine them with current workforce development efforts to create a national academy similar to the National Mine Academy and the National Fire Academy, training its own workforce, the government, and the local schools in the art, craft, and science of publishing.

5. The Rural Internetification Administration. Repurposing the Amateur Radio League, modifying spectrum policy, and injecting capital into rural coops can bring high-speed broadband to 98% of rural Americans just as the Rural Electrification Administration did in the last century.

Carl adds, “All submissions are in the public domain and you may feel free to remix or mashup the ideas as you so wish.”

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Open government ally Carl Malamud has posted a brilliant agenda on public.resource.org, a five point technology plan he has presented to the Obama transition team.

The ideas all reflect Carl’s longstanding work on behalf of the public interest, as a programmer, archivist, institution builder, broadcaster, academic, and publisher. Realizing Malamud’s vision of government information would mean a public sector renaissance, democratizing both publishing and social .gov web use.

I’m particularly fond of the first of the five ideas — “rebooting .gov” which includes, among other things, digitizing all government information, increasing interactivity between government and citizens, and creating a .gov cloud (imagining agile deployment of computing services to government agencies).

All five proposals are worth a thorough read, and close consideration.

More from freegovinfo, and boing boing.

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The Obama transition team released two new policies this week, a Creative Commons license and a radical disclosure policy. These changes don’t just signal a new relationship to the public, but also create a paradigm shift in how government manages information, and could lead to much bigger things to come from the administration. Requirements for affirmative disclosure move the onus of dissemination to the government (unlike FOIA, which relies on citizen requests), and might just revolutionize the way our government views its communications.

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In a reiteration of just about everything we cover here at Sunlight, Congressional Quarterly released a terrific article examining the many ways in which Congress is not transparent and open. If you read the blog here, or are familiar with Sunlight’s work, these problems will be very familiar:

• Bills are often dropped hours before a vote. With no time to read the bills, large programs get voted on with little review from lawmakers and no review from the public. In one egregious case, lawmakers went scurrying for information on the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act amendments, legalizing domestic spying programs, as the final version of the bill was not available when the vote was held.
• Some committees are secret, some are open. Sometimes a bill can travel through multiple committees with varying degrees of transparency.
• Conference committees are supposed to be open, but openness is often circumvented or multiple conferences are held, some open, some not.
• Congressional Research Service reports, the information pipeline for most congressional offices, are not widely, publicly available.
• There is a large amount of over-classification of legislative activities related to defense and intelligence.

And so it goes. Congress still has leaps and bounds to make towards true transparency. Over the past two years, there have been some encouraging developments including the Honest Leadership and Open Government Act, the rewriting of franking restrictions for lawmaker web use, and the voluntary transparency of some individual lawmakers.

One thing that does stand out in this article that needs to be challenged is the suggestion that transparency could cause greater disapproval of Congress:

Lawmakers in the 1970s reasoned that more openness could benefit not just voters, but Congress itself. That isn’t necessarily true, said Princeton’s Zelizer, thanks to 19th Century German Chancellor Otto von Bismarck’s saying that the two things no one should want to see being made are sausage and legislation.

“It might not result in better ratings for Congress,” the professor said. “They thought, ‘If you make it more open, people will like it more.’ That actually didn’t happen.”

Zelizer, one of my favorite congressional experts, isn’t wrong here, but his lessons don’t necessarily apply to transparency as conceived of in the Internet-powered 21st century. While the reformers of the ’60s and ’70s did believe that openness would build trust with the public, they did not build interactivity and connectivity into that push for openness. Transparency, different from openness, proposes that information should not just be available and accessible, but that the public should be able to freely interact with both the information and all actors involved, including lawmakers, staffers, and other members of the general public. Unlike simply making information available, transparency would go a long way to help repair the image of Congress by actually connecting and involving citizens.

To see what this transparency could look like read my colleague Greg Elin’s excellent review of the interactivity at change.gov, the Obama-Biden Presidential Transition web site.

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This is great news. Over the weekend, the Obama–Biden Transition team switched the copyright policy for their Web site, Change.gov, from the old fashioned “copyright protected model” to the most  open Creative Commons license. Lots of folks had noticed this oddity and there had been a low buzz of conversation about it. It’s really terrific to see the Transition team catch this early on and free the information. So we can now mix and remix the content there. It will be interesting to see what we can do with it.

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As we at the Sunlight Foundation watch the Presidential transition begin in earnest, we’re particularly interested in President-elect Obama’s history and promise for a more open, transparent and connected government, as articulated throughout his Senate career, Presidential campaign, and now through his newly posted agenda, on change.gov. Obama’s disposition toward government reform and transparency makes it a really good time to be an open government advocate.

Throughout his four years in the U.S. Senate, Obama has compiled an impressive record on government openness and transparency. He sponsored the Federal Finance Accounability and Transparency Act, which created USAspending.gov, a database of government grants and contracts developed in the image of FedSpending.org, which OMBWatch created with the support of the Sunlight Foundation. He also sponsored or cosponsored two successful amendments to the Honest Leadership and Open Government Act, requiring Senate committees to post transcripts of their public meetings, and to add a fundraising disclosure requirement for lobbists (S.Amdt 41). Other measures that Obama has proposed include a bill to set up an outside ethics commission to receive complaints from the public on alleged ethics violations (S. 2259 ), a bill (S. 2261) to shed light on earmarks, and a bill to radically open conference committee proceedings.

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