There is discussion going on at the FGI website about the copyright status of the President-elect's website, Change.gov, as well as the vanishing contents of the website, among other concerns. We at FGI created a standard letter for you to use (see below) if you wish to contact Change.gov and let them know your concerns.

You can email the change.gov website by going to their Contact page at: http://www.change.gov/page/s/contact

Oh, and Daniel Cornwall created a Facebook group on this issue too. Join and spread the word!

Hello,

I strongly urge you to change the copyright statement on your site to clearly state that all information on the site is in the public domain. According to Copyright Law 17 U.S.C. § 105, "Copyright protection under this title is not available for any work of the United States Government." Since the site is in the .gov domain, people expect the material on the site to have been produced by government employees and thus as being in the public domain.

If the bulk of material at change.gov was not created by federal employees, then I suggest that you post a blog entry explaining why your material is under copyright. You should also explore moving your content to a .org domain, which internet users understand can have copyrighted material. It would be ok to leave a redirect from change.gov to the new site as long as the new site was clearly labeled non-government.

There has been much discussion over this matter at the Free Government Information website, which you can read about here: http://freegovinfo.info/taxonomy/term/876.

Thank you for your prompt attention to this matter.

Sincerely,
Rebecca Blakeley
Government Documents Librarian

There are some great discussion going on at the FGI (Free Government Information) website about the Presidential Transition, civic engagement in librarianship, and a series of posts from John Schuler called "75 Days" to Government Information Liberation. Check it out and join in on the conversation!

(Reposted from Free Government Information.)

On Tuesday, I received several exhortations to vote – via e-mail, Facebook, and other social networking sites. I found it somewhat amusing – since I received most of these exhortations after I voted. I also found it somewhat frustrating, because while voting is arguably the most powerful tool citizens have to engage with their governments, I think people are often ignorant of other ways to be civically engaged.

I should clarify that by "civic engagement," I'm referring to active dialogue with one's government. Political blogs such as DailyKos and Instapundit have hundreds of thousands of subscribers. I'm willing to bet that far more people read political news and blogs than read government publications like the Federal Register - and actually respond to its requests for comments.

If you're planning on being in Washington, D.C. for Inauguration Day, you might want to start booking that trip now. 

The theme of Inauguration 2009 is "A New Birth of Freedom," in recognition of the bicentennial of Lincoln's birth.

Looking for tickets? In January 2009, a limited number will be distributed by Senators and Representatives to their constituents.

Via Huffington Post:

President-elect Barack Obama has launched the website change.gov, where one can find news about the transition and inauguration and information about his agenda. The site also has a place for people to share their ideas for government and their stories about the campaign.

According to DemConWatch, the site change.gov is slated to go live later today.