As citizens of this vast country, it's nice that we can smite the spammers and illegal pyramid schemers that plague our great nation. And then I remember, this isn't ACTUALLY a country. It's a company. If it were really a nation, we would know where we're supposed to offer our comments pre-August 18th and each of the "Rights" would have been spelled out separately as amendments to a pre-existing document. In fact, by now all of this info should have arrived in our mailboxes as a poorly designed pamphlet full of cheesy stock photography.

While Facebook's "Open Governance" redraft is an admirable attempt to encourage crowd sourced decision-making, it lacks the feedback mechanism to make it a success. Critics will argue that this is intentional, but it feels more like the system (or lack thereof) was rushed to the public after the TOS uproar in February. While this amendment to the Facebook Bill of Rights is a fairly tame one, consider joining the Bill of Rights group for future updates and leaving a comment. At this rate, if Facebook acquires anymore companies or services, you might find your entire online identity living in one social networking landscape. It's not like the administration is going to change, let's just hope a loud majority can usher in a better system.

Photo credit: David Drexler

Sunlight downloaded a CSV list of prison populations in all 50 US states and created a map to visualize which states have the largest prisoner populations. Cross reference those numbers with the list of supporters who have singed on to the National Prison Commission Bill and what do you see? Surprise, surprise, not a single Senator from the three states with the biggest prison populations (California, Texas and Florida) are excited to see the the current criminal justice system studied and reformed.

That disinterest could be a matter of economics or satisfaction with the status quo. Or the aversion to studying the matter may represent a desire to avoid embarrassment. The explanation can't be drawn from the data, but it is good data to have. It's not data that Data.gov will help you get your hands on. That catalog of public data remains limited to some of the least controversial data sets online. Three weeks after it's launched, Data.gov keeps adding more and more data sets to its collection - but a search for the word "prison" still brings up zero results.

Take a country with the highest documented incarceration rate and total documented prison population in the world, where under-represented ethnic groups are incarcerated multiple times more than the dominate majority population. Isn't that the kind of situation where you'd like to know whether or not a politician supports just studying the matter? Who does and who doesn't? Easy access to government and public data can help shed important light on current events like this and that's why people get excited about calls to open data up to the public in better and better ways.