Weekly Round-up ~ Nov 22, 09 Edition

Every weekend, we recap our articles and round up other useful articles we read during the week on web design, development and Gov2.0. We hope you find them helpful. If you have article links you’d like to share, please post in the comment section.

ClearType☆Press

• Adobe and Open Government

  Adobe recently launched its Open Government initiative. As a tech giant, how can Adobe help government agencies to deliver their data to the general public?

From Elsewhere

• Obama Team Challenges Web Developers

  White House new media director Macon Phillips, deputy director Dave Cole, and creative director Nick Lo Bue announced plans to make WhiteHouse.gov more customizable and increase their usage of RDFa. Plus, the new media team is “working with the White House legal counsel to determine how to contribute that code back to the community” which means they would not only be using Open Source Software, but contributing to it.

  We covered their switch to Drupal and RDFa in our post Structured Meaning in HTML5. (via RDFa.info)

• Re-mapping the future for Ordnance Survey – making public data public

  UKPrime Minister Gordon Brown announced the Ordnance Survey, Great Britain’s national mapping agency, “will open up its data relating to electoral and local authority boundaries, postcode areas and mid scale mapping information.” He added “Today’s announcement responds to the demands for better use and access to data held by government. In this new world, smarter government is not an option but a necessity.”

• World Wide Web Foundation Launches Global Operations

  The W3C summarized the launch:

  World Wide Web Foundation was created with W3C’s support in September 2008, and focuses on advancing the Web as a medium that empowers people to make positive social and economic change. Web Foundation’s first two projects [...] are consistent with W3C’s own work to ensure that One Web is available to all, including work on mobile Web for social development, accessibility, and internationalization. W3C looks forward to collaborating with World Wide Web Foundation to further lower barriers to access and to promote the development of free and open Web standards.

• City of Fargo, North Dakota Must Have Accessible Web Sites under DOJ ADA Settlement

  “The US Department of Justice (DOJ) settled with the City of Fargo, North Dakota on November 16, 2009 under ADA Title II non-discrimination provisions. Among the various agreements, there is specifically a requirement ensuring that official City websites be accessible to persons with disabilities, including individuals who are blind or low vision.”

• Tim Berners-Lee on Government Data

  At the W3C Technical Plenary (TPAC) 2009, Tim Berners-Lee spoke to Anne van Kesteren, Lachlan Hunt and Marcos Caceres about his goal for governments to put their data on the web.

  (via Standards Suck)