The O’Reilly Gov 2.0 technologies group is offering a free 2 hour conference on March 11 that may be of interest to some CS-SIS members.  The conference is called “Gov 2.0 International: Global Innovation Meeting Local Challenges – The O’Reilly Gov 2.0 Online Conference”. According to the conference blurb, “Gov 2.0 is a worldwide revolution—from the United States to Australia and everywhere in between. Members of government are interacting with citizens via social media and open data efforts are spreading from city to city. At this Gov 2.0 Online Conference, you’ll hear about open government efforts in Canada, the United Kingdom, and Israel. The speakers will share stories and lessons learned, and answer your questions. Learn about some of the Gov 2.0 best practices that have helped effect important change in other countries, and discuss effective ways to use specific tools and processes in other settings.”

The free 2 hour online conference will be held on Thursday March 11 at 9 am Pacific time, 11 Central, 12 Eastern. Information and registration links are at http://en.oreilly.com/gov2-international.

A month ago, the Canadian Privacy Commissioner issued a report that found some Facebook practices violate the Personal Information Protection and Electronic Documents  Act (PIPEDA).  Today is the deadline for Facebook to respond to the report.

The Facebook investigation was prompted by a complaint filed by the the Canadian Internet Policy and Public Interest Clinic (CIPPIC)  at the University of Ottawa law school.  Several  main issues were raised in Privacy Commissioner’s report, the most glaring of which is the access to personal information on Facebook by some third-party applications. In order to download popular games and quizzes, Facebook users must consent to share all their personal information, except their contact details. These companies, totalling nearly one million, operate in 180 countries. Other serious problems include account deactivation and deletion, accounts of deceased users, and non-users’ personal information.

If Facebook’s final response is unsatisfactory, the Privacy Commissioner  has two weeks to take the California-based company to Federal Court in Ottawa to try and get a court order requiring it to change its business practices to comply with Canada’s  privacy law.

If the dispute goes to court it would be an international first for Facebook, which has grown to more than 200 million users since its launch in 2004.

There’s a very interesting article about social media on the (I am not making this up) Department of Defense website.  The article explains how Lt. Gen. William Caldwell IV discovered the power of social media when he was the the military’s top spokesman in Iraq. His experiences there made him recognize the military’s responsibility to keep the American public informed, and the importance of that understanding to ensure support for the mission. Now, as commander of the Army Combined Arms Center at Fort Leavenworth,  he is working to impress those concepts on future military leaders. The Center now has a blogger page and Caldwell  requires his students to blog as part of their curriculum at the center. He also  encourages them  to contribute to the center’s YouTube, Twitter and Facebook pages.  His goal, he said, is to help create a new generation of leaders who recognize the power of social media and help the Army change its cultural mindset so it’s able to embrace it.

Librarian and Digital-Scholarship founder Charles W. Bailey Jr. has compiled a Google Book Search bibliography , with selected  articles and other works  useful in understanding Google Book Search and the legal, library, and social issues associated with it.  Where possible, links are provided to works that are freely available on the Internet, including e-prints in disciplinary archives and institutional repositories.

The National Federation of the Blind and the American Council of the Blind have announced that they’ve filed a discrimination lawsuit against Arizona State University, claiming that the University’s Amazon Kindle DX Pilot Program discriminates against the blind. The NFB and ACB have also filed complaints with the Office for Civil Rights of the U.S. Department of Education and the Civil Rights Division of the U.S. Department of Justice, asking for investigations of the five other institutions of higher education that are part of the Kindle pilot project, which is intended to assess the role of electronic textbooks and reading devices in the classroom.  The other institutions in the pilot program are Case Western Reserve University, the Darden School of Business at the University of Virginia, Pace University, Princeton University, and Reed College.

Although the Kindle  features text-to-speech technology that can read textbooks aloud to blind students, the NFB and ACB say that  its menus are not accessible to the blind, making it impossible for a blind user to purchase books from Amazon’s Kindle store, select a book to read, activate the text-to-speech feature, or  use the advanced reading functions available on the Kindle DX.