legislation

The term "Open Government" (OG, hereafter) has been used since the 70s to refer to the effort to reduce bureaucratic opacity and open up governments to public scrutiny. Current notions of OG are thus the result of more than four decades of endeavours to increase the transparency of government actions. These efforts materialized mainly in the enactment of legislation on access to information, privacy, data protection and administrative procedures, and by creating ombudsman offices and supreme audit institutions.

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Great things for open government happened last year on November 15-16 at the 4th annual Capitol Camp event, organized and hosted by the New York State Senate and the New York State Office of Information Technology Services, in collaboration with the Center for Technology in Government.

I have discussed recently the NY State Senate progressive stance on open government and its embrace of open source. Capitol Camp 2012 was another display of the powerful benefits the adoption of open practices in government can bring to the public. The event involved an unconference-day and a hackathon-day, both of them fully open to the public.

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With a recent op-ed in the Economist and a segment on NPR's Planet Money, it seems as if an awareness of the high cost of the outmoded, traditional patent system is finally creeping into the mainstream.

A funny thing happens as a Congressional session comes to a close. Priorities, whether political or policy, rocket to the surface.  It becomes a war of attrition, of who can keep things 'out of sight, out of mind' before people get tired and want to go home.  

But, there are always numerous pieces of legislation that don’t get much love either way. The problem is, although they technically “go away” for now, the ideas behind them aren’t dead.
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