So this guy, Carl Malamud, wants to be President Obama's chief printer. So why should we care? It turns out he isn't even really a printer. He's actually an internet pioneer.
We should care because what he wants to do is pretty much put the whole operations of the United States government up and freely available online (and also he has some new ideas about the actual printing the Government Printing Office should do).
He's got some great ideas - and he needs our help in getting the job.
Details below the fold...
Carl Malamud has been working since the 80's working to make government databases freely available online and recently making primary legal documents, state laws and codes available at his website
Here's part of his statement asking to be head of the Government Printing Office:
For over 20 years, I have been publishing government information on the Internet. In 2008, Public.Resource.Org published over 32.4 million pages of primary legal materials, as well as thousands of hours of video and thousands of photographs. In the 1990s, I fought to place the databases of the United States on the Internet. In the 1980s, I fought to make the standards that govern our global Internet open standards available to all. Should I be honored to be nominated and confirmed, I would continue to work to preserve and extend our public domain, and would place special attention to our relationship with our customers, especially the United States Congress.
Read the whole thing at YesWeScan.org - there's much more of interest there. [He lists seven main points, in fact, about how the Government Printing Office should serve the public. The headings of those seven points are: America's Operating System(!), jobs, librarians, security, jobs[again], rebooting.gov, and transparency. Go there - read about them - very interesting ideas!]
Read more about Mr. Malamud at Wikipedia and NNDB and at BoingBoing. Or read the Wired story that I found on the top of my gmail this morning that set me off on this diary instead of working on digging my business out of this recession which is what I have to get back to very soon... There are also a bunch of stories at the New York Times including this recent one about his work around publishing legal information and questions of just who owns the law. [In order to see the stories at NYT, you may have to register, but I'm pretty sure it's still free.]
The coolest thing [I mean other than his ideas for putting the whole government up online and making it all freely accessible - exactly what the internet is about, no?] is that he asks for your support saying
Make a blog post and enable comments and you too can become a "public opinion bundler." Send email to carl at media.org or twitter @carlmalamud with the link.