The two paragraphs were added by Congressman Mike Honda of California, one of our champions of the use of technology to further transparency and civic engagement. John Wonderlich of Sunlight Foundation, Rob Pierson in Honda’s office, and I collaborated on this over a long period of time. Honda got involved in 2007 asking the Library to look into this and then in 2008 getting the paragraphs added to the bill markup.

So here they are:

Congressional Technology Coordination.-The House of Representatives needs a strategic and coordinated plan that will prepare for the future technology needs of the institution. A 2006 report commissioned by the Chief Administrative Officer and the Committee on House Administration, entitled Strategic Technology Road Map for the Ten Year Vision of Technology in the House of Representatives, provided a suggested structure for Information Technology evaluation and decision making. The Chief Administrative Officer, the Clerk, and the Sergeant at Arms are asked to prepare a report by June 30, 2009 on their efforts or plans to develop House-wide data-sharing standards; implement standard legislative document formats; address the increasing resource challenges of Member offices; and identify disparate systems throughout the institution that prevent it from taking advantage of economies of scale. [page 2]

and

Public Access to Legislative Data. There is support for enhancing public access to legislative documents, bill status, summary information, and other legislative data through more direct methods such as bulk data downloads and other means of no-charge digital access to legislative databases. The Library of Congress, Congressional Research Service, and Government Printing Office and the appropriate entities of the House of Representatives are directed to prepare a report on the feasibility of providing advanced search capabilities. This report is to be provided to the Committees on Appropriations of the House and Senate within 120 days of the release of Legislative Information System 2.0. [page 11]

According to an article in Wired: “In our web 2.0 world, we can empower the public by providing them with raw data that they can remix and reuse in new and innovative ways,” says Honda, who is vice chairman of the Appropriations Subcommittee on the Legislative Branch. “With these tools, the public can collaborate on projects that can help legislators to create better policies to address the pressing challenges facing our nation.” There’s also a good article at Mother Jones and a nice post by Tim O’Reilly.

The concept of bulk data downloads hasn’t been missed by many parts of the government. The Census Bureau and the Federal Elections Commission, for instance, are fantastic at sharing with the public as much as they can. In the latter case it is electronic versions of campaign contribution filings, which is obviously very important for preventing corruption. But, there are significant gaps in other areas of the government where a little legislating is necessary. Here we’re talking about information on bills in congress going back around two decades, and the information going forward.

The Library of Congress has a database of this information but they don’t share it with the public. Sharing it would mean that creating sites like GovTrack — and the various other sites that use data from GovTrack including OpenCongress and MAPLight.org — would be a little easier, but also a little more accurate. Right now GovTrack goes through a roundabout process to reverse-engineer the same information we are seeking from this database. Basically, we already have the information by scraping it off of thomas.loc.gov — we’d just rather get it directly rather than the way it is assembled now. So because I go through so much trouble to reverse-engineer the data I want, not so many things will change in an obvious way on GovTrack — it’ll just be that my life will be a little easier and the information will be a little more complete and up to date. But, you can expect to see other sites spring up doing new and interesting things with the information — ways of visualizing the congressional process that we couldn’t yet imagine.

The Government Printing Office is mentioned because of how they make legislative documents like the text of bills available to the public. PDFs and text-only versions are made available for free already. No problem there. But they have other files that would be useful to sites like GovTrack which they sell at ridiculously high subscription prices. Those files would make comparisons of bill text easier to produce (although GovTrack already has this feature, again by essentially going about it the hard way). If you think about it from the perspective that some bills go through Congress so fast no one has time to read them through, being able to apply technology to the process is so important, like to detect changes in the text of bills between versions to make it easier for people to get through it. This is what GPO is preventing by selling some of its files, rather than providing them to the public for free (which it is essentially mandated to do for most documents — why they exempt certain documents is not known).

Now, it’s not that the Library doesn’t necessarily *want* to share its database. It’s just that sharing it wasn’t a part of their mandate from Congress and they don’t want to upset Congress by stepping out of their mandate. The omnibus bill is an indication from the House to the Library that this would be something supported by Congress. (My understanding is that the Library has been seeking permission from Congress to do some of these things, probably in response to a previous push for this, but the omnibus legislation has been in the works concurrently.)

http://assets.sunlightfoundation.com/pdf/eesa2008.pdf

and an embedded version:

http://issuu.com/johnwonderlich/docs/ayo08c04_xml515pm

Get your own – Open publication

Sunlight is working on getting a copy up on PublicMarkup.org as soon as possible.

His office also submitted a second paragraph which I’ll get to below.

Rob Pierson in Honda’s office writes on the OHP mail list:

I’ve mentioned on the list some of the steps my boss (Congressman Honda) has been taking, with counsel from many folks on this list, to guide Congressional policies on the path towards effectively leveraging technology to open up access to the public. There are actually quite a few other staffers who also follow this list, and we’ve certainly learned quite a bit from the conversations posted here, so I wanted to throw out a quick note of appreciation to everyone who has been contributing to the discussions.

With guidance from the conversations on this list (and the OHP report), Congressman Honda recently submitted the following sections into the House Legislative Branch Appropriations Report. The following (or possibly very similar versions) were included in the Leg Branch Subcommittee markup of the bill:

*Public Access to Legislative Data (as submitted)*

The Committee believes that the public should have improved access to legislative information through more advanced search capabilities such as those available through the Library of Congress’ Legislative
Information System. The Committee also supports enhancing public access to legislative documents, bill status, summary information, and other legislative data, through more direct methods such as bulk data downloads and other means of no-charge digital access to legislative databases. The Committee requests that the Library and Government Printing Office report on the progress towards these goals within 90 days of enactment of this Act.

Note that the GPO has also been stuck in there. More more on that, see this post.

The second paragraph that Honda’s office submitted John noted was parallel to the final chapter of our report, Coordinating Web Standards. (Hmm, I principally wrote that chapter too….)

*Congressional Technology Coordination (as submitted)*

The Committee recognizes the need for the House of Representatives to develop a strategic and coordinated plan that will prepare for the future technology needs of the institution. A 2006 report commissioned by the Chief Administrative Officer and the Committee on House Administration, entitled /Strategic Technology Road Map for the Ten Year Vision of Technology in the House of Representatives/ provided a suggested structure for an IT evaluation and decision-making process.
No later than 90 days after the enactment of this Act, the Committee requests that the Chief Administrative Officer, the Clerk, and the Sergeant at Arms report to the Committee of their efforts to develop House-wide data-sharing standards; implement standard legislative document formats; address the increasing resource challenges of Member offices; and identify disparate systems throughout the institution, which prevent it from taking advantage of economies of scale.

This is of course fantastic news for anyone that supports transparency, which is, well, everyone in their right mind, I think. So thanks to Congressman Honda for taking the initiative on this!

(Other links: last year’s leg branch appropriations blog post, my first or one of my first posts here about structured data)

Demand for online services, increased pressure on web services operations to enhance THOMAS, the World Digital Library (WDL), and the Legal Information Services (LIS) databases, and the need to develop new configurations and applications have severely strained technical assistance and infrastructure support provided by the Office of Strategic Initiatives (OSI) and Information Technology Services (ITS). Since 1995, THOMAS has provided free legislative information on the web. Our congressional and public constituencies have for several years been requesting upgrades to both THOMAS and LIS to enhance content and searchability. Again, the Library will attempt to use the prioritizing tools of the Strategic Plan to address these demands with existing resources. However, the IT and digital demands on the Library will need support from the Congress in fiscal 2010 to sustain the Library’s ability to provide services to the Congress and its constituents.

I’m glad to see IT and web service upgrades given priority, and hope funding is sufficiently rewarded to support the Library, especially in their capacity as stewards of public congressional information online.

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 that affects the prerogatives of the majority will probably be harder to enact than those that just involve basic implementation.

A host of other reforms involve Congress adjusting to evolving technological possibilities, and the expectations that come along with them. XML sets a new standard for content management, and data access expectations increase. People use the Internet as their primary source of information, and members and committees are expected to post more, more often.

Some reforms might require new appropriations, slightly changed authorizing language, and others might take a few hours of staff attention.

It’s probably important to keep in mind, though, that despite the different goals we have in mind for Congress (and public access to it), that Congress tends to adjust cautiously, but at the same time has a long rich history of enhancing its own abillity to process and publicize information, and that these adjustments are very much tied up in the political situations of the day. While partisan politics may make an easy target for constituents frustrated by policy results, it does provide an effective engine for incremental and dialectic progress, as our legislature was designed.

This bill, like most of the 12 others he has introduced this year, takes a classical conservative position, here trying to reduce government spending. The real point of the bill is expressed best in one of its findings clauses:

Whereas a rescissions bill, which would cut Federal spending, should be brought to the House floor at the beginning of every fiscal quarter to give Congress the opportunity to cut and cancel unnecessary, wasteful, and bloated government spending to eliminate the deficit;

But the interesting part for us is:

Whereas the process of cutting spending should be open to the public, by posting this spending cutting bill and its amendments on the Internet, so that Americans can exercise their right to contact their Members of Congress and make their views known

It has a variant of the 48-hours language from his other bill applied specifically to rescission bills.

I find the Statements of Administrative Policy to be particularly helpful, since the administration’s official policy positions on various legislative initiatives are all available as they’re available.

Now if bills as they’re reported out of committee and considered on the floor were to get assigned a URI and everyone used a standardized version of LOC’s Legislative Indexing Vocabulary, then these disparate data sets could all be more easily linked for centralized tracking.

Provided by Open CRS.

While the majority side of the Senate Appropriations committee did include a brief review of their bill (as did their House counterpart), I’d like to give my impressions of the appropriations from the perspective of an advocate for public access and transparency, using the Senate report as a guide. (The Republican websites don’t feature any press releases, which isn’t surprising, given the minority’s smaller staff and budget, comparative lack of clout in controlling committee functioning, and their opportunity to add dissenting views to the report, as I discovered in reading the House report.)

Reading the actual report yields much greater detail about how our federal government views its own functions and prioritizes. Committee reports are carefully structured documents, largely in response to the specific requirements of House Rule XIII, governing the explicit disclosure of legal wording, and the production and availability of reports. Aside from raw statistical details comparing spending to the President’s budget requests (which the Leg. Branch subcommittees managed to stay below), the reports also afford an intimate view into the priorities and inner functions of the government.

The Senate report contains a similar admonishment against legislative branch waste, explaining the creation of an Inspector General for the Office of the Architect of the Capitol. (p. 3, page numbers as numbered on the report).

The report similarly touts the passage of S.1, defending their spending power while asserting the benefits of transparency:

The Committee believes trongly that Congress should make the decisions on how to allocate the people’s money. In order to improve transparency and accountability in the process or approving earmarks (as defined in S. 1) in appropriations measures, each Committee report includes, for each earmark…[the Member's name, the location of the recipient, and the purpose for each earmark.] (p. 4)

The report lists budgets and priorities for offices throughout the Senate, including the Office of Captioning Services, as authorized by Public Law 101-163. I wonder if the likely public domain status of these captions could be leveraged to help provide a text stream to accompany internet based legislative video, to help with section 508 (accessibility) concerns for members posting videos of themselves on their websites?

Budgets for each Senatorial office are posted, ranging from about $2 million to about $4 million, depending on the size of the population of each state and the increased travel expenses associated with more distant states.

Each separate committee and administrative office has a detailed budget; within these estimates one can see that one year of utilities for the Capitol costs about $64.4 million.

The Library of Congress gets about $577 Million, and also gets castigated for apparent poor budgeting (p. 35)…

The Committee continues to be concerned with the Library’s budget development process… The Committee recognizes improvements in the Library’s strategic planning efforts, but believes a better job needs to be done of setting priorities, recognizing budgetary constraints, and linking the budget to performance-based metrics.

The LOC is an essential American institution, controlling and maintaining much of the information and knowledge that permits Congress to function. The Congressional Research Service also gets singled out:

It has come to the Committee’s attention that CRS has been holding annual management retreats at expensive off-site locations… The Committee is also concerned that the Congressional Research Service often acts as if it were an independent agency, separate from the Library of Congress. CRS is in fact part of the Library of Congress, and its policies and procedures should reflect this fact. (p. 39)

Many of the report’s admonishments suggest strange issues or struggles whose origin is unclear to the observer. For example, the restriction of public travel and occupancy of the LOC “to the sidewalks and other paved surfaces” is rescinded (p. 49). I can only imagine what resulted in that particular rules change.

The Office of Technology Assessment come up in the Senate report again as well…

The Committee recommends funding of $750,000 and four full-time equivalent employees to establish a permanent technology assessment function in the Government Accountability Office. The Committee has decided not to establish a separate entity to provide independent technology assessment for the legislative branch owing to budget constraints… (p. 42)

The report goes into further detail about their plans for a revisited OTA (which was disbanded in the Gingrich revolution. Background about the Open House Project and the OTA is available here.

The report also mentions the FDLP program under the Office of Superintendent of Documents, describing the distribution process of government documents. (p. 42)

The amount of detail in appropriations reports is staggering, and Congress does a great service to anyone looking to understand where the government’s money is spent in providing detailed appropriations reports in human readable (non-legal) language.

To that end, I’m going to be writing more about what I’ve been doing, and more about the current state of transparency reform in the House (and Senate, soon hopefully).

We’re also going to have a lot to say in the coming months about awareness online, and political and civic information.

To get everyone caught up on what’s been happening, I’m going to be writing a series of emails and blog posts on each section of our report, and then doing probably weekly updates on what new developments I’ve got to discuss.

Legislative Database:

Josh’s post on the OHP blog gives the best update about what we’re looking for and what already exists. I don’t really have much to add to what he wrote (in great detail) in that post, except that GovTrack continues to provide really compelling examples of how better implementation of structured data can lead to useful and creative combinations of data later. As more data streams gain a semantic component, through either RDF or some similar stopgap measure such as crowdsourcing (digg, wikis, etc), paid staff adding value (cf. Congressional Quarterly), or new alternatives such as daylife.com, structured data will become a minimum expectation.

The transition to XML has been happening in the house for quite some time, and will probably continue to do so, given all of the separate sets of data, and users, and the need to make any kind of IT transition VERY smoothly and VERY securely. When compared with the potential consequences private companies work under, I think it’s easier to understand why Congress lags behind the private sector in adopting new technology. Clear priorities, well thought out transitions, and funding immune to political manipulation will all be essential to a Congress which becomes more technologically capable, efficient, and transparent.

Preservation:

The other section I’d like to discuss today is preservation.

Concerns over preserving born-digital congressional documents come up constantly and in reference to all of the other sections of the report.

Some of the biggest potential for large improvement exists in this area, since we’re doing such an incomplete job of this type of archiving and preservation now. A good first step would be to fully fund the NDIIP program, as I wrote in reviewing the House Legislative Branch Appropriations report:

I’d also like to be able to more clearly articulate the way in which an empowered FDLP could help NARA, FDLP, or NDIIP to comprehensively back up web-based congressional documents. Further help fleshing that out would be appreciated.

I’ll be writing more in the next few days about a few other sections of the report.