While you can make a good living poking fun at the Texas legislature (just ask the late, great Molly Ivins), apparently the great state of Texas can claim one serious distinction: According to a new survey of state government information online, released for the start of Sunshine Week, Texas is the only state to provide information in twenty key categories. Most states do provide online information on high-profile topics like campaign financing and school test scores. But only nine provide schools' building inspections and/or safety ratings, and only 13 share school bus inspection reports. And the patchwork of disclosure practices is full of contradictions and absurdities:

In November, I wrote that the new administration might call upon the tech community to help improve government, and that if they gave us the opportunity, we would have to make good on it. That opportunity is here.

Craig Newmark committed what he termed a "crime against nature" at last week's Government Web Managers Conference when responding to a web manager who asked if he could use the free section of Craigslist to advertise his agency's free government information and services.

As striking as it was that one of the very first acts of Barack Obama's presidency was to call for making the federal government far more transparent, participatory, and collaborative , open government advocates have waited eagerly and, ironically, mostly in the dark for some news on just how this new paradigm would emerge. In some ways, that wait is over.

1. Getting people online (broadband access, and lessons for people who don’t have the skills or interest)
2. Protecting people from bad things done using the Internet (terrorism, child abuse, fraud, hacking, intellectual property infringement)
3. Building websites for departments and agencies.

The government does all these things primarily because it believes that the Internet boosts the economy of the UK, and that IT can reduce the cost of public services whilst increasing their quality. Together, these outweigh the dangers, meaning it doesn’t get banned. Gordon Brown’s recent speech at Google, was an exemplar of this mainly economically driven celebration of the Internet’s virtues, telling audience members that your industry is driving the next stage of globalisation”.

The first challenge for the government is to understand that whilst these beliefs are true, they are only a minor part of the picture. Tellingly, Brown's speech contained almost no language that couldn’t have been used to explain the positive impact of electrification or shipping containers.

My favorite thing to complain about is government systems: how bad they are, how unnecessarily expensive major contractors are, and how everyday Web developers could do much better work for a much lower price. But it's so hard for those everyday people to get a foot in the door. Maybe if a group of them got together and bid on a project collectively...

Clay Johnson, the director of the Sunlight Foundation's Sunlight Labs, had this idea today: let's all put in a bid for the Recovery.gov job.

Yesterday, New York City Mayor Mike Bloomberg announced his "Connected City" initiative, rolling out a series of programs aimed at transforming how New Yorkers interact with and get services from city government. Building on his administration’s valuable 311 program, he promised to make government more accessible by translating city websites into six languages, distributing more information via Twitter (follow @311nyc) and social networking sites, enabling users to fine-tune their usage of NYC.gov around their personal information needs, and creating a free iPhone application allowing people to submit quality-of-life complaints to 311 directly from their phone.

As previously blogged, we are building an Open Declaration on Public Services 2.0 (http://eups20.wordpress.com), to be presented in Malmo at the EU ministerial conference.
We have now published the draft version of the declaration, which tries to summarize all the good ideas submitted in a short and readable text (http://eups20.wordpress.com/2009/10/06/draft-declaration-published-and-t...).

A survey released today by the American Customer Satisfaction Index (ACSI) shows that citizens' views of government websites are moving up to being on par with their opinions of private sector sites for the first time. Measuring 291,000 citizen responses to 104 federal agency websites, the E-Government Satisfaction Index reached 75.2 on a 100 point scale, vs. "e-retail" at 82 and "online news and information" at 74. (It should be noted that offline government came in at 68.9 on the scale.)

In the coming weeks, O'Reilly Media will publish Open Government, a collection of new essays on how technology can make DC more transparent and efficient. Today, O'Reilly released a sneak preview (PDF) of the book that features the first eight chapters. My chapter is included; its entire text is below.