What if the government information and publications that interest you showed up in your RSS feed? Carl Malamud discusses with Techné his proposals for the Government Printing Office.

Much of the data and documentation the American government produces resides in the public sphere. On the federal, state and local levels, bills are written, laws are passed, court cases are decided, regulations and codes are promulgated.

The Government Printing Office (GPO) is the official publisher of the US government. Though all of this material is in the public domain and thus not copyright protected, it’s hardly clear how to access much of what the GPO, on the federal level, or other agencies, for that matter, publish. The public largely relies on the media to inform them about a given law’s passage or court case’s resolution—it’s not obvious how else someone would go about finding out about such things. But what if the government information and publications you were interested in could simply show up in your RSS feed?

Long a proponent of open access to what he calls the “operating system” of the US government—the laws, codes and court cases that regulate our lives in society—Carl Malamud has spent more than a decade working to make government documentation freely available online through his organization public.resource.org. He has recently turned his attention to the GPO and is “running” for the appointment of Public Printer, the head of the GPO and thus of the federal agency that produces a great deal of the same documentation he has previously fought for public access to.

Malamud was kind enough to recently take the time to discuss with Techné his proposals for the GPO—such as an RSS feed of the Official Journals of Government—and how the internet and technology are changing, or could change, the relations between a citizenry, its government and the information that passes between the two.

Techné: What led you to work towards the digitization and free availability of government records?  Why is this something that the average citizen should be concerned with?

Malamud: This comes out of my early work on the Internet, where open standards really make the difference.  You can see my version of that story in my book “Exploring the Internet”, or in a nice story the CJR did on me, which dwelt on that topic.

Techné: Okay, but having worked outside of the system to increase public access to government data, what has led you to seek employment within as the GPO’s ‘Public Printer’?

Malamud: My aim has always been policy change.  When I put the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission on-line, my goal was not to start the ultimate financial site, but instead to get the SEC to put itself on-line.

For the last two years, I have focused on making the primary legal materials of the federal government—what I call America’s Operating System—freely available. GPO publishes the Official Journals of Government, so if we really feel that we are a “nation of laws and not men” one looks to the official printer of the U.S. as the natural place for policy change.

Techné: Are the Official Journals of Government currently unavailable to the public courtesy of the GPO?

Malamud: They are available but in a very poor format.  By that, I mean you have two choices: One, pay $17k/year per product (e.g., “Congressional Record” is one product) for bulk access; or two, use an early-1990s vintage database system called WAIS that Brewster Kahle invented. That is all that the GPO has available. But there’s no easy way to simply “download it all” or “give me an RSS feed” so I get each daily edition.

Techné: It seems that many of your proposals for the GPO can be put together under the headings of ‘increasing transparency’ and ‘updating the system for the 21st century.’  A great deal of both of these will involve the use of the internet and other new media platforms.  How much printing do you envision as part of the GPO in the middle to long term?  Is the title of ‘Public Printer’ any longer an accurate one—or would Chief Information Officer be more fitting?

Malamud: Publisher would be better than CIO.  I’m a strong believe that there is a role, and will continue to be a role, for print.  You’ll note in some of my proposals I’ve suggested that moving towards the “high end” is a way to continue to maintain jobs at GPO, which has some of the best printers and craftsmen in the world.  Some things, such as “commodity printing” may go online or may get distributed, but remember that of the $1 billion in print business GPO does, about $800 million of that is already farmed out to private industry.

Techné: Even retaining print as part of the GPO, some of your proposals could be seen as somewhat radical. How closely does your vision of the office of Public Printer fit with the tradition of the GPO, and the printers such as Gus Geigengack that you cite as inspiration?

Malamud: My vision of GPO is, I believe, very different from that of the previous public printers.  But, I think August Giegengack, who ramped GPO up to meet the incredible demands of the war effort and pioneered new technology such as photography-based page composition, had a radically different vision of printing than his predecessors.  Likewise, Nicholas Spence II, the public printer under Nixon, computerized the typesetting of patents, again a radically different vision from those that came before him.

Techné: What are some particular areas where you think your tenure as the GPO’s Public Printer would radically change the Office’s direction?

Malamud: I think all my proposals would be a distinct change in direction or velocity.  For example, reliance on bulk data/APIs and then a web site for Official Journals, moving the GPO towards the high-end of publishing with the Library of the USA, and creation of the Academy would all be big changes.  And, you can bet their computer systems would get a scrubbing.

There’s also no transparency or visibility into the organization, which is not appropriate for a public service bureau. Part of the GPO’s mission is “Keeping America Informed” (the agency’s function under Title 44).

Techné: Often when the words ‘transparency’ and ‘open access’ come up, someone will cite security as an argument against such initiatives. How do you view this dialectic in relation to the GPO?

Malamud: Remember, almost everything GPO has is meant to be public. The point I’ve often made—such as in my letter to Judge Rosenthal of the Judicial Conference on 10.24.08—is that only when our court documents became public did we start to address a huge number of privacy issues that had been left to fester by private industry.  Indeed, companies such as LexisNexis view Social Security issues as a feature not a bug.  Too often, we say data should not be public for privacy reasons when what we really mean is the data is only available to those with money.

Techné: If, then, the majority of the information that the GPO holds are meant to be public, why aren’t they more readily available?  What has created the system whereby access to such material—such as court decisions—is controlled for the most part by private enterprises?

Malamud: It used to cost a lot of money to publish.  Selling paper by the page made sense 100 years ago.  Our judiciary sold a lot of that out from under us in a series of sweetheart deals which might have made a little sense in 1970 but started to really smell by 1985.  Once the big money got into play, it was hard to reverse.