Author Archives: Jamie Joyce

Democracy’s Library Leads a Workshop at International GovTech Conference

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Internet Archive Canada’s Executive Director, Andrea Mills, and Jamie Joyce from Internet Archive discuss unlocking gov docs using AI at FWD50 2023

FWD50 is an international govtech conference which, since 2017, has been bringing together global leaders working to innovate government from the inside and out. This year’s gathering in Ottawa featured Jennifer Pahlka (founder of Code for America), the Honourable Anita Anand (President of the Treasury Board for the Government of Canada), his Excellency Saeed Al Mulla (from the Department of Government Enablement in Abu Dhabi), and dozens more – including the Andrea Mills and Jamie Joyce from Internet Archive Canada and Internet Archive.

In their 90 minute workshop, Andrea and Jamie demonstrated the power of using AI not only to make each government document more accessible by improving metadata and the output of digitization efforts, but they also walked government officials through the possibilities of using AI to perform higher order government functions, like modeling deliberation, structuring policy, and creating more robust representations of constituent’s sentiments on policy issues.

“My humility and imagination about what AI can do tripled watching your presentation.”

– Workshop Attendee

Because the conference was occurring at the same time as OpenAI’s DevDay, the workshop also included an overview of OpenAI’s new offerings, including the new possibilities with GPT4 Turbo. By showing off these new capabilities, both those recently announced by OpenAI and capabilities currently deployed at the Internet Archive and Internet Archive Canada, Andrea and Jamie invited participants to think big about how AI can transform their work in government.

By the end of the workshop, attendees wrote out descriptions of their daily professional work, detailed how they currently use AI, identified their pain points, and dreamt up new services they want to exist to make their work more efficient and impactful.

Andrea and Jamie brought these learnings back from the conference, hoping to inform potential services that Democracy’s Library, and its partners, may be able to provide to help bring democracy more so into the digital age.

We thank FWD50 for the invitation to present and participate in this fabulous event! It’s truly an honor to be among so many passionate and incredible innovators and public servants.

Celebrating 1 Petabyte on the Filecoin Network!

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The Internet Archive is pleased to announce, through support from the Filecoin Foundation (FF) and Filecoin Foundation for the Decentralized Web (FFDW), that one petabyte of material has now been uploaded to the Filecoin network. Among the collections uploaded are the “End of Term Crawl” collections. These collections are composed of U.S. government websites which are crawled at the end of presidential administrations, before the ephemeral media may be lost to administrative turnover. 

We are so grateful for the support we have received from the Filecoin Foundation (FF) and Filecoin Foundation for the Decentralized Web (FFDW) to make this work possible, and are enthusiastic about continuing this collaboration to ensure the ongoing accessibility of critical information like government materials. 

To read more about this milestone, please visit the Filecoin Foundation’s announcement here.
About the Filecoin Network: Filecoin is an open-source cloud storage marketplace, protocol, and incentive layer with a mission to store humanity’s most important information.

The Power of Preservation: How the Internet Archive Empowers Digital Investigations and Research

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A part of a series: The Internet Archive as Research Library

Written by Caralee Adams

When gathering evidence for a court case or researching human rights violations, Lili Siri Spira often found that the material she needed was preserved by the Internet Archive.

Spira is the Social Media and Campaign Marketing Manager for TechEquity Collaborative, as well as the co-manager of RatedResilient.com, a platform that promotes psycho-social resilience for digital activists. She has interned at the Center for Justice & Accountability and was an open-source investigator at the Human Rights Center at UC Berkeley during college.

In Spira’s work, the Wayback Machine has played an integral role in providing stamped artifacts and metadata.

For example, when researching the Bolivian coup in 2019, she wanted to learn more about the sentiment of indigenous people toward political leadership. Spira used the Wayback Machine to examine how indigenous Bolivian websites had changed since 2009. She discovered after initial criticism, some websites seemed to have disappeared.

“The great thing about the Internet Archive is that it really protects the chain of custody,” Spira said. “It’s not only that you look back, but you can even find a website now and capture it in time with the metadata.”

In 2020, The Berkeley Protocol on Digital Open Source Violations provided global guidelines for using public digital information as evidence in international criminal and human rights investigations. Spira said this allows preserved website data to be used in court proceedings to hold parties accountable.

On other occasions, Spira has investigated companies suspected of unethical practices. Sometimes executives openly admitted to certain behaviors, only to later deny their action. Companies may attempt to erase past communication, but Spira said she can uncover the previous versions of websites through the Wayback Machine.

“Our knowledge is not being held sacred by many people in this country and around the world,” Spira said. “It’s incredibly important for research work in any field to have access to preserved [digital] information—especially when that research is making certain allegations against powerful entities and corporations.”

We thank Lili and her colleagues for sharing their story for how they use the Internet Archive’s collections in their work.

The International Democracy’s Library Team Came Together for Presentations, Discussion, and a Workshop About Gov Docs (3.16.23)

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Let’s Build It Together!

Video: https://archive.org/details/full-democracys-library-3.16.23-presentation

On March 16, 2023, the Internet Archive hosted the “Democracy’s Library Workshop: Community Collaboration.” This event marked the first public presentation and discussion of the Democracy’s Library Project since its inauguration at the 2022 Annual Event, following several months of research, supported by the Filecoin Foundation, from November 2022 to February 2023. The presentation, a collaboration between Internet Archive staff and a visiting government official, aims to preserve government information and make it much more meaningfully accessible to the public. The event was live-streamed and can be viewed at the provided video link.

Presentation includes:

  • Brewster Kahhale, founder of The Internet Archive, providing an introduction and discussing why we need to “Build Our Collections Together.”
  • Andrea Mills, Executive Director of Internet Archive Canada, discussing the incredible progress made in Canada working with their foundational partner, the University of Toronto, in digitizing government information. 
  • Jamie Joyce,  leading the Democracy’s Library initiative at Internet Archive in the U.S., reporting on the U.S. landscape analysis and stakeholder interviews.

To librarians and archivists: please know we are still collecting feedback from government information professionals. So if you are a librarian or archivist, we would love to hear from your experience. If you’re interested in sharing, please fill out this survey.

See existing Democracy’s Library here: https://archive.org/details/democracys-library 

Also, In Case You Missed Them…Recommendations and Strategic Plans from the GPO: 

Declaring Democracy’s Library (U.S.)

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A video presentation of findings, an executive summary, and more to come from the United States team.

Video: https://archive.org/details/jamie-joyces-democracys-library-presentation

After the declaration of Democracy’s Library at the 2022 Internet Archive Annual Event [video], the U.S. team underwent a 4-month landscape analysis to discover the state of the United States’ collective knowledge management. 

Over the course of this blog series we’ll discuss our findings, including the various ways in which our federated national infrastructure contributes to the immense complexity which inhibits easy and meaningful access to the public’s information. 

But for now, we would like to share our executive summary. This piece is informed from interviews with librarians, archivists, information professionals, after review of various pieces of legislation, government agency reports, as well as consultation with government representatives at various departments, technologists working on civic-tech and gov-tech applications, and users of government information.

A huge thanks again to all who were interviewed, involved, and are excited about this program.

EXECUTIVE SUMMARY OF THE DEMOCRACY LIBRARY (U.S.) REPORT

    Every year, the United States government spends billions of dollars generating data: including reports, research, records, and statistics. Both governments and corporations know that this data is a highly valuable strategic asset. Yet meaningful access to this critical data is effectively kept out of the public’s hands. Though much of it is intended to be publicly accessible, we do not have a publicly-accessible central repository where we can search for all government artifacts. We do not have a public library of all government data, documents, research, records, and publications. These artifacts are not easy for everyone to get a hold of.

    Instead, this data is organized only to be kept behind paywalls, vended to multinational corporations, guarded by “data cartels,” or sits inaccessibly among thousands of disjointed agency websites, with non-standardized archival systems that are stewarded by under-resourced librarians and archivists. This data is siloed within agencies, never before linked together. Although by law, we are entitled to this data – by default, journalists, activists, democracy technologists, academics, and the public are deprived of meaningful access. Instead, it’s a pay to play system in which many are priced out.

    However, if we could reduce the public burden in accessing this knowledge – as the federal government has stated is a priority – then it might be the lynchpin to transforming democratic systems and making them more efficient, actionable, and auditable in the future. This work could potentiate a big data renaissance in political science and public administration. It could equip every local journalist with comprehensive, ‘investigative access’ to policy-making across the country. It could even provide key insights which ensure that democracy survives, thrives, adapts, and evolves in the 21st century; like so many desperately want it to and yet so many fear that it may never. To make our democracy more resilient and prepared for the digital age, we need Democracy’s Library. 

Democracy’s Library is a 10 year, multi-pronged, partnership effort to collect, preserve, and link our democracy’s data in a centralized, queryable repository. This repository of data will be sourced from all levels of the U.S. government, for the purpose of informing innovation, enabling transparency, advancing new fields like mass political informatics, and overall, digitizing our democracy. Access to this data is a necessary substrate for that innovation, and to propel our antiquated system into a lightning fast future, we need to overcome challenges from the artifact-level to the systems-level. 

    Fortunately, the Internet Archive is perfectly primed to comprehensively take on these challenges alongside our partners (like the Filecoin Foundation) through this new initiative, supported by a groundswell of legislative and political support. The time is right, the network is primed, and most of the tools are already built and being deployed. So, the only thing that remains is for funding partners to step up to scale the effort to revolutionize the U.S. government once again.

To librarians and archivists: please know we are still collecting feedback from government information professionals. So if you are a librarian or archivist, we would love to hear from your experience. If you’re interested in sharing, please fill out this survey.

See existing Democracy’s Library here: https://archive.org/details/democracys-library