U.S. government data is some of the most important open source information in the world. And, if you paid taxes in the U.S., you helped pay for this data. For his talk at OSCON last July, Carl Malamud explained a few hacks that provide the extra shove the government sometimes needs to make this information available. He’s since posted his slides and notes for his presentation. Hack #1 is “Be Media”:

Often, if you want to record audio or video or even just get in the door to some official function, you have to present your bona fides ahead of time. The trick to this hack is that they will always say no and you have to just keep asking until they realize you won’t go away.

I’ve long had an interest in Internet [and] Governance, so when I heard the United Nations was throwing a big party called WSIS on the topic, I figured I’d go see how the pros did it. I’m not really a journalist, but I’ve played one on the Internet, so I got O’Reilly & Associates to name me their international tech reporter and applied for credentials. O’Reilly didn’t make the cut as “bona fide media,” so I reapplied as a stringer for the second-largest English-language newspaper in Bangkok.

I made it to Tunisia and covered the summit. It was not a pretty picture, as I reported for the Bangkok Post. A few months later, I was invited to give a talk on 10 ways to hack government at O’Reilly’s OSCON conference, so I brought some footage of Tunisia with me to illustrate this hack, the moral of which was that they could easily have cancelled the whole summit and just given Nick the money to buy some laptops.

It’s too bad to see that O’Reilly didn’t qualify as bona fide media, but it’s inspiring to see such detailed hacks for aspiring citizen journalists and grass-roots activists. Here’s the whole list of hacks from Carl’s talk:

• Hack #1: Be Media (Internet Governance in Nutshell

• Hack #2: Get Standing (Somebody Stole the Attic)
• Hack #3: Be Government
• Hack #4: Adopt the FCC
• Hack #5: Enforce ODF by Proxy
• Hack #6: Audit the Feds
• Hack #7: Link Check the Feds (Link Check the Mayor)
• Hack #8: Annotate Hearings
• Hack #9: Hold Hearings
• Hack #10: Map Spectrum (Summation)

(Thanks, Gordon!)

UPDATE

Over on the O’Reilly Radar, Tim O’Reilly provides great synopses of each hack, as well as pointing to Carl’s summation:

The hacks all have a point, and that point is that government should be less about private interests and more about the public interest. The skills we use in the open source world are tools of civic engagement, tools of citizenship. And, if we apply those skills of engagement to our government, it is possible, at least sometimes, to drag the political system (kicking and screaming perhaps) towards the common good.