Yesterday I attended a presentation by ACSI and ForeSee, offering federal agencies the results of the customer satisfaction surveys they use to measure “citizen-customer” relations.  Most of the others in the room were investigating the results of the surveys as they relate to the agencies they represent, since customer satisfaction surveys are a metric by […]

I’ve been on a mission, since November 14th, to find a digital copy of S.Pub 102-20, a reference document from 1990 giving a very comprehensive analysis of all public congressional information, from an archival perspective.  I’ve finally managed to digitize a copy (after some quality time at the scanner).  It is a large file.  (Click […]

I recently came across a mandate that the GAO perform periodic reviews of financial disclosure practices across the government, which appears to be unenforced and unimplemented.
My search started in the House rules from Ellen’s post last week pointing to this house rule, which leads from this search to this doc, from 1990. More clearly, […]

A little out of the scope of this blog, but I wrote previously about how the previous two democratic presidential debates were proportioning out speaking time to the candidates based roughly (if not entirely) on their poll numbers. In the 10/30 MSNBC debate, the correlation between speaking time and poll numbers was near perfect (a, […]

Following up on Ari’s post- At yesterday’s Senate HSGAC hearing, Senator Lieberman noted briefly:
Furthermore Senate votes, unlike House votes, are intentionally presented in a format that limits the public’s ability to examine Senators’ voting records.
I confirmed with HSGAC that Lieberman was indeed referring to making Senate votes available in XML format, like the House does. […]

I was fortunate to be a witness at an excellent hearing today on E-Government in front of the Senate Homeland Security and Government Affairs Committee.
Among other items of discussion, Chairman Joseph Lieberman (I-CT) introduced a resolution with Senator John McCain (R-AZ) and Senator Susan Collins (R-ME) to put CRS reports directly online […]

This weekend an Open Government Working Group conference was held in Sebastopol, CA. It was very useful and productive. I didn’t think that I contributed as much as I should have, personally, but in any case… Sunlight’s Micah Sifry has a good write-up, so I won’t repeat all of those details. (It was great to […]

From a response I just wrote to a comment on a Lessig blog post about dreaming up a US CTO position:
The OTA was recently reinstated, although in a different form, when Congress passed (and President Bush signed) the most recent legislative branch appropriations bill. I work for the Sunlight Foundation, and we helped push […]

Paul Blumenthal just came across this document from the GAO, transcribing a pithy speech by the Comptroller General of the United States, David Walker (the head of the GAO). Transparent Government and Access to Information: A Role for Supreme Audit Institutions provides a neat tour of the advantages of transparent public administration, from […]

I’m glad to have just found the archive of old Web sites from members of Congress, maintained by the Center for Legislative Archives under the National Archives and Records Administration (NARA).
The collection seems well organized and easy to peruse, with solid explanations of their methodology and disclaimers about what’s available based on the crawling.
My main […]