It's Tax Day. Do you know where your taxes are?

The White House has developed a cool little widget that will let you calculate how much of your tax dollars go to different programs. They call it your Federal Taxpayer Receipt. Visit here and enter the amounts you paid for your federal income tax, your Social Security taxes and your Medicare taxes, and it will calculate for you all kinds of different categories of expenditures. You can see, even without adding in the dollar amounts, the percentages of expenditures.

They let you expand certain categories. So, the 26.3% of your Income Tax that goes to National Defense can be expanded to show you that 6% goes to military personnel, while 10.5% goes to "ongoing operations, equipment and supplies." That means the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq and now the no-fly zone over Libya, plus the ship-aid we are supplying in Japan. Attsa lotta dough! You can hover your mouse cursor over the various lines and an explanation bubble will pop up over the line. Some explanations are more explanatory than others.

On this day when taxes are due, what better way to avoid doing your taxes than playing around to see what happens to the money you ought to be calculating?

E-government Portal!

Tip of the OOTJ hat to BeSpacific:

UK Guardian Launches World Government Data Gateway
"Search the world’s government data here

. Governments around the globe are opening up their data vaults – allowing you to check out, visualise and analyse the numbers for yourself. This is the Guardian’s gateway to that information. Search for government data here from the UK

, USA

, Australia

and New Zealand

- and look out for new countries as we add them. Read more on the Datablog

."
Topic(s): E-Government

Law.Gov and PublicResource.org: Alternative Gov Docs?

Carl Malamud is posting at PublicResource.org/Law.gov, what he calls "America's Operating System, Open Source." He hopes to garner support, both legislative and monetary, for authenticating and hosting a centralized registry and repository for all primary legal materials. He makes it clear that he is aiming for judicial, legislative and executive branch materials that constitute primary law. He is aiming for the federal level first, and to provide the "open source software building blocks that will allow states and municipalities to make their materials available as well." He specifically compares his vision to the new, federally produced data.gov,

providing bulk data and feeds to commercial, non-commercial, and governmental organizations wishing to build web sites, operate legal information services, or otherwise use the raw materials of our democracy.

Anybody who cares to submit concurring opinions, dissenting opinions, appendices, specifications, or others materials to this report will be invited to do so. It is understood that on a subject as complex as the functioning of our system of justice and our system of legal education there will be many views, and our hope in this process is to stimulate a robust discussion and dialogue on how to move our legal system forward.

Can an effort of workshops, a report, and briefings spur real change in Washington, D.C.? We won't know if we don't try.

This is an opportunity for citizens to help change the way we distribute America's Operating System.

Co-conveners will assist by hosting workshops, symposiums, and other activities during Q1/2010 that will be used as input to the report process. Confirmed co-conveners presently include:

* Professor Pamela Samuelson, Berkeley Law, University of California
* John Podesta, Center for American Progress
* Professor Tim Wu, Columbia Law School
* The Legal Information Institute, Cornell Law School
* Professors James Boyle and Jennifer Jenkins, Duke Law
* Professors Lawrence Lessig and Jonathan Zittrain, Harvard Law School
* Professor Jessica Litman, University of Michigan Law School
* The Oyez Project, Northwestern University
* Tim O'Reilly, O'Reilly Media
* Professor Edward W. Felten, Princeton University
* Robert Crown Law Library, Stanford Law School
* Professor Terry Martin, University of Texas Law School
* Professor Jack M. Balkin, Yale Law School

They specifically reference the AALL "ground-breaking report and AALL National Summit on Authentic Legal Information in the Digital Age...." on the need for authentication of legal information online. Malamud proposes using law students to systematically compare the online versions to print materials for authentication purposes, during the start-up phase. Apparently the students would be unpaid, since Malamud states that the students would gain "reputation points in the registry to demonstrate their public service" when they apply for clerkships or jobs. Malamud has a strict timetable and goals:

It is our goal to deliver, by mid-2010, a detailed report to policy makers in Washington, D.C., including at a minimum:

* Detailed technical specifications for markup, authentication, bulk access, and other aspects of a distributed registry.
* A bill of lading defining which materials should be made available on the system.
* A detailed business plan and budget for the organization in the government running the new system.
* Sample enabling legislation.
* An economic impact statement detailing the effect on federal spending and economic activity.
* Procedures for auditing materials on the system to ensure authenticity.

The original site has links to interesting documents and materials dating from September. More recently, our colleague, Rich Leiter, has taken up the cause in a post at his blog, Life of Books, and Malamud's post at the blog O'Reilly Radar.