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 has been mainly focused on getting some kind of RSS notification system set up for the House that could match with the Senate’s aggregated page, and ultimately result in a single aggregated spot where one could find all of the congressional committee hearings, updated as they’re scheduled.  This isn’t an easy task, with the primary issue being finding a balance between usefulness and ease of entering, which corresponds with the likelihood of implementation.  A good starting place may be to use the Committee on Oversight and Government Reform’s standard, which you can find halfway down the right hand side of their page.  Greg Palmer (of Waxman’s staff) has been working on setting up useful feeds, and has helpfully pointed out that the amount of effort that goes into entering data into the feeds relies heavily on the format that the data is currently stored in, which may vary from committee to committee.  Again, it seems that simplicity is necessary for incremental improvements.

Also, Ari Schwartz posted this morning on the Open House Project blog about adding an additional requirement for the submitted answers submitted after committee hearings to be posted online.  This would be a great addition to the requirement of transcripts being posted online for hearings, which will now presumably signed by President Bush.

Many of the things we’re looking for are continuing to advance ad hoc, as more committees fill out their web presence.  The Senate Foreign Relations Committee is now offering archived video of their hearings, although finding it isn’t obvious (click on the large text at the top of the page).  Carl Malamud is also collecting hi-res video from four different committees and depositing them online.

CRS Reports:

The CRS Reports section has seen the smallest amount of actual progress, although it seems to me that the reports have been in the news more often, and we’ve been pushing for reports to be used more often for reliable unbiased information, by posting CRS reports on Tuesdays that are relevant to the week’s news stories.  I’m also interested in identifying other sorts of incremental steps we could ask for, such as access to a subject list of CRS topics, or getting access to reports with the authors’ names redacted.  I really feel like public access is ultimately inevitable, especially when people process just how obnoxious it is that they’re for sale, through some unknown mechanism.  I could be wrong about this, but doesn’t it seem at least unseemly to provide access to government documents for profit?

I’ll have another update in soon, moving through the other sections of the report.