When President Obama took office, I approached John Podesta and we sent an open letter to the President along similar grounds. I put the letter on a web site with the domain name YesWeScan.Org, a take on the President’s “Yes We Can” campaign slogan. The catchline of the letter was “if we can put a man on the moon, surely we can launch the Library of Congress into cyberspace.” Because John was my co-author, the administration gave us a nice reply from Archivist David Ferriero, but nothing came of the effort. I also tried valiantly to get the new Digital Public Library of America to interest itself in such a broad aspirational goal, but to no avail. It is my hope that India will take up the challenge and build a temple of knowledge for educating future generations.
3. Edicts of Government. A third effort, modernizing the official journals of government, seems to be gaining momentum, both within the government and with grassroots support in areas like the official gazettes. But this area will require considerable effort. The back issues of the gazettes must be rescued from behind their arcane technical interfaces. More importantly, going forward, the gazettes, laws, regulations, bylaws, and all the other edicts of government could be made much more broadly available, but only if the government actors charged with promulgating these materials see this as beneficial. We must educate them as we educate ourselves.
There are two efforts we can take to make edicts of government more broadly available. The first is strictly technical, mirroring all the gazettes from states and municipalities, perhaps even going beyond the current online files and scanning historical editions. The programming task to mirror the existing online gazettes is difficult, but with a little sustained effort can be achieved.
Another activity that might prove useful is to gather participants from government, law, and the technical world together for a conference or congress or other assemblage. There are perhaps some legislative changes needed to truly modernize a system of official journals and promulgation of the law, and there are no doubt some administrative and procedural changes that would be needed. Gathering together those in India who work with edicts of government and bringing in others with expertise, such as the folks that put together the UK system, might be enough to spark some concrete steps.
4. Hind Swaraj. A fourth area, documenting the amazing and rich history of Hind Swaraj, is a personal favorite of mine, and I take great delight in continuing to add to that collection. There are some issues even here. There are attempts to assert control over even the works of Mahatma Gandhi, through the use of technical limitations and copyright assertions. The entire record of the
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