CMF published an interim report Communicating with Congress: Recommendations for Improving the Democratic Dialogue . I had one of those “someone got it right” moments reading the report. Following what seemed to be tireless work by Daniel Bennett and Rob Pierson (Rep. Mike Honda’s office) and CMF staff going back a long time, and a [...]

Matthew Burton has written a spectacular essay on government service and citizen tech development, Why I Help “The Man”, and Why You Should Too, available here, and reprinted on techPresident here.
I’ve witnessed a great deal of enthusiasm for creating a community of practice and better coordination for citizen technology politicos/political web devepers.  I’ve been preparing [...]

A few months ago we had a conversation on the ohp google group about word count analysis and political information. In launching capitolwords.org, we’ve taken a big step toward creating simple presentations of complex political informaiton.  Capitol words takes advantage of LOUISdb.org’s presentation of Congressional Record information, and counts words to find the [...]

In case anyone would like an introduction to twitter to understand what all the fuss is about, Paul Blumenthal just came across this great video:
Twitter in Plain English from leelefever on Vimeo.

Via information aesthetics blog, the BBC has produced a visualization of the commentary they’ve received regarding their controversial discussion of the changing role of whites in Britain.  With a strong semantic or language processing component, reminiscent of a stamen design project, the comments are sortable by intensity of emotion, location, agreement level, and emotion group.
As [...]

After last week’s twitter debate / flamewar? between Reps. John Culberson and Tim Ryan, I’ve been amused by some of the reactions I’ve seen, as a fairly recently converted twitter user.
I should first point out that when twitter was suggested to me by Gab, of Sunlight, I offhandedly mocked it, signed up, and then didn’t [...]

I’ve been listening to a podcast version of the Federalist Papers, and I’m up to number 66. This sentence is a gem:
The truth is, that in all such cases it is essential to the freedom and to the necessary independence of the deliberations of the body, that the members of it should be exempt [...]

I was very lucky this week to have stumbled into the middle of an update being done to a page maintained by the U.S.’s GSA at webcontent.gov on best practices for making data available, for executive branch agencies. The site serves as a collection of best practices and uses OMB policies
as a starting point. I [...]

Today saw a House Committee on Homeland Security hearing on the “Improving Public Access to Documents Act of 2008.”
The committee site has testimony from, among others, Patrice McDermott of Openthegovernment.org, and Meredith Fuchs, of the National Security Archive, along with, fittingly enough, both streaming and live video from the hearing.
McDermott’s testimony starts off with a [...]

It looks like mysociety.org’s new experiment in harnessing public input to timestamp parliamentary video is off to an excellent start.
The project creates a simple input mechanism that connects transcripts to video footage, helping to fill out theyworkforyou.org’s data sets, and presumably add text searchable video to their already expansive offering of legislative information.
The idea of [...]