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?)

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.