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Carl Malamud

Carl Malamud is the founder and president of the nonprofit Public.Resource.Org. An activist archivist, he has become a public domain hero by making local, state and federal documents freely available online.

READING I just finished “Ashoka,” by Charles Allen, which is about these 50-foot-high inscribed stone pillars all over India. No one could read the things for centuries until in the 1800s a bunch of scholars deciphered them and figured out they were the legendary King Ashoka’s laws.

Right now I’m reading J. R. Sharma’s “Republics in Ancient India,” about the early assemblies from 1500 B.C.E. to around 500 B.C.E. It’s important to me to know the historical origins of access to legal materials. To find that out, you have to read history.

LISTENING When I was a weekly computer columnist for The Bangkok Post in the 1980s, I started following the reviews of Ung-Aang Talay, their music critic. He just turned me onto Alisa Weilerstein’s performance of the Elgar and Carter cello concertos.

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CreditPeter DaSilva for The New York Times

I’m also loving a new release “Blinking in the Brackens” from an Indiana duo called Return to Normal. And, as a former trumpet player, I’ve got to say I’m totally wearing out David Byrne and St. Vincent’s “Love This Giant.” They back the whole thing up with a brass section.

WATCHING I worked with some friends in Washington to copy 6,000 government videos and upload them to YouTube — look for Public.Resource.Org — and to the Internet Archive — look for FedFlix. So I watch a lot of old government videos. Boring? Not a chance! I’ve got a bulldozer safety flick called “Stay Calm and Stay in the Cab” that will knock your socks off. It’s had nearly 2.5 million views.

FOLLOWING BoingBoing is one of my favorite Web sites. It lets me stay in touch with the modern world even though I’m reading books about the birth of republican governments. And they covered the Aaron Swartz suicide really well. That hit me really hard because I worked with him so closely.

On Twitter I follow my peers in the world of making government better like @CodeForAmerica and a guy named Waldo Jaquith who is single-handedly taking care of putting Virginia online.

EATING I invented a killer recipe for durian cheesecake while living in Bangkok. It has a coconut biscuit crust and it was published in The Bangkok Post. It’s my claim to fame when I go to Bangkok. It’s like going to Italy and saying you invented a pasta.

Correction: 

The Download feature last Sunday misspelled the surname of an open-government technologist in Virginia. He is Waldo Jaquith, not Jacquith.

Kate Murphy is a journalist in Houston who writes frequently for The New York Times.

A version of this article appears in print on , on Page SR2 of the New York edition with the headline: Carl Malamud. Order Reprints | Today’s Paper | Subscribe

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