As some of you know, I am at Princeton’s Center for Information Technology Policy for the year. It is great to be around the folks here for a host of reasons. A big one is the speakers and conferences the Center hosts. I wanted to let folks know that next week, the Center is running Open Government: Defining, Designing, and Sustaining Transparency. Joe Hall, Stephen Schultze, and Ed Felten organized this conference. CITP has already done some great work with RECAP and FedThread. This conference looks to continue that work:
Despite increasing interest in issues of open government and governmental transparency, the values of “openness” and “transparency” have been undertheorized. This workshop will bring together academics, government, advocates and tinkerers to examine a few critical issues in open and transparent government. How can we better conceptualize openness and transparency for government? Are there specific design and architectural needs and requirements placed upon systems by openness and transparency? How can openness and transparency best be sustained? How should we change the provision and access of primary legal materials? Finally, how do we best coordinate the supply of open government projects with the demand from tinkerers?
The current list of panelists includes:
* Jerry Brito, senior research fellow and adjunct professor at the Mercatus Center at George Mason University, and director of its Technology Policy Program
* Tom Bruce, co-founder and director of the Legal Information Institute at the Cornell Law School, the first legal-information web site in the world
* Brian Carver, assitant professor at the University of California, Berkeley School of Information
* Anil Dash, director of Expert Labs, part of the American Association for the Advancement of Science
* Ed Felten, director of Princeton University’s Center for Information Technology Policy
* Joseph Lorenzo Hall, joint postdoctoral researcher at the University of California, Berkeley School of Information and the Princeton University’s Center for Information Technology Policy
* Ginny Hunt, product manager for Google Public Sector at Google
* John Joergensen, reference librarian at the Rutgers School of Law, Camden
* Clay Johnson, director of Sunlight Labs
* Eric Kansa, executive director of the Information and Service Design Program at the University of California, Berkeley School of Information
* Carl Malamud, the President and Founder of public.resource.org
* Patrice McDermott, director of OpenTheGovernment.org
* Helen Nissenbaum, Professor Media, Culture & Communication at NYU. Helen is also the co-creater of TrackMeNot which protects the privacy of your web searches.
* Roger Schonfeld, research manager of Ithaka S+R
* Stephen Schultze, associate director of Princeton University’s Center for Information Technology Policy
* Adam Sedgewick, Staffer of Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee, with a focus on E-Government and Federal IT
* Lewis Shepherd, Chief Technology Officer, Microsoft’s Institute for Advanced Technology in Governments
* J.H. Snider, president of iSolon.org
* Josh Tauberer, creator of GovTrack.us and founder of Civic Impulse, LLC
* Mike Wash, Chief Information Officer of the Government Printing Office
* Jonathan Weinberg, professor at Wayne State University Law School
* John Wonderlich, policy director for the Sunlight Foundation
The full details including how register are here.
If you plan on attending, please RSVP in the next day or so, so that the Center can plan properly.