I had the pleasure this morning of speaking at the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, for a panel on Innovative Advocacy (cohosted by Adfero).
While much of the discussion centered on best practices and ideas around (what seemed to me to be) more traditional advocacy, I tried to add some of my thoughts on what might make [...]

The following is an update of what I’ve been up to recently, in several different areas…
Transcript Pledge and Letter:
Even if the leadership in both parties make a priority of publicizing committee proceedings, the committee chairs in their variable discretion (as we called it in the report) still need to make it a sufficient priority for [...]

Google has been working with federal agencies to help them ensure that their data are accessible through search engines. Many government databases providing critical information or statistics have existed for much longer than the current standards for public Internet accessibility, so the disconnect between search engines and public databases is understandable.
There is a clear [...]

Rob suggested that the tag “openhouseproject” is well suited for community
tagging; no tags from other projects appear to be showing up there. Let’s
start using openhouseproject as a tag for relevant webpages.
Adopting a standardized tag would add another collaborative tier of
information to what we’re doing. Maintaining a collection of relevant links
accessible to the community [...]

Broad access to fundamental data leads to compelling analysis. Here’s a TED talk from Hans Rosling, where he gives a tour of the recent history of countries becoming industrialized, using visualizations built on data from the UN.

The history of representative democracy and government is waiting to be similarly told; here’s a broad collection of [...]

I’m writing this post to test out Adobe’s new PDF embedding and sharing service.

If this works, that should be a CRS report about legal privileges and restraints on the press.

Apparently there was another Democratic debate last night. Based on the transcript analysis by the New York Times and the latest Fox News/Opinion Dynamics poll numbers, I’ve run the numbers again. Last debate, as I blogged, I found that the amount of speaking time of each candidate was ridiculously closely correlated with their latest poll [...]

To encourage Congress to grant access to committee hearings, we’ve prepared this letter.
I’m hoping that we can demonstrate some enthusiasm for what happens in committee hearings, since they’re so essential to the legislative process, literally determining the content of our laws and the extent of Congress’s oversight. To that end, I’ve also prepared a brief [...]

(pasted in from the google group, which has been especially active…)
After returning earlier this week from a trip to London to meet with mysociety.org, I’m starting to catch up on everything we’ve been up to.
Whips and Structured Data: For one, I’ve reached out to leadership on both sides to hopefully start a discussion about [...]

On November 19, 2006, I inquired with the GPO regarding how they decided on charging the public $8,000 for documents they produce in their normal course of printing bills. These documents are not for the end-user, but would be useful for sites like GovTrack. The U.S. Code requires most GPO documents be sold to the [...]