If you’d like to get a flavor for the sort of impact that one (tenacious) citizen can have on making government data more transparent, check out this Google Tech Talk by one of my personal heroes, Carl Malamud. (I write about his exploits in my new paper on online transparency.) He talks about cajoling the ITU to put standards online, forcing the SEC to put its public information online, and his new project to live-stream and archive video of all congressional and agency hearings in Washington. He’s a real inspiration.
The Technology Liberation Front is the tech policy blog dedicated to keeping politicians' hands off the 'net and everything else related to technology.