Benchmarking e-government in web 2.0. Gov 2.0 Coverage & Insight. Self-directed learning, and O’Reilly’s role in the ConnectED program I wanted to provide a bit of perspective on the donation, announced on Wednesday by the White House, of a Safari Books Online subscription providing access to O’Reilly Media books, videos, and other educational content to every high school in the country.
First off, this came up very suddenly, with a request from the White House that reached me only on Monday, as the White House and Department of Education were gearing up to Wednesday’s announcement about broadband and iPads in schools. I had a followup conversation with David Edelman, a young staffer who taught himself programming by reading O’Reilly books when in middle school, and launched a web development firm while in high school. He made the case that connectivity alone, without content, wasn’t all it could be. And he thought of his own experience, and he thought of us. OpenGovernment.org connects state government to citizens. OpenGovernment.org, a free, open source online portal designed to make open state government available to citizens, launched this morning.
OpenGovernment.org makes it easier for citizens to learn about pending legislation and their legislators by combining open government data, information about state legislators, multiple databases of voting information, social mentions and news coverage into a lightweight online user interface. If that sounds a lot like what OpenCongress.org does for the federal government, it should: it’s the same model, adapted to the state level. Alan W. Silberberg writes about the Gov 2.0/Gov 3.0 transformation sweeping the globe.