(from the ohp google group)
I’ve talked to probably 6 people on this list with ideas about publishing Congress’ “Dear Colleague” letters.
Dear Colleagues are letters sent between Members of Congress, often daily, often detailing legislation and asking for support or cosponsorship. The Committee on House Administration recently announced new plans to “allow for greater categorization and customization of electronic Dear Colleagues.”
CHA also notes that staff sometimes receive up to 70 of these letters per day, a rather astounding number.
My question is this:
Is there reason to either push for the publication of all Dear Colleague letters (or some subset of them)? What would be the ideal publishing method, and what might be a good incremental step toward that?
I expect that most members would welcome Dear Colleagues’ publication, since they’re written similarly to press releases, and are about getting attention.
On the technical side, I expect that an ideal situation would be for the House system to offer a “public” option for Dear Colleague distribution, where the default is public. In the meantime, cc-ing some predefined third party public ingestion email would probably work, with that email connecting to a database and a public facing index of dear colleagues, functioning on an opt-in basis.
Any reactions or ideas? I’m especially interested in any thoughts on why this would be a bad idea, since I can’t think of any.
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