The committee rules, as they stand, contradict the new requirements of S1, specifically section 513, which requires public committee proceedings to be posted online within 21 days of the hearing.  I expect that other committees will have to deal with this issue, and the Finance Committee should be applauded for taking the provisions of S1 seriously, and recognizing that their rules will need to be updated to accommodate its requirements.

Committees, as they adapt to new expectations for online information access, should also recognize that these stipulations are only a (very necessary) first step.  Meaningfully access to committee proceedings is only possible through real-time disclosure and digital records management.  This would enable citizens to follow along with hearings that pertain to their interests or expertise as they happen, and also give members of Congress and their staff new tools to help them do their jobs more effectively.  (Multiple committee hearings, floor votes, interviews, staff meetings and who knows what all happen at the same time, the least we can do is make sure members of Congress can find out what happens in the meetings of the committees on which they serve.)

This disclosure, as outlined in the Open House Project report (committee section), must first be timely.  Committee staff have expressed real concerns about posting official transcripts in time, and one solution to that concern may be to post unofficial versions of transcripts first.  In any case, making public access a priority should enable best practices to quickly emerge, and I’m confident in the committees ability to post proceedings quickly.  Senator Salazar was confident of this fact as well, as he remarked when introducing the amendment to the Senate bill: “I should also add that the amendment will create no serious burden for the committtees”. (link)

OMBWatch also mentions in their note that multiple formats for proceedings are vastly preferred to the one-of-the-above approach that S1 requires.  Not only does this make it easier to watch, digest, quote, or share, but this also will make the committees more likely compliant with the section 508 accessibility standards, giving citizens, staff, and members with disabilities access to records of proceedings.  (Patrice McDermott of OpenTheGovernment.org has also vocally supported robust committee disclosure requirements.)

Finally, our discussion of implementing S1 has led us to realize that new standards for posting public information online lead inevitably to new challenges in digital records management and preservation.  If the committee Web sites become the go to source for committee related information (where before there was no digital source), then who becomes responsible for this digital history?  Committee documents become the property of the National Archives (specifically the Center for Legislative Archives) after each Congress.  As I observed in the previous discussion of this topic, it may end up being easier to get committee documents online than it will be to get them to stay there.  Ideally, I think committees should probably maintain jurisdiction over their documents, and have an easy procedure to link to an archive of previous committee procedures.

Kudos to the Finance Committee (and especially Senator Salazar) for getting the proceedings requirement introduced, and for following up more than year later.

I’m hoping that we can demonstrate some enthusiasm for what happens in committee hearings, since they’re so essential to the legislative process, literally determining the content of our laws and the extent of Congress’s oversight. To that end, I’ve also prepared a brief pledge via pledgebank, where one can pledge to look to committees for legislative information, but only if Congress will meet us halfway and provide access to its proceedings.

You can sign the pledge by visiting pledgebank, or you can also be a signatory to the letter by leaving a comment here.

After returning earlier this week from a trip to London to meet with mysociety.org, I’m starting to catch up on everything we’ve been up to.

Whips and Structured Data: For one, I’ve reached out to leadership on both sides to hopefully start a discussion about using whip publications as a resource for indexing votes to party positions for research purposes.  The parties have a clear interest in having their position be easily determined (even long after the fact), and structured data seems to be the best solution.

There are probably two levels of data coordination here: the first is to publish whip packs as RSS (which neither side is doing at the moment)–this makes the content accesible without needing to screenscrape.  Second, the party positions for each bill should be indexed to each bill.  I’m not sure whether there is a single format for this purpose (I suspect one of Josh Tauberer’s conventions may be the de facto standard?), but indexing would make the task of linking legislation back to the party line much easier.  (I should add that we’re lucky to have public whip notices at all, this information is unavailable in the UK.)  Here’s an illustration of someone trying to derive the party line by poster Democratic Luntz at daily kos (part of a labor-intensive series), which also ties into the usefullness of structured data in posting votes information.

Preservation: Next, I’ve been on a mission to research the Advisory Committee on the Records of Congress.  This group meets occasionally, and features membership like the Secretary of the Senate, the Clerk of the House, the House Archivist, and others.  This seems to me to be the best example of cross-departmental cooperation, which is reassuring given how important it is to access such fundamentally important information.

They frequently reference a document from 1992, written in participation with a community of archivists, on documenting Congress.  The document is S.Pub 102-20, which I’ve spent a great deal of time trying to access for the last few weeks.  Research librarians at the LOC first suggested that S.Pub wasn’t actually a class of document, and were later able to send me a detailed citation.  A visit to the LOC then led me on a search through the main reading room, the microform room, and then to a delayed visit to the law library.  Everyone was really helpful and knowledgable, I must say, but I do have to remark that I’m amused that a document about making congressional information public can be so difficult to find, even for the LOC.  Is cross departmental cooperation so unusual?

In any case, I’ve finally gotten to read S.Pub 102-20, and it’s really the holy grail of congressional information surveys, delivering 120 pages of detailed analysis and recommendations, remarking on the nascent internet and the state of documents availability for every aspect of Congress, a survey I wish I had had a year ago.  I’ll be scanning the document from microfilm over the next few weeks, and will post it whenever I’m able to.  (If anyone has access to it in a more accessible format, I’d be very grateful.)

This work fits in closely with the idea that information availability is more than an abstract idea about good government, but really a necessary condition for meaningful deliberation; the societal equivalent of an operational memory, whose function is impaired by a technology that develops before archiving practices can keep up.

I’ve got several more things to write about, but that’s probably more than enough for one email.  More soon.

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.

All of the cosponsors are Republican. Does anyone know why that would be? Do Members not bother to seek out support across the aisle, do Members not listen to Dear Colleague letters from across the aisle, or are the Democrats not interested in actual transparency reform?

Not so for committee votes. Reminiscent of the type-print-scan-print-mail-scan-print-type financial disclosure methods in the Senate, committee votes were included in this PDF as an image. That is, the vote was typed up, and then probably printed, scanned, and then imported as an image in the final report. Because it is an image, and not text, it is infeasible to extract this information automatically.

I’ll give the committee the benefit of the doubt that this just happens to be the way they’ve always done it, and change is tough.

But come on. This isn’t transparency.

A map with spending information overlay on a district map is a great start. Since this information was put into a google map (whose functionality has been recently upgraded), the data gets automatically translated into an available “kml” file. (see the upper right portion of the above screenshot.)

This kml file lets you open the information in Google Earth, which really turns things up considerably, especially given how easy it is to enter this kind of information into Google maps. Here’s the whole district (note the finger lakes in the foreground):

Here’s a view across the top of the district:

And this is a view from over lake Erie looking towards Buffalo, NY:

As information sources build on each other, will politically desirable information be something integrated and expected, like traffic signs? Or maybe annoyingly present and self promotional, like consumer product packaging? Who knows. At a minimum though, government’s relevance will become more obvious, and verification will be an easier task, more likely to function as the basis for measured debate and reasonable discourse.

Since we’re already at the point of being able to produce detailed maps with customized content, viewable from any angle, or 35 miles in the air, or hovering over lake michigan, (or even flying in an f-16 flight simulator)–we must be taking some steps in that direction.

My basic point was that members of Congress have certain privileges granted by the Constitution, giving them freedom from legal action relating to their legislative duties. Congress members aren’t above the law, so only legislative acts qualify as being immune from certain kinds of legal attention.

My question, after finding qualifying statements from some committees and from CRS, was the following: do lawmakers or their staff incur legal liabilities by posting information on their websites? Do they give up some immunity by (ostensibly) serving the public, in this case, and not doing something more obviously definable as a legislative act?

My question was answered by several different exchanges that I’ve had in the last few days. First, I was made aware of the Gravel (yes, that Gravel) Supreme Court case. Gravel read the Pentagon Papers into the Congressional Record, which resulted in legal action leading to the supreme court, which broadly interpreted the immunity of lawmakers. Apparently, legislative acts are immune under the Speech or Debate clause, and these protections apply also to aides or staff that are engaging in acts that the legislator would also engage in.

This case defines the bounds of the immunity granted under this clause of the first amendment as extending to staff as well as members of Congress.

Further detail, I’m told, is available to staff on the Hill, defining in more specific terms what staff can do and still maintain their protection under speech and debate.

First, Minority Leader John Boehner has a twitter badge up on his Republican Leader website. This allows him to post status updates on his whereabouts to a very specific degree. While it appears to only have been updated once (in reference to the House vote counting dustup), he should be applauded for engaging with technology that has such immense potential for facilitating public disclosure. (The only other search results for “site:www.house.gov twitter” are for George Miller and the Republican Study Committee.)
Second, via Speaker Pelosi’s blog The Gavel, Rep. George Miller (Chair of the Committee on Education and Labor) has posted a map of workplace deaths in the US, apparently mapping ten percent of workplace deaths from 2007. As google maps and other mashups get easier to manipulate and embed, we should expect to see this sort of data presentation crop up more often.

Imagine if all federal agencies had APIs that encouraged this sort of creative statistical presentation, and all members of Congress had the staff and desire to start making more of what they do meaningfully public.