I’m a huge fan of a good “About” page. When searching government agencies for jurisdiction, responsibility, or statutory basis, I’m always pleased to find a well-developed page defining an agency (or any other website, for that matter.)
About tabs are the Internet’s name-tags.
Details like function, staff, and history are always useful, and bonus points go […]

in a victory for Internet crowdsourcing, OpenCRS was able to get all of the first list fugitive documents from the list of new reports that we were given by an anonymous Member of Congress last month.
However, this is going to be a constant struggle until Congress posts CRS reports directly. We already have a […]

Two particularly relevant new CRS reports this week:
First, a report summarizing lobbying reform measures:
Significant changes were made by Congress to the current lobbying laws, and to internal House and Senate rules on ethics and procedures, by the passage of S. 1, 110th Congress, and the adoption of H.Res. 6, 110th Congress. In the face of […]

Here’s a great video of Carl Malamud speaking at a Google Talk about freeing government information through his unique combination of technological acumen and activist ambush:

The National Archives and Records Administration (NARA) is seeking public input into their draft plan for digitizing their content. This plan builds on their 10 year strategic vision, published last year, and lays out their goals for moving more of their physical materials into a publicly available digital format.
I found Appendix A particularly interesting […]

The Office of Management and Budget offers tons of information publicly, and does a great job of archiving and indexing pdfs relating to their reports, budgets, and testimony.
I find the Statements of Administrative Policy to be particularly helpful, since the administration’s official policy positions on various legislative initiatives are all available as they’re available.
Now if […]

Parliamentary procedure in the House and Senate is difficult to understand. I’ve been looking for a good intermediate level procedural reference, maybe something between the books summarizing Congress, but not quite to the level of an encyclopedic reference of procedural precedents.
One good source is the Library of Congress’s How Our Laws Are Made, […]

At the end of the 109th Congress I wrote a couple of blog posts (1, 2) showing how congressional committees failed to post transcripts and audio or video files of their hearings on their Web sites. After a careful review of the committees at the time it turned out that […]

Last night I read the entire CRS report that I posted yesterday, Congress and the Internet: Highlights. There were several things about that report that got me excited, including a beautifully rendered history of Congress adapting to new technology. I’ll write more about that in a bit, since the detail that most caught […]

This Tuesday I’m looking at two CRS reports about Congress, Information Technology, and the Internet.
First is a new report called Congress and the Internet: Highlights, which is a great overview of technology in Congress, and also of a sort of administrative view of technological transformation and its likely effects on policy. It ends with […]