A few things caught my eye this week at the intersection of Government and the web:

e-petitions at 10 Downing

Tony Blair’s administration is hosting an electronic petition tool:

>Petitions have long been sent to the Prime Minister by post or delivered to the Number 10 door in person. You can now both create and sign petitions on this website too, giving you the opportunity to reach a potentially wider audience and to deliver your petition directly to Downing Street.

Petitions range from a referendum on EU membership to Knighthood for Ringo Starr (“Time to right an injustice.”).

Some Sunlight

The Sunlight Foundation is organizing and underwriting some of the most important work going on in this town. Check out The Open House Project
(a collaborative effort to produce some recommendations for opening up Congress) and the Congressional Web Site Investigation project, where you can help research usefulness-or-lack-therof of congressional home pages.

Even Brighter

I’ve been lurking on the Open House Project mailing list for a few days, and saw this interesting discussion about C-Span and the copyright ownership of government proceedings. ‘aphid’ got the last word in with:

>Proceedings are NOT taped by C-SPAN. They are recorded by House

employees, and have been for 18+ years. The cameras are remote

controlled by gov’t employees 3 floors down. The proceeding footage

is mixed and sent along with a closed caption stream (provided by the

National Captions Institute) to the press gallery. There, C-SPAN and

every other credentialed media organization has access to the feed.

C-SPAN is simply the only one to air them in their entirety.

The conversation got started when Pelosi’s office was criticized for posting C-Span video to Youtube.