For this week, I’ve decided to look into CRS reports that will help us delve a little further into Congressional reform efforts, from a few different perspectives. This Open House Project post, referencing a Financial Times article, provides a nice highlight reel of state-based transparency reform. The Congressional Research Service product with direct relevance is available here, and is entitled State E-Government Strategies: Identifying Best Practices and Applications. (Well, I think it’s the most relevant to state based transparency, but I can’t really tell, since we don’t have access to a comprehensive index of CRS titles.)

To compare the situation in the states to the current situation in the House, this CRS report is excellent (RL31103). Anyone involved in IT issues in the House should read this report. (I wonder if there’s an updated version? It’s from7/25/02.) This report provides detail about the Legislative Information System (and distinguishes LIS from LIMS), describes the science committee’s tech upgrades, traces blackberrys’ use to 9/11, explains where the name “THOMAS” comes from, and much more.

For a description for how this type of reform has been enacted before, see Reorganization of the House of Representatives: Modern Reform Efforts. Understanding the greater movement toward effective communication and meaningful disclosure reform makes public access reform seem all the more inevitable. It also gives insight into the sort of concerns and challenges we’ll face in enacting them: questions of security and tradition will continue to need answers, just as they did when TV was introduced to first the House and then the Senate, just as it was each time the committee system was reworked to recalibrate the leadership structures within Congress.