Archive for the ‘poll’ Category

The team at the Oxford American Dictionaries have selected GIF as the 2012 word of the year. 

In case you don’t know:

GIFverb to create a GIF file of (an image or video sequence, especially relating to an event): he GIFed the highlights of the debate

The GIF, a compressed file format for images that can be used to create simple, looping animations, turned 25 this year, but like so many other relics of the 80s, it has never been trendier.  GIF celebrated a lexical milestone in 2012, gaining traction as a verb, not just a noun.  The GIF has evolved from a medium for pop-cultural memes into a tool with serious applications including research and journalism, and its lexical identity is transforming to keep pace. 

The GovLoop InsightsIssue of the Week with Chris Dorobek… where each week we try to pick a issue… idea… person… or topic that defined the past 7-days… but also choose one that will define the days… weeks… and months ahead… As always, we focus on six words: Helping you do your job better. Generally we hold off telling you what the big story is, but… not this week.  This week’s big story is the budget.  And there was a lot of budget news this week…

But before we talk budget… some of the other stories that defined the second week of first week of November 2011…

After the break, we highlight some of the big stories of the week… including a fed jobs bill… USAJobs update… TSP’s October numbers…

There currently are more than 40 cyber-security bills somewhere in the legislative process on Capitol Hill. 

After heading up the President’s 60-day Cyberspace Review last year, Melissa Hathaway has some analysis.  She has complied all that knowledge in a 31-page report which broke down the different bills into sections.  Nine bills make the legislation to watch list, including updates to FISMA.  Hathaway also says there great need for more public awarness for cybersecurity issues both in the U.S. and abroad. 

When there are big events, I like to pull together resources in one place — and, of course, this has been open government week — the Office of Management and Budget issued a series of policies, while agencies issued their open government plans. 

* White House Office of Science and Technology Policy blog post by Norm Eisen, Special Counsel to the President for Ethics and Government Reform:Open for Change, which he says will “strengthen our democracy and promote accountability, efficiency and effectiveness across the government.” 

Put simply, it’s increasingly clear government is not going to become more open and transparent without extraordinary public pressure.  And WE are going to have to be the ones to put that pressure on them. 

You can help right now by joining our campaign for open government and signing the pledge to demand all public government information be available ONLINE and in REAL-TIME. 

This is fairly far from awesome.  I’d actually label it fairly disappointing.  Not only are both documents written to be as vague as possible (the PRA primer, for instance, spends most of its text simply repeating statute), this doesn’t really get us where we need to be…

More disappointing from my standpoint, it keeps in place the notion that citizen interaction with the government is essentially a “burden” and still codifies the position that significant interaction with the public should be minimized (this is clearly contrary to open government). 

The discussion has spurred me to actually print out the Paperwork Reduction Act and read it for myself to get a sense of what it actually says.  My sense is that some of what OMB is trying to do is work within the constraints of the law — a law enacted in the early 1980s before hardly anybody even had e-mail addresses.