Open-Government.us

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As I noted yesterday, happily, the Transition team announced over the weekend they have now adopted the most open Creative Commons license.

As that was unfolding, a group of open government colleagues and allies put our heads together to encourage the Transition team to take even more steps to open up the transition. Along with a number of some very distinguished colleagues in this field, Sunlight signed onto a letter outlining steps we believe they should take to foster free use of its content on the Internet. The signers include Larry Lessig who spearheaded the effort, Tim O’Reilly, senior people at Mozilla, and Wikipedia, MoveOn.org and American Solutions.  Ben Smith at Politico as more details. (Here’s a full list of the signatories.)

Here’s the web site that also includes a short PowerPoint narrated by Lessig explaining the recommendations.

In sum we have endorsed three principles:

1. No Legal Barrier to Sharing

2. No Technological Barrier to Sharing

3. Free competition

We’re excited at the prospect that the Obama team will continue to follow these principles once they occupy the White House after Inauguration Day. We think that this is all common sense,  good policy.