I’m writing to give a general update on the status of our recommendations, and to give some other various updates. The impact of this project has always been, to some degree, contingent on the clout generated by the distributed expertise of its participants. This list and project will retain their unique productive appeal insofar as open interaction is privileged over communications silos. It’s difficult to keep conversations from spinning off into small non-public sub-threads, especially since so many people on this list have been reticent to dive into the conversation, given their political or organizational affiliations, or the difficulty in keeping up with a large amount of traffic. I’d prefer that we err on the side of overdoing dialogue, especially when the constructive potential of public interaction is so great. (The bias toward disclosure needs to be balanced, of course, against creating a disincentive to interaction, which is a distinction I consider often, both in terms of congressional disclosure, and my own interactions.)

To that end, I’m going to be writing more about what I’ve been doing, and more about the current state of transparency reform in the House (and Senate, soon hopefully).

We’re also going to have a lot to say in the coming months about awareness online, and political and civic information.

To get everyone caught up on what’s been happening, I’m going to be writing a series of emails and blog posts on each section of our report, and then doing probably weekly updates on what new developments I’ve got to discuss.

Legislative Database:

Josh’s post on the OHP blog gives the best update about what we’re looking for and what already exists. I don’t really have much to add to what he wrote (in great detail) in that post, except that GovTrack continues to provide really compelling examples of how better implementation of structured data can lead to useful and creative combinations of data later. As more data streams gain a semantic component, through either RDF or some similar stopgap measure such as crowdsourcing (digg, wikis, etc), paid staff adding value (cf. Congressional Quarterly), or new alternatives such as daylife.com, structured data will become a minimum expectation.

The transition to XML has been happening in the house for quite some time, and will probably continue to do so, given all of the separate sets of data, and users, and the need to make any kind of IT transition VERY smoothly and VERY securely. When compared with the potential consequences private companies work under, I think it’s easier to understand why Congress lags behind the private sector in adopting new technology. Clear priorities, well thought out transitions, and funding immune to political manipulation will all be essential to a Congress which becomes more technologically capable, efficient, and transparent.

Preservation:

The other section I’d like to discuss today is preservation.

Concerns over preserving born-digital congressional documents come up constantly and in reference to all of the other sections of the report.

Some of the biggest potential for large improvement exists in this area, since we’re doing such an incomplete job of this type of archiving and preservation now. A good first step would be to fully fund the NDIIP program, as I wrote in reviewing the House Legislative Branch Appropriations report:

I’d also like to be able to more clearly articulate the way in which an empowered FDLP could help NARA, FDLP, or NDIIP to comprehensively back up web-based congressional documents. Further help fleshing that out would be appreciated.

I’ll be writing more in the next few days about a few other sections of the report.