Dr. Mark Drapeau writes a wonderful series of posts on Government 2.0 ("from an insider's perspective") at Mashable.com.

Dr. Drapeau is the 2006-2008 AAAS Science & Technology Policy Fellow at the Center for Technology and National Security policy of the National Defense University in Washington. He also has his own fun blog and tweets at Twitter under the name "Cheeky_Geeky". How cute is that?

 

UPDATE: 12/3/08 Change.gov has changed their copyright statement to a Creative Commons attribution license. Read more about it here at FGI.

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

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!

This post is the same as my original post at FGI:

Now that a new administration will be coming into office soon, it is more important than ever to encourage our Government to make Congressional Research Service (CRS) Reports publicly accessible online. Here at FGI, the topic of CRS Reports has been written about often, but I was inspired to create this blog post and take action after seeing Starr Hoffman’s DLC conference presentation last week (click on "Search Document" and enter "Starr Hoffman". Her PowerPoint, "Encouraging An Informed Citizenry" will come up as a PDF to download).

Starr is responsible for maintaining University of North Texas's Congressional Research Service (CRS) Reports Archive. In her presentation, she gives tips for writing to Congressmen and lists some past legislative efforts (Bills that never passed both houses of Congress) to make CRS Reports publicly accessible. I have gathered some other Bills, as well as all the contact information for the sponsoring Congressmen and have included them in my Delicious.com "CRS" tag as well as in this list:

1998 H.R. 3131, S. 1578
1999 H.R. 654, S. 393
2000 H.R. 4582
2001 S. Res. 21
2003 H.R. 3630, S. Res. 54
2007 H.R. 2545, S. Res. 401

Senator John McCain
Introduced S. 1578, S. 393, S.Res. 21, S. Res. 54, & co-sponsored S. Res. 401
Senator Mike Enzi
Co-sponsored S. 393
Senator Leahy
Co-sponsored S. 393, S. Res. 21, S. Res. 54, and S. Res. 401.
Senator Tom Coburn
H.R. 4582 co-sponsor when he was in the House.
Senator Jim DeMint
Introduced H.R. 4582 when he was in the House.
Senator Joe Lieberman
Introduced S. Res. 401 and co-sponsored S. Res. 21 and S. Res. 54
Senator Tom Harkin
Co-sponsored S. Res. 54 and S. Res. 401
Senator Susan M. Collins
Co-sponsored S. Res. 401
Senator John Cornyn
Co-sponsored S. Res. 401

Congressman David Price
Co-sponsor for H.R. 3131, H.R. 654, H.R. 3630, and H.R. 2545
Congressman Christopher Shays
Introduced H.R. 3131, H.R. 654, H.R. 3630, and H.R. 2545
Congressman John Campbell
Co-sponsored H.R. 654
Congressman Tom Tancredo
Co-sponsored H.R. 4582
Congressman Jay Inslee
Co-sponsored H.R. 3630 and H.R. 2545

And you can find and contact your local Senator  and your Representatives too.

James A. Jacobs did a Google search this past June for "Received through the CRS Web" OR "CRS Report for Congress" combined with site:house.gov and then again for site:senate.gov and got around 600 hits with each. For example, here are some domains he found that you can search within for CRS Reports or to search for those in Congress who may support public access to CRS Reports: bartlett.house.gov, holt.house.gov, radanovich.house.gov, weldon.house.gov, bennelson.senate.gov, carper.senate.gov, lugar.senate.gov, murray.senate.gov, etc.

For more information on CRS Report legislation efforts, visit this site which contains a "Campaign for Online Access" section.

Spread the word about this post and good luck in writing to your Congressmen! If you have other ideas, please share them in the comments.

 

I've caught the widget bug, thanks to Daniel Cornwall, who mentioned on Twitter that he found some nifty EPA Widgets.

So, out of curiosity, I did a search for other Government Agency widgets and widgets that use government information (such as those found on Govtrack.us or the Sunlight Foundation website). I found quite a few but I know there must be more out there.

I've compiled a "government widget guide" at my Gov Docs 2.0 wiki page. Please feel free to suggest others by commenting here or on the wiki page.

I thought it would be nice to have a guide so you can quickly browse widgets that you may want to add to your blog or webpage. For example, see my Environmental Law guide (a work in progress, mind you) for ideas!