Even though that video centers on intellectual property issues, Lessig talks about how his focus came to shift away from hoping Congress would pass rational policy. He remarks that the "economies of influence" that dictate congressional policy are fundamentally corrupt, as a system. That made me reflect that Sunlight’s mission is, [...]
Entries from November 2007
Two Internet Cultural Shift Videos
November 7th, 2007 · 1 Comment
Tags: Congress · OpenHouse · Structured Data · TED · corruption · intellectual property · lessig · web 2.0
Senate Voting Records: Use XML
November 5th, 2007 · 1 Comment
(This is written in the style of a letter to the Senate… because hopefully it will turn into just that. Comments on its persuasiveness are welcome.)
Summary: The Senate’s current position on publishing voting records online is analogous to a reference library that has no copy machine. I explain below why the Senate website should publish [...]
Tags: Congress · OpenHouse · Structured Data · data visualization · government websites · web 2.0
Transcript Analysis; Delicious Links
November 4th, 2007 · 4 Comments
One theme running through what we’re doing here, in my mind at least, is to blur the line between the explicit and the implicit, or, put differently, to make evident those things which were only implied. Effective data availability is certainly a case of this. Every time there is government information that is [...]
Tags: Congress · OpenHouse · communication · data visualization · government websites · transcripts
Reform Taxonomy?
November 3rd, 2007 · No Comments
Josh’s recent post, and general attentiveness to newly introduced legislation, has me thinking about the different kinds of reform that might result in increased transparency.
It seems to me that it’s worth looking into how a lot of transparency reform and process reform tend to be favored perenially by the political minority. Any transparency reform [...]
Tags: Congress · House of Representatives · OpenHouse · appropriations · committees
The cynical take on the debate speaking times
November 2nd, 2007 · No Comments
I can’t help but take this a step further. Last post I noted that in Tuesday’s MSNBC Democratic presidential debate, the amount of time spoken by each candidate was correlated ridiculously well with their latest poll numbers, to the extent that it is impossible to believe this was not planned. I don’t know who planned [...]
Tags: OpenHouse
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