Just a quick post to point out that I just found a Congressional Research Service Report on the Legislative Branch Appropriations for Fiscal Year 2008.
Provided by Open CRS.

Via the Library of Congress blog, it looks like the LOC Website will be getting an upgrade in the coming weeks. They make a good point about choosing between providing RSS feeds and email updates, noting that many more people use email than RSS:
While only a fraction of people on the Web use RSS […]

Openness is one of the big buzzwords on this website and among the participants. Being able to access and share information about the government is perhaps Goal #1, and we use “open” as a broad term covering different aspects of our goals. The website Open Knowledge Definition (http://www.opendefinition.org/) attempts to make a clear definition of […]

Today I’d like to post the two main documents with the Congressional Research Service’s explanation of their policy regarding public distribution of their documents. First is the memo from January 1998.
Page 7 has one of the better arguments, explaining how public dissemination would render CRS no longer exempt to being required to go to […]

I find it hard to stay away from compelling data visualization. That’s probably a big part of why I’m passionate about government information. The connection isn’t entirely clear to me, but it goes something like this: digital analysis of information illuminates subtle connections and trends that would have gone otherwise unnoticed. New […]

The Senate Legislative Branch Appropriations Bill (reported out of committee on June 21st) provides a revealing look into the priorities that Congress sets in funding its own operations. The House and Senate pass separate appropriations bills; this page on THOMAS organizes the appropriations bills for each fiscal year in a remarkably useful manner.
While the […]

“Buy it, use it, break it, fix it, Trash it, change it, melt - upgrade it.” If only fixing and changing the technological infrastructure of Congress would be as simple as Daft Punk would have us believe. At the beginning of the month Republicans were up in arms over a seemingly nefarious move by Democrats […]

Continuing my earlier update on lobbying for public access reform efforts in the House…
Committee Information:
Pushing for more robust disclosure of committee information in the House through committee websites provides great room for improvement, since this set of recommendations covers several different types of information, all presented to various degrees by the various committees.
Our energy […]

I just saw via O’Reilly that google released embeddable maps, and decided to take a little foray into attempting an embedded map mashup myself.
We made an entry a week or so ago for Gmail’s promotional video contest, featuring us throwing around an enlargement of the Gmail sign. Using Google’s intuitively designed tools, […]

One aspect of congressional Committee Web sites that seems to frustrate even members of staff is how long it can take to post the formal, written answers that witnesses submit following many hearings.
As anyone who has spent any time around Congress knows, lawmakers often ask witnesses at hearings to submit detailed written answers to complicated […]