editing this space

The Worldwide Governance Indicators (WGI) project reports aggregate and individual governance indicators for 212 countries and territories over the period 1996–2006, for six dimensions of governance: voice and accountability, political stability and absence of violence, government effectiveness, regulatory quality, rule of law, control of corruption.

Workshop: "Computing in the Cloud"

Center for Information Technology Policy at Princeton University
“Civics in the Cloud”
Joshua Tauberer – GovTracks.us

January 15, 2008  

This panel at the workshop was very interesting.  The discussion was about using the cloud to strengthen the relationship between citizens and the government.  How?  Joshua Tauberer started a website called GovTrack.us to improve communication between the government and the citizens of this country. Govtrack.us is a tool used to track what is happening in congress.  The website pools resources from a number of different website including Google Maps, local government website, campaign donation websites, etc. You can get customized rss feeds and emails that are relevant to your personal political interests.  Furthermore, it collects information automatically from government website (like Thomas.loc.gov) and represents it in a several new ways.  For instance, there are websites that store public data on campaign donations and there are other websites that track earmark spending in legislative bills, but GovTracks.us puts combines the power of these existing sites in order to track the relationship between earmark spending and donations to study weather politicians are voting based on certain financial interests.

According to Tauberer, the U.S. Government only presents bills and laws in one perspective, but GovTracks.us uses the power of cloud computing to help you to see and understand them from a variety of different perspectives.  Once concern of Tauberer’s is that government has no goals for how to incorporate technology into the legislative process in order to keep citizens more informed.  Fortunately, there is lots of relevant data on government legislative actions, but there is no structure or a system to put relevant government databases together in a meaningful way to help the citizens understand what is going on in congress.

GovTracks.us is an example of how cloud computing can be used to bridge the citizens and congressmen.  This panel helps to illuminate a powerful and influential social utility that can arise from cloud computing.  If GovTracks.us can actually fulfill its purpose, such technology would prove to be a powerful tool for improving the democratic political system in this country.

With the advent of each generation of internet related innovation, there is always a fury of discussion over how much of ourselves we are exposing, both to known and unknown factors. From online shopping, to social networking sites, to private and government institutions offering a full range of services online, the often stated fear of having your entire identity available online is a not without validity. Issues of personal privacy and information security require oversight and mediation by a regulatory and judicial body, which, ironically, perpetuates the need for greater access to personal information. On the other hand, the proliferation of the internet has drastically changed the velocity of flow of ideas, goods/services, and people across borders. More than ever, the ease with which people are accessing various travel and financial services are allowing companies to dynamically forecast sales and adjust pricing, leading to a consumer driven economy that is not bounded by the traditional state borders. Concerns that the internet is eroding the traditional authority of the nation state has led countries to enact legislation and even directly interfere in citizen access to information online. I would like to explore the extent to which the nation states actual or perceived authority has been eroded by the internet. I will examine the ways in which nations are attempting to filter and limit access to various speech online and the types of speech that are being restricted. It would be especially interesting to see whether these filters are consistent with controls on other types of media within the country, which would be an indication of whether government control is contracting or expanding. Also of interest are the various national and international organizations and regulatory bodies that are arising in response to the need for regulation. In the end, I suspect that the need for order within societies will still outweigh individual rights, leading to the expansion of the nation states authority but tested in international forums.

This is a collection of mental health resources for Mad, Bad and Sad. It consists of databases, websites and books to aid in researching the question: "How would you improve mental health services for children with a specific mental disorder in Philadelphia?" Also included are basic information evaluation resources.

LANIC page on cuba.

About Open Congress

OpenCongress brings together official government information with news and blog coverage to give you the real story behind what's happening in Congress.

For most people, finding out what's really happening in Congress is a daunting and time-consuming task. The legislative process is frequently arcane and closed-off from the public, resulting in frustration with Congress and apathy about politics.

Small groups of political insiders and lobbyists know what's really going on in Congress, but this important information rarely makes its way into the light. The official website of the library of Congress, Thomas, publishes the full text of bills, but we can do much more to inform ourselves and make our government accessible. Now, with OpenCongress, everyone can be an insider.

OpenCongress is a free, open-source, non-profit, and non-partisan web resource with a mission to help make Congress more transparent and to encourage civic engagement. OpenCongress is a joint project of the Sunlight Foundation and the Participatory Politics Foundation.

Philadelphia Department of Human Services school based program, a collaboration with the school system.

The OSS provides comprehensive special education, behavioral health, school health, and prevention/intervention programs which are aligned with the educational and organizational goals as outlined in the District's Strategic Plan.

Database of online social services available for Philadelphia residents.

Homepage of the City of Philadelphia.

Welcome to Congresspedia, the "citizen's encyclopedia on Congress" that anyone can edit. Congresspedia is a collaborative project of the Center for Media and Democracy (http://www.prwatch.org) and the Sunlight Foundation (http://www.sunlightfoundation.com/) and is designed to shine more light on the workings of the U.S. Congress. Congresspedia is part of SourceWatch, a collaboratively-written, wiki-based website documenting the people, organizations and issues shaping the public agenda.

This book examines the life and political career of the 33^rd president of the United States, Harry S. Truman.  Born in Missouri, he went off to serve as a captain of artillery in World War I.  Upon his return, he began his career in politics and quickly rose to great local and state popularity due to his "reputation of honest and efficiency as well as for party regularity."  His political shrewdness caught the attention of President Franklin D. Roosevelt, searching for a new vice presidential candidate to replace Henry Wallace in the 1944 election.  After Roosevelt died in April of 1945, Truman assumed the presidency and was initially preoccupied with foreign policy: the Allied conference in Potsdam  and the conclusion of the war in Europe.  But perhaps the issue that took precedence at the time, and remained a major point of political debate the year after (1946, when The Best Years of Our Lives was made), was the decision in August to drop atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, Japan.  Though Truman maintained till his death that he made the decision solely on the basis of ending the war, preventing an invasion of Japan and saving American lives, the book explores alternative beliefs that Truman had alterior motives, such as preventing participation of the Russiancs in the Japanese defeat, as they had pledged to do at the Yalta conference.

The decision to drop the bomb was initially greeted with great acceptance by most Americans, who were relieved to see the surrender of Japan, the end of the war, and the return of the troops.  Soonafter, however, people began to question the morality of leveling an entire city and killing hundreds of thousands of civilians with a single bomb.  People began to question if dropping the bomb on Hiroshima and Nagasaki was a good decision, if perhaps the US should have warned Japan of the awesome power their new weapon was capable of, if it should have been dropped on a military base rather than a city.  This debate was very much alive and well during 1946, the year of The Best Years of Our Lives, and this social commentary is very much interjected into the film.  For example, upon Army Sergeant Al Stephenson's (Fredric March) return home, his son promptly asks him if when in Hiroshima he saw the damaging of effects of radioactivity on survivors of the bomb.  The film is not a sterotypical, patriotic postwar film for many reasons, and its ability to recognize domestic debate over foreign policy is one reason for that; its discussion of complex issues lends it a layer of intellectualism.  At that point in American History, and still to this day, the American conscience has not been able to completley accept the decision to use the atomic bomb.

 

Gateway to statistics from over 100 U.S. Federal agencies

Provides country briefings, which include articles, background profiles, forecasts and statistics and information about economy, politics and history.

These publications include facts about the land, people, history, government, political conditions, economy, and foreign relations of independent states, some dependencies, and areas of special sovereignty. 

"This November 2005 report looks at changes in airline travel since the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks. Features data on number of domestic airline passengers, available seats, prices, and number of airline employees. Includes brief discussion of decreasing airfares in reaction to the growth of low-cost carriers. From the Bureau of Transportation Statistics (BTS), U.S. Department of Transportation." (via LII)

Links to official statistics of foreign countries from the University of Aukland. Statistics by country, region, and topic.

This work seeks to predict the impact of government regulation, in terms of new policy and programs, upon the music field for the future. It raises some ethical questions concerning the direction of technology and tries to account for how technological advancements will influence the national and global economy. The central issue around which the whole work is concerned is the commerce of music.

Major source of statistical information relating to education in the U.S.