Another thought on NARA suspending its Web Harvesting of executive agency sites: (Whether this extends to legislative sites is unclear.)
Effective digital preservation is both distributed and centralized. The fact that agencies have backups of their sites isn’t a reason to abstain from keeping a centralized repository of public digital information.
NARA’s strategic [...]

Some things I’m thinking about after attending the House appropriations hearing on the GAO budget request:

Oversight is expensive, and enormously important.  GAO wants to fund a modest staff increase, from 3100 Full-Time-Equivalents (FTEs) to 3275.  They should get more than that; they’re already stretched to do the work their statutorily required to do (which [...]

Last night I attended an Obama campaign tech-policy panel discussion here at Penn. Unfortunately the consensus among me and my CITP friends who attended was that the event was almost completely uninformative on tech issues. One thing I did learn was that the Obama campaign is making use of some 1500 experts in the public [...]

Josh Ruihley, of Sunlight, and creator of OpenHearings.org, recently found an XML feed of committee schedules from the Senate. (via Twitter.) They’re advertising this fact via a link on this page.
On first examination, he reports that the data format looks solid, and should prove useful. In fact, Josh has already integrated the [...]

What should congressional committees’ Web sites look like in six months, or in five years?
The committee chapter of the Open House Project has a number of recommendations, which we’ve added to in the 11 months since the report’s release. I’d like to collect those in one place, and keep developing our recommendations for committee [...]

Where does the distinction between governmental and political come from?  The justification for the line between political appointee and career civil servants?  Campaign expenses and official expenditures?
Does this distinction follow the conclusion that money is speech, as necessary damage control?
Does the Internet replace the image based self promotion of the candidate with a new popular [...]

The first week of PublicMarkup.org’s launch has exceeded our expectations.
As I write this post, there are now 63 comments on our draft legislation, which you can now keep track of through an RSS feed. While many of the posts come from allies familiar to Sunlight, we’re delighted to find excellent, new ideas throughout [...]

Josh Tauberer, founder and creator of GovTrack.us (and Open House Project contributor), announced today that his site is now “officially totally open source.”  Josh’s broadened commitment to opening the code that runs his site is very exciting; GovTrack can now benefit from the same kind of public examination and participation that the site encourages [...]

Reading the CRS description of the Speech or Debate clause privilege (linked in the last entry) strikes me as a great example of why this privilege is so important.
A member’s office was raided, and a case goes to the courts to decide the boundaries of legislative independence. Members are interested, and need to know [...]

GovExec.com recently published an update (worth reading in full) on Senator Lieberman’s Congressional Research Service bill, S.Res. 401. The bill has been referred to the Senate Rules Committee for consideration, where a compromise is seemingly being negotiated:
Senate Rules Committee Chairwoman Dianne Feinstein, D-Calif., who has jurisdiction over the matter, is pushing a more [...]