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Writing for The Guardian, Michael Cross digs in to a report on British government IT that finds the folks across the pond are over-reliant on large contractors for their IT needs:

The central charge is that governments have "wasted an obscene amount of public money" by buying systems on too large a scale from too few suppliers. One headline-grabbing figure: the Cabinet Office spends £3,664 per desktop computer for every employee.

But what's really damning about the report is where it points the finger – at big IT. The MPs refer to "extremely serious allegations" about an "oligopoly" of giant suppliers who handle the vast majority of central government's IT. The allegations, of anti-competitive behaviour and collusion, were apparently made by smaller companies (SMEs) in a closed session of the inquiry held under the Chatham House rule. The committee calls on the government to commission "an independent, external investigation" into the alleged cartel.

Among the reasons for an over-reliance on big vendors, according to the report, is lock-in because government agencies refused to take the risk of migrating off of a legacy system or because of a lack of foresight in licensing intellectual property rights to systems developed on their behalf.

"As a result," according to the report, "the government may not have rights over systems it has paid for."

Last week, the city of Cleveland, Ohio made it illegal moved to make it illegal to organize "flash mobs" within city limits:

Cleveland Councilman Zack Reed wants a good crowd when George Clinton and Parliament Funkadelic perform July 30 in Luke Easter Park. What he doesn't want is a flash mob.

At Reed's urging, City Council voted Wednesday to outlaw use of Facebook and other social media to call together unruly crowds.

The Cleveland Plain Dealer's Thomas Ott reports that violations of the law will be a misdemeanor punishable by a $100 fine on the first offense, $250 on the second and $500 on the third.

There's a Footloose joke in here somewhere ...

Update: The local chapter of the ACLU notes the bill is still awaiting the mayor's signature, and, predictably, issued a statement in opposition:

Use of Facebook and other social media to summon unruly "flash mobs" would be a misdemeanor punishable by a $100 fine on the first offense. The charge would be in addition to disorderly conduct or other alleged offenses that could carry jail time.

ACLU of Ohio Legal Director James Hardiman said in the news release that the law is vague and violates the rights to freedom of speech because it does not define social media or explain what would make a post criminal. The law could end up punishing people who innocently promote events that are re-posted on social-media sites and turn rowdy.

"The law is unconstitutional, unworkable and a waste of resources," Hardiman said in the news release. "The city already has laws in place prohibiting acts of violence or disorderly conduct, and they should be enforced when appropriate."

While everyone is going nuts over an impending end to the United States' credit line, Sen. Joe Lieberman, independent of Connecticut, and Republican Senators Susan Collins and Tom Coburn, have introduced a bill that would require that reports to Congress that are mandated by statute to become public record:

“In the digital age, Congress should be sharing as much information as possible with our constituents through available information technologies, so taxpayers can judge for themselves how well their government is performing,” Lieberman said. “This bill represents one more step toward maximizing government accountability and transparency, as well as the participation and collaboration of taxpayers with their government.”

The bill calls for the creation of a Government Printing Office website that would publish all reports within 30 days of being submitted to Congress, according to a press release from Lieberman's office.

Of note: The bill text calls for reports to be published in an open format and to be machine readable.

• Spain | Spanish elections: is a Twitter interview enough to engage people?
  Earlier today Prime Minister Zapatero called early elections in Spain, which are now set for November 20th).
  The situation is troubled. The country is suffering from a huge crisis and the established power has been questioned by the Indignados movement, a youth-led and peaceful protest that spread in many cities in the past two months.
  How will politicians react?
  As Zapatero is not seeking reelections, the Socialist Party's candidate is Alfredo Pérez Rubalcaba. Rubalcaba is working to establish his online presence: he has profiles on Facebook,  Youtube, Flickr, Slideshare and Tuenti, a social network that is very popular in Spain).

  Rubalcaba has also a Twitter account, usually updated by his staff - Rubalcaba signs his own tweets with RbCb. The news is that he decided to use it as a way to be interviewed: on July 24th his followers were asked to send their questions via Twitter usign the hashtag #Rubalcabacontesta, and the PSOE candidate replied the next day. The account gain more than 1.300 followers and a thousand more during the week.
  It may sound innovative - though the first political Twitter-interview can be traced back to a year ago -  but is this the way to create engagement?

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Massachusetts state Rep. Dan Winslow.

Groupon economics (Grouponomics?) has come to campaign finance.

In June, Massachusetts state Rep. Dan Winslow sought approval for an effort to Grouponomize a campaign fund-raiser with a scheme that would allow at least 100 supporters to attend a $100-a-head event at a cost of $25 per person.

The Sun Chronicle of Attleboro, Mass. reports that the Republican of Norfolk is now going ahead with the plan for a Sept. 20 fund-raiser at Boston's Battery Park Bar & Lounge. Instead of Groupon, he'll be going through the similar-but-Massachusetts-based GoodTwo.com:

The freshmen state representative, who uses Facebook extensively to communicate with the public, said he is making a concerted effort to use social media outlets to attract young people to the political process.
"I believe it's important to involve people in civic life, and this is a way to engage young people," he said.

Winslow said he hopes that by drawing new people to politics, they will become supporters in the future.

"The real value is not just in fundraising, but in friend-raising," he said. "If they support me now with low-level donations, maybe they'll support me with a higher-level later in life."

Update: Turns out that Winslow retains Swift Current Strategies, the new media firm of Sen. Scott Brown campaign staffer Rob Willington.

"Someone once said that the best skiers in the world come from New England because they have to learn and practice on some of the worst conditions," Willington writes on the company blog. "I like to think that of the few Republicans we have in Massachusetts, they are pretty innovative and aggressive as well due to the tough conditions."

Source: Trendsmap

As Sen. Kent Konrad (D-N.D.) delivers a staid and very traditional speech on the Senate floor during remarks on the debt ceiling, the White House new media team is going another direction entirely — they have asked Americans to take to Twitter with the hashtag #compromise to urge their electeds to support a deal on the upper limit of the country's ability to borrow money.

Update, 4:46 p.m. Friday: President Barack Obama's campaign account, @Barackobama, has been posting the Twitter handles of every Republican member of Congress, by state, throughout the afternoon.

Tim Tagaris notes that he began the day with 9,396,253 followers. As of right now, @Barackobama now has 9,378,827 followers — meaning that the campaign account has actually lost over 17,000 followers so far. Oh, and that he's also giving his 9-million-plus followers a great chance to join the following of Republican members of Congress.

The aftermath of a bullet train crash in eastern China over the weekend is yet another example of the Chinese government's weakening grip on control of public access to information, shaken loose by scandal after scandal placed under the scrutinizing eye of Internet users, Reuters reports:

China's state-run media, initially ordered only to write positive stories and not question the official account, had by mid-week begun to ignore those directives and turn their invective on the Ministry of Railways. On Friday, Chinese newspapers continued to thunder against the ministry.

"Unless the Ministry of Railways abandons its arrogance, it will forever remain off the list of those the public trusts," said a commentary in the Southern Metropolitan Daily, a popular tabloid published in the southern province of Guangdong.

"Given that trust has already fallen to zero, it will be very difficult for people to believe that the railways apparatus can mend itself."

There are many other examples, both inside and outside of Chinese media, of anger at the government's handling of a crash that killed at least 40 people and injured nearly 200 more. Chinese Premier Wen Jiabao took days to visit the crash site; when he arrived, he told reporters that he had been delayed due to illness. Given that the government had recently gone so far as to block some search terms from search engines in order to banish to the Deep Web all discussion that might pertain to former president Jiang Zemin, who was rumored to be in ill health, this was met with suspicion: Why go so far to keep one party official's health out of the news only for another, not long after, to use his to make headlines?

The Telegraph chronicles rising suspicion of Wen's remarks. Here's their Malcolm Moore, filing from Shanghai:

Within hours, photographs of him in seemingly perfect health at various functions over the past week had been posted on the internet and Mr Wen was accused of being a liar. His tears at the sites of various disasters over the years had already earned him the mocking title of China's "Best Actor".

After scandals over melamine-contaminated milk in 2008 and the poor construction of schools that may have exacerbated the effects of a major earthquake in 2010 in Sichuan province, as well as a trickle of peccadilloes in small governments throughout the country, the Chinese government's ability to suppress negative stories has eroded, these reporters observe.

"What has changed over the past year," Moore writes, "is partly the growing inability of China's leaders to control free speech, both in the traditional media and over the internet."

At least, that's the idea; this has been the story after each of those past crises, yet the watershed moment in which Chinese media breaks free of close government control seems to have yet to arrive.

A new government entity responsible for ushering in a new era of transparency and accountability in federal spending will be conducting its meetings behind closed doors.

The White House announced in a press release today that the Government Accountability and Transparency Board, an entity summoned into being through executive order that is supposed to assume the Recovery Board's mantle of reducing government waste and increasing transparency, had held its first meeting. But the board isn't obliged to conduct its business in public, an administration spokesman wrote in an email.

"The meetings of the Government Accountability and Transparency Board are not required to be open to the public under the Government in the Sunshine Act," Recovery Accountability and Transparency Board communications director Edward Pound told me via email, citing chapter and verse of a U.S. Court of Appeals case to prove his point.

Guess that means no live-streamed meetings, either — not that anyone would watch.

Willed into existence