Well, this pissed me off. Long-time readers of this site may recall my interest in the Internet Archive’s Wayback Machine, which aims to preserve the historical web. I’ve previously written to criticize the Bush administration for its lengthy robots.txt exclusion file (thousands of lines long), which could be viewed as an attempt to prevent the […]
A new website, Open-Government.us, proposes three “open transition” principles for President-elect Obama’s transition to the office of the President. The site, set up by Lawrence Lessig and others, notes the importance of openness and accessibility for the transition process. For example, although Obama’s Change.gov transition site is generally subject to a Creative Commons license, his videos are made available through his Transition Project YouTube account. In turn, YouTube is a proprietary site that does not permit downloading of user content. As noted in the principles, open government requires that citizens be able to copy, remix, and excerpt such materials unfettered from undue proprietary or format restraints.
Here’s a short explanatory video from http://open-government.us/:
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Below the break is text with the three principles, also from http://open-government.us/:
