Open Government Working Group

Tim O'Reilly of O'Reilly Media and Carl Malamud of Public.Resource.Org—with sponsorship from the Sunlight Foundation, Google, and Yahoo—will be hosting a meeting of 30 people interested in open government in Sebastopol, CA on December 7-8, 2007.

While the first meeting is invitation-only because of space and other logistical constraints, our hope is this meeting leads to a series of open activities in 2008 and beyond. With 3 sponsors, we are able to commit to a follow-on meeting in the spring, location, date, and agenda to be determined after we hear from the attendees at the first meeting.

Schedule and Agenda

December 7, 2007 (Friday)

• 8AM-10AM. Coffee and pastries will be available for early attendees and those wishing to get a jump on the day with small group activities.
• 10AM. Formal start of the 2-day event. Opening plenary session.
• Noon. Lunch will be served.
• 1PM-5PM. Group sessions.
• 5PM-6:30PM. Happy hour.
• 7PM (to be confirmed). Dinner at a nearby offsite restaurant.

December 8, 2007 (Saturday)

• 8AM-9AM. Coffee and pastries will be available.
• 9AM-12PM. Morning sessions.
• Noon. Lunch will be served.
• 1PM-3PM. Closing plenary session.

Topics and Goals

To give the group a common purpose, two group activities are proposed:

• Can the group devise a list of 10 principles of open government? As strawmen, we propose “a meeting isn't public if video from that meeting is not made available on the Internet” and “it is not proper for government to artificially restrict the supply of public information in order to create revenue opportunities for the government or for a limited oligarchy of large industrial players.” The hope is to be able to publish these principles and perhaps even get candidates in the upcoming U.S. elections to adopt them.
• Can we bring together people interested in planning and executing a set of citizen activist boot camps or work shops that would teach skills as how to get press credentials, how to rip video, how to monitor elections, how to open up local records, or how to run a database?

There will be small groups of attendees with common interests, and part of the 2-day meeting will be made available for work sessions. Possible topics include financial transparency, making case law available, and mirroring or harvesting local records or other databases. In the style of Foo, attendees will determine what these topics are.

Accomodations and Logistics

The meeting will be held at O'Reilly Media, 1005 Gravenstein Highway North, Sebastopol, California, 95472. Sebastopol is about an hour north of San Francisco, in the western part of Sonoma County. December is rainy season with moderate weather, evenings getting quite cool.

There are two hotels in Sebastopol, both of which have group rates for O'Reilly Media:

• Sebastopol Inn.
• Holiday Inn Express.

There are also a large number of motels in nearby Rohnert Park and in Santa Rosa. Please contact Carl if you have questions about accomodations.

We will be serving meals both days. If you have specific dietary requirements, please contact Carl.

Confirmed Attendees