The New York Times has an interesting flash application that breaks down the text of yesterday’s Democratic debate (there was a debate? UPDATE: And it was in my own city??) by speaker and shows visually the distribution of who spoken when through the debate. I mention it here because it’s one of these data transformations [...]

Steve King, a Republican from Iowa, has introduced a new bill that has a clause specifically about Internet-based transparency. (We know King from his bill H.R. 170: Sunlight Act of 2007, parts of which I think were integrated into the passed ethics reform bill. One part that wasn’t integrated was a provision to have bills [...]

The following video is a TED talk by Nokia researcher Jan Chipchase, whose blog I read regularly. He discusses mobile phone research and design in a broader context of international culture. While he doesn’t explicitly discuss politics, the ideas he introduces about the rapid evolution in the ways in which we experience technology [...]

Here’s a visualization of voters reactions to politicians’ statements distributed across either time or geography.
This stuff is really compelling, and will just become more pervasive and easier to use as data processing becomes better standardized (and therefore easier to repurpose) and as political parties, legislatures, and businesses see that it is in their interest to [...]

I was just informed about a nice paper on transparency out of George Mason University by Jerry Brito. It cites the OHP report a few times and talks about CRP, MAPLight, WaPo’s votes database, GovTrack, etc. It’s a good read:
http://mercatus.org/Publications/pubID.4397/pub_detail.asp

I happened to check on the list of cosponsors to H. Res. 231: Amending the Rules of the House of Representatives to require all committees post record votes on their web sites within 48 hours of such votes — the number is growing. It now has 131 cosponsors, with 27 added in the last two [...]

For a few years now I’ve wanted to look into integrating committee actions into GovTrack. Along with full roll call votes, it would be nice to be able to see how committee members voted in committee on various issues. Finally I took a look at a report PDF from the House Armed Services committee on [...]

Here’s a CRS report on e-rulemaking, outlining legislation and implementation of e-rulemaking, especially as it relates to the relationship between the legislative and executive branch.
For a little more detail on the foundations of that relationship in terms of oversight, here are two recent CRS reports on Inspectors General, one about the offices’ history and statutory [...]

This post from information aesthetics has me thinking again about ontology, linguistics, and semantically derived hyperlinks. How else can you describe a system that effectively matches photos’ content in a maneuverable spatial context than a successfully implemented visual semantic web?
(this video is really amazing. follow the above link.)

Building on our earlier conversation, I’m wondering if anyone has further input about THOMAS or LIS in terms of either raw data access or prioritizing feature upgrades.
Here’s a roundup of where our conversations have stood on the issue:
The chapter of the Open House Project report on Legislative Data.
Congress should make available to the public a [...]