Having spent a handful of years toiling away in the House, I thought I had taken the full measure of how confusing Congress can be. But it was when I left the Hill that I began to really appreciate how the way Capitol Hill works can seem from the outside to be designed to, well, obfuscate — rather than to help us citizens engage with our legislature.
But we, the children of the Internet age, are in luck! The Internet is very good at the things that Congress is weak on. Capitol Hill produces tons and tons of fascinating and useful bits of information that get scattered to the winds; the Internet is great at aggregating knowledge. Political actors who share similar interests and goals don’t talk with one another; the Internet is at its best when helping people collaborate. Action in the House and the Senate is stymied by secret holds, misinformation, and incomplete understandings; the Internet has already proven itself to be great at shining sunlight onto the sausage-making process.
In the spirit of helping to kick off the Open House Project, here’s an idea
I’ve been mulling over: the possibility of developing a standard or platfrom
through which individual congressional offices can syndicate and share
information on their work. The way it is now, the office of each Senator
or Representative or Committee operates like a little kingdom. Each controls
the information that streams from it in its own particular way. Syndication
would let Democratic and Republican leadership offices use that info to
good effect — for example, by highlighting their caucus priorities or
just acting as a useful clearinghouse — while not really taking much
juice away from individual members.
And make those standards open, then stand back and watch what millions of engaged citizens do with all that terrific information.
Make a Suggestion
2 responses so far ↓
Rupert // Feb 12, 2007 at 9:09 am
What sorts of information are you suggesting that Members would be putting onto this tube?
Lots of MoCs already put out RSS feeds of their press releases, but reading them is typically about as exciting as watching a piece of coal become a diamond.
Nancy Scola // Feb 12, 2007 at 12:47 pm
Rupert, what I’m thinking of is a standard way for members to tag and bundle together information on their priorities and then pass it across, up, and out — to fellow members, to congressional leadership, and to the public.
What the heck am I talking about? With the giant caveat that these are very rough ideas, here’s an example that I hope might illustrate it. In the House, Henry Waxman has been doing oversight of Hurricane Katrina contracting since the storm. He’s written letters, introduced legislation, held hearings, and given interviews on it. But all those chunks of information are scattered online. If those chunks are on his website, some are under “letters,” some under “legislation,” some under “news,” and so on. I’d argue that that weakens the impact of all that work.
What’s more, moving over to the Senate side, Waxman’s work is very similar to say, Dick Durbin’s body of work on Iraq contracting. Then one level up, Waxman’s Katrina work is a building block in Speaker Pelosi’s “waste, fraud, and abuse” initiative.
The question is, in my mind, could all the good work of one member be tagged and bundled in a way that might be useful not only just for their office, but for their respective caucuses, and for the public looking to track what Congress does?
A big project, but maybe an end goal worth keeping in mind.
(Seems to me that one major problem with this idea is that “priorities” are necessarily partisan, and the goal here is to make changes that open up the whole Congress. Can a standard be developed that allows members to identify and tag priorities without getting involved in what those priorities are?)
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