One theme running through what we’re doing here, in my mind at least, is to blur the line between the explicit and the implicit, or, put differently, to make evident those things which were only implied. Effective data availability is certainly a case of this. Every time there is government information that is […]

The problem of authentication is basically this: how can we off-load the problem onto someone else that’s already doing authentication? I suggested last post charging credit cards using some credit card charging service that happens to verify billing addresses too (and, as Oxa pointed out in the comments, it’s fairly disenfranchising, although to be honest […]

I guess this is going to be a series of blog posts on this subject. For me, this is a lot of thinking out loud and trying to figure out whether there’s something in here for me to tackle (with my nonexistent spare time), so I appreciate the comments.
As commenters Oxa and Chris (in the […]

Oxa Koba asks in a comment to my last post what other forms of many-to-one communications types there are that would make sense for Congress, as additional forms of communication besides the individually sent letter. I don’t know what would make sense for Congress, but here are some things I had in mind.
The petition, which […]

One aspect of transparency that we didn’t touch on in our report was the ability of the public to contact Members of Congress. Yesterday the well-respected Congressional Management Foundation hosted a conference on Communicating with Congress, and some OHP regulars were in attendance (John Wonderlich, Rob Pierson, and Daniel Bennett were among the panelists — […]