U.S. statutory law is organized into 50 books, known as titles. Each title should contain only those laws that have to do with a discrete subject area. In addition, it should only contain general and permanent laws — excluding provisions that apply only for a limited time (e.g., an annual appropriations law) or to a small number of people (e.g., a private law). For example, Title 7 should only contain permanent laws having to do with agriculture. Title 28 should only concern the judiciary and judicial procedure.

However, the last time that all law was organized in this way (or “codified”) was in 1926. Since then, entirely new areas of law have emerged that weren’t part of the original structure. Those laws have been placed into the code wherever was convenient, without Congress necessarily considering where would make the most sense.

Over time, this has created a mess. Laws that are related to one another often are placed in completely different places. Occasionally, Congress enacts laws that contain technical errors. And, the passage of time and future legislation render certain provisions obsolete.

In response to these issues, the Office of Law Revision Counsel recodifies the laws: it reorganizes and rewords them. However, without legislative action, the office’s recodification does not have full legal force. In those instances, to see the actual text of the law, you have to look up the original bill passed by Congress and compare it against any additional laws that modify that original law.

Unless Congress enacts and the president signs the OLRC’s suggested revisions into law, the recodified text serves as a guide to how the law should be organized; it is prima facie (i.e., facial) evidence of what the law is. When Congress enacts the OLRC’s codification, it transforms the code into “positive law,” and repeals the statutes that originally created the laws. The only statutory law left is that newly-passed U.S. Code title.

As things currently stand, 24 titles have been revised and enacted into law. The other titles remain only prima facie evidence of the law.

The process of turning proposed codifications of the law into positive law can take a lot of time. After the OLRC proposes revisions to the code, it invites comments from federal agencies and non-governmental stakeholders in a process that can take more than a year. Currently, the OLRC has proposed six revisions to U.S. law, including the addition of four new titles to the code.

Congress, however, isn’t always so quick to act. For example, legislation to codify Title 41, concerning public contracts, was first introduced in the House of Representatives in May 2004. It has been reintroduced each subsequent Congress since then, and was finally passed by the House of Representatives on May 6, 2009. The ball is now in the Senate’s court.

The OLRC has been taking steps to update its services. It recently started a twitter feed, and it is interesting to watch as the OLRC announces where newly enacted legislation should be classified. In addition, OLRC recently updated its “popular name tool,” which allows users to find legislation by its popularly known name. Another useful resource from the office is its online search engine, which returns the most recently published version of the code plus a page containing any subsequent amendments or notes, and Public Law citation information. I can’t wait to see what other improvements the office will make to their web site.

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.)

Congressional Republicans recently released a high production value video on the FISA fight, which prompted a quick response video in return. Political positions and identities are crafted in slicker and more appealing ways, witnessed also in recent discussions of presidentials’ skill at creating a coherent brand. While self-promotion is somewhat essential to electoral success, political messaging, much like commercial advertising, is sculpted around the expectations of the viewer. Savvier voters require savvier messaging (the intentionally lo-fi notwithstanding).

Lucky for us, the same forces that are making it easier to create propoganda are granting us a new view of our civic world. I’m starting to collect political data visualizations more consciously, with an eye to what might be missing.

A quick search already uncovered this gem: a visualization of the words in former Attorney General Alberto Gonzales testimony. I love the added semantic context; the words can be rearranged and positioned within the sentences spoken, like a syntactic tag cloud.

Here’s a blog just about turning census data into KML files (which can be run within Google Maps). They have a great shot of all of the zip codes in Maine, arranged by color. (Census Data KML Visualization, aptly enough.)

Josh Tauberer’s GovTrack.us is full of ingeniously autogenerated mapping and visualizations, like his cartograms for each vote that make geography and representation equivalent, or the map of all congressional districts overlayed on a google map tile.

MySociety.org’s time travel maps allow users to define a point (near London), and then dynamically shade the map with travel time and property prices, which could be obviously valuable when home hunting. (If this is confusing, check it out… It’s easier to see than to explain.)

Good policy only comes from good information, which is only as helpful as it is comprehensible. That’s why I think we’re so drawn to new or novel data visualizations; we function as data visualizers all the time, and intuitively create schemas to help us navigate the world. Seeing facts and trends given new intuitive force through design and aesthetics is very pleasing.

Anyone have good congressional data visualizations?

Organizational realignments are often the reactionary responses to scandal (Credit Mobilier, Watergate), political struggle (the Cannon mutiny, Committee Chairs and civil rights), or changing technological expectations (1993 Committee on the Organization of Congress).

Congressional reform efforts are often contentious, political, and limited in participation, jurisdiction, and duration, which shouldn’t be a surprise, given the importance of legislatures’ independence generally.  Congress’s tendency to adapt in fits and spurts does lead to what can seem to be a shortsightedness, or deficit of attention (perhaps not a deficit, but a sporadic intermittent quality) which is filled in by the knowledge of long serving members and staff, legislative support agencies, lobbyists, and non-profits.  In short, the infrastructure of political knowledge and influence.  Some perennial challenges demand specialized knowledge and sustained attention, even if they require frequent legislative attention, as do the subjects of full committees or subcommittees.  For a full background on congressional advisory commissions, check out this CRS report, RS22725.

The Advisory Committee on the Records of Congress is one of these special congressional bodies, made up of political appointees, administrators, archivists, historians, and academic figures. They’re been meeting since 1991 to coordinate between the various agencies with a hand in the preservation of congressional records, under the authorization of Public Law 101-509.

Having grown out of a series of conferences, events, and speeches throughout the late seventies and eighties, the committee seems to have come of age just as the Internet was becoming congressionally relevant, making the commission an important counterpart to other agencies with technological jurisdiction, such as the Committee on House Administration, the Homeland Security and Government Affairs Committee, GPO, LOC, the CAO, Architect of the Capitol, or the Senate Rules Committee.  While their function is largely the advisory oversight and planning of Congress’s archival activities, the distinction between preserved archive and public database is only a matter of digitizating records and creating public access.  (“Only” may be an unfortunate phrase here, the National Archives and Records Administration’s yearly budget is in the hundreds of millions of dollars.)  While archiving may have been something that used to be directed at future generations or researchers, the Internet is transforming the struggles for effective archiving into the struggle for meaningful public access.  Among other things, an archive is the physical aspect of what should also be a public database.

This public database is being built.  The National Archives is building the Electronic Records Archives as discussed in today’s meeting by the Director of the Center for Legislative Archives, Richard Hunt.

Much of today’s meeting focused on different agencies’ reports on their outreach strategies for convincing members to take archiving their records seriously, by designating a repository for their records upon their retirement, adopting good documents management practices, or even by hiring an archivist (which was also a concern in their 1992 report.)  One committee chair reportedly responded to an attempt at archiving guidance by asking “what, am I dying or something?”

The Clerk of the House and the Secretary of the Senate also reported on their recent endeavors, especially on the fifty percent increase in committee hearings during the first session of the 110th Congress, and on the challenges of implementing the requirements of the Honest Leadership and Open Government Act, which they endearingly referred to as “HLOGA” (pronounced huh-low-guh).

The main lesson of the morning for me was that disclosure and public information access are wrapped up with issues of records management and archiving. We’re working through the same administrative, political, and technological circumstances, on largely the same sets of information, and we have a great opportunity in the well coordinated work of the Advisory Committee, and the surprising receptiveness of its members.

Transparency bills that passed in 110th Congress, 1st session:

1. S.1 Honest Leadership and Open Government Act of 2007:

2. S.2488 OPEN Government Act of 2007:

3. OTA funding implemented as part of GAO:

Other developments during 110th Congress, 1st session:

1. C-SPAN changed its copyright policy to allow reproduction on the Web
2. Seven Members of Congress posted daily schedules to their official Web sites
3. Two Members of Congress posted their personal financial disclosures to their official Web sites
4. The number of Members blogging and posting their earmarks increased dramatically
5. Launch of OMB spending and earmark online database
6. Launch of FARA online database
7. Redesign of SOPR lobbyist disclosure online database

Pending for 110th Congress, 2nd session:  (see also here )

1. S.2321 E-Government Reauthorization Act of 2007 (Hearings held in the Senate)
2. Review of Franking Regulations for Member Web sites
3. H.R.1362 Accountability in Contracting Act of 2007 (Passed the House)
4. S. Res. 401 A resolution to provide Internet access to certain Congressional Research Service publications
5. Lieberman’s statement that Senate votes should be in XML, in support of THOMAS upgrades

Two more pieces of transparency reform legislation underway for 2008:
First, the Presidential Library Donation Reform Act of 2007, (HR
1254<http://www.govtrack.us/congress/bill.xpd?bill=h110-1254>)
saying <http://www.govtrack.us/congress/billtext.xpd?bill=h110-1254>… *”Any
Presidential library fundraising organization shall submit on a quarterly
basis, in accordance with paragraph (2), information with respect to…”
*Second, here’s the Presidential Records Acts Amendments of 2007, (HR
1255<http://www.govtrack.us/congress/bill.xpd?bill=h110-1255>)
saying <http://www.govtrack.us/congress/billtext.xpd?bill=h110-1255>…
“`(a)(1) When the Archivist determines under this chapter to make available
to the public any Presidential record that has not previously been made
available to the public, the Archivist shall…” and “Executive Order No.
13233, dated November 1, 2001 (66 Fed. Reg. 56025), shall have no force or
effect.” among other things.  (link to executive
order<http://www.whitehouse.gov/news/releases/2001/11/20011101-12.html>
)
Again, the OHP page<http://www.theopenhouseproject.com/resources/pendingbills>also
has legislation on Congress relevant to the report as well.

Access to information is often referred to as “necessary for a healthy democracy,” or the “foundation of an informed citizenry.”

I think both of those things are true, but I would assert that notion more strongly.  Broad access to public information is a precondition for sound policy, responsive government, and civic engagement.

With insufficient information, correct decisions and well-founded debates only arise through chance.  For sound policy, procedure, or evaluations, data and history are more than background; they fully determine our options.  Without broad access, our agency (our ability to be agents) — our ability to be voters, lawmakers, judges, candidates, council members, family or community members — is reduced from full agents to that of mere subjects.  (Literally, as though subjects under a monarch.)
Insofar as the Internet grants all of us agency (written about at such much at length for electoral campaigns), our agency is only possible insofar as our choices, analyses, and narratives are well reasoned and well sourced.  The legitimacy of the blogger, especially, is based almost entirely on the legitimacy and trustedness of the information source.

For strong public analysis, policy debate, or media criticism, information access and transparent government are more than a vitamin supplement to keep you well, they’re more like the ground we should walk on.

I’m particularly interested in Pierson’s purportedly novel conception of how political institutions develop over time, apparently filling the gaps that other models fail to address. (He sets his conceptions against “historical institutionalism” and “rational choice theory”.) His analysis is abstract enough to be rigorous and challenging at first, but takes a broad enough view that he can abstract common elements out of disparate systems in a useful, applicable manner. He seeks to “explicate different ways in which things happen over time in social life, drawing attention to processes that are unlikely to be visible without specifically addressing questions of temporality” (p. 10).

In reading just the first few chapters, I’m surprised at how well the concept of “path dependence” maps onto congressional reform efforts. A concept I would probably have referred to as a “positive feedback loop”, path dependence is self reinforcing behavior — development whose onset disproportionately influences further development. Basic examples that come to mind are both debt and wealth, which tend to feed off of themselves.

Pierson applies path dependence to economic theory, illuminating situations that may be well explained by examining self reinforcing structures. For example, various national economies develop divergently, and, rather than taking advantage of each other’s successful strategies, produce very different situations. “Once in place, institutions are hard to change, and they have a tremendous effect on the possibilities for generating sustained economic growth. Individuals and organizations adapt to existing institutions. If the institutional matrix creates incentives for piracy, North observes, then people will invest in becoming good pirates. When institutions fail to provide incentives to be economically productive, there is unlikely to be much economic growth.” (p. 27)

Pierson argues that the political sphere is particularly subject to self-reinforcing behavior (aka positive feedback, path dependence, or increasing returns). He outlines four mechanisms that render the political particularly influenced by whatever the current state of affairs is. They are: “(1) the central role of collective action; (2) the high density of institutions; (3) the possibilities for using political authority to enhance asymmetries of power; and (4) its intrinsic complexity and opacity… Each of these features makes positive feedback processes prevalent in politics”. (p. 30)

Each of these mechanisms seems to easily map onto Congress in a useful way.

Collective action problems make feedback loops because both politicians and constituents (or any political actor) are largely unable to act alone, and must constantly assess the winning strategy, and what is perceived as the winning strategy. This privileges existing organizations, giving established parties, coalitions, and institutions the distinct advantage of clearing the first hurdle of viability. When effectiveness can be found in groups, and groups are hard to form (and political organizing is insufficiently agile), then those groups’ existence will tend to exhibit self reinforcement. The Internet, and blogging, however, are a productively destabilizing force, giving ad-hoc coalitions and unproved institutions an equal voice, where reputations matter less than well sourced convincing arguments. The Internet also reduces the amount to which political activism involves collective action problems: there is a rather low barrier to participation (digital divide notwithstanding). Broader participation and competition means greater alternatives, leading to more agility and easier transitions, meaning we’re less likely to stay stuck on some self-reinforcing pathway.

A dense realm of institutions similarly exists around Congress and the federal government; they sort of approach being the essence of the institution, the defining meta-institution, comprised of departments about departments, creating the conditions for all other institutions. With such far-reaching work, this complex of institutions will be justifiably risk-averse, weighted down by the seriousness of their task, and the high price of failure. The sheer mass of institutions at play gives reform a much higher cost (and renders them path-dependent.)

Third is the “possibilities for using political authority to enhance asymmetries of power.” Congress is full of power begetting itself, as is government generally. Societal expectations and checks and balances are supposed to help define the terms of the equalibria controlling this power. The legislative and executive periodically switch in dominance, as do the parties. The incentives created by elections are enhanced by an information-empowered electorate, helping to reign in self-reinforcing political power structures.

The last political mechanism of path-dependence is “its intrinsic complexity and opacity.” Complexity and opacity make political institutions and agents less susceptible to any societal pressure, which is more likely to be mediated through sympathetic agents (the media, lobbyists). While complexity is often necessary, and has a high cost of shedding (see #2, institutional path-dependence), it can be countered by information availability. In other words, while Senate procedures provide an effective shield against criticism for questionable votes only as long as those procedures are hard to explain. Insofar as Congress is inscrutable, it’s less likely to feel real pressure, and more likely to reinforce itself. Insofar as the Internet helps make Congress scrutable and transparent, pressure becomes productive.

I’m looking forward to going through more of Pierson’s research, finding it similarly helpful to Harvard’s Transparency Policy Project or Congress’s own best attempts to survey itself.

The collection seems well organized and easy to peruse, with solid explanations of their methodology and disclaimers about what’s available based on the crawling.

My main suggestion is that the archiving happen with greater frequency, perhaps coordinated in order to capture the greatest amount of material possible, and for those responsible for the Web Harvest to coordinate with the CAO, systems administrators, and vendors to be sure that the digital records management practices used in organizing member sites encourages easy crawling and archiving by NARA and CLA.

The House has a document laying out best practices for documents management for House offices; I wonder if the digital materials management should be expanded to include digital materials availability, perhaps including standards like sitemapping, in order to ensure the preservation of member sites?

My other suggestion is to increase the exposure of the captured sites, perhaps encouraging links from the bioguides, or current member sites, and to ensure that the collection itself is crawlable through search engine indexing practices.

While much of the discussion centered on best practices and ideas around (what seemed to me to be) more traditional advocacy, I tried to add some of my thoughts on what might make for more effective non-traditional advocacy and outreach. Speaking in public is always useful exercise for me, and, as is often the case, my thoughts are better organized after speaking than before.

My initial thesis was that the form of our advocacy is determined by the form of our awareness, and that the Sunlight Foundation, by extending the reach of our awareness of Congress, is broadening the field of advocacy opportunities possible for both the public and for traditional advocacy organizations.

Sunlight grantees, and other similarly minded folks engaged in entrepreneurial political Web design are enabling these opportunities to flourish, and Congress is adapting, both as in terms of staff, and as a technological institution.

My advice for advocacy groups could probably be summed up in a few brief points:

• Simply overloading Congress with email has an upper limit of effectiveness, overloading members of advocacy organizations with similarly excessive appeals has similarly diminishing effectiveness.
• While re-imagining advocacy is unlikely to replace email anytime soon (as many prefer it when offered alternatives), adding other features to advocacy methods will increase effectiveness (retention, appeal, impact, ability to get attention from Congress)
• To best affect a legislative information ecology, you should be a part of it.
• This means taking advantage of Congressional data sources, being databases like opensecrets or opencongress, legislative support agency publications (like CBO, GAO, or CRS), or committee reports. These publications take immense staff effort to create, and they probably get some satisfaction out of people actually reading them.
• Members of Congress can’t ask you to do their work for them, but, if you’re interested in getting their attention, there’s nothing to stop you from doing it anyway. In other words, you can write legislation, read the House or Senate rules, suggest questions for a committee hearing, or outline arguments or messaging. If someone was trying to do your job for you online, wouldn’t you check to see how well they were doing?
• Blog Ads are a massively under-appreciated way of reaching specific and involved constituency groups, and well worth looking into. They’re also very very cheap when compared to advertising alternatives.
• By asking your members to engage with the substance of Congress (and helping them to do so), they’ll more likely be viewed as relevant, and likely to enforce political consequences reinforce good or bad decisions.

Even if the leadership in both parties make a priority of publicizing committee proceedings, the committee chairs in their variable discretion (as we called it in the report) still need to make it a sufficient priority for it to happen.  To encourage them to do so, we’ve drafted a letter, working closely with VoterWatch (and Perla Ni) to articulate what we are looking for–accurate, timely records of what happens in public hearings, posted online permanently in text, audio, and video.

I’ve also created a pledgebank pledge, which you can view or sign here, (or through facebook), which says the following:

The pledge has links to more detail (and to the letter to committee chairs), and is set to succeed only at 50 people by mid December.  We’re up to 11 as of this email.


Press Credentialing:

I recently finished Donald Ritchie’s Press Gallery, which covers the congressional press galleries through the 19th Century, with a focus on the development of institutional standards that reify things like conflicts of interest and endemic corruption.  (Institutions like ethics committees, or press galleries reify, or recognize and make real, conflicts of interest–effectively or not, where before they were just seen as incidental profits.)

Interestingly, these distinctions (for example, understanding that a reporter shouldn’t also be a committee clerk, a lobbyist, and an stock speculator, all at the same time) largely develop through new technology being introduced, which creates tension and new incentives within the reporting community.  This point is very clearly made in the preface to Reporting from Washington, Ritchie’s book that starts around 1932:

I’m sure there’s a detailed comparison to be made here, taking blogging and comparing it to the growth of such institutions as the initial party-affiliated papers, the penny press papers, the wire (telegraph based) services, larger syndicated papers, radio, and television.  A case could be made that the Internet isn’t so uniquely revolutionary (at least in this sense), but operates in a long tradition of evolving distinctions, each taking a different concern, conflict of interest, party interest, or business interest, and removing them from the narrative of the reporter.

The Constitution:

I’ve alluded a couple of times to the Constitution Annotated, but I’d like to elaborate slightly more on this document, and why it’s worthy of our attention.

The world of legal research is very complex, with different bodies of information being vital to the arrangement of court cases and legislative research, touching on case history, legislative intent, regulatory processes, and differing jurisdictions, precedents, and interpretations.  Within this sphere, just as much as in the world of legislative information, when information isn’t readily available to the public, for-pay services grow to fill this need.  While this has been both necessary and good, there is also a clear public good to securing access to a digital public repository of legal and legislative information.  In other words, more people should take advantage of advanced legal research than can afford to.

The Constitution Annotated is a sort of bridge between the legal and legislative research worlds, since it provides the foundation for both of them.  It is also a great example of a vital technical document.  CRS employees take the Constitution and append explanations and context to every section, based on the most recent supreme court interpretations.  There’s no better place to start looking in order to get a (mostly) current view, from a team of experts, of how the Constitution functions in contemporary life.

CONAN (as it’s referred to) has immense potential to become a digitally vital document, and adding searchability, links for cross-referencing, and versioning would all be possible by making the XML data at its core public.  Third parties with an interest in adding value would likely be happy to create links, searches, and further context.  (See Cornell’s Legal Information Institute, for example, which is already providing a basic set of these value-added features, as they’re able to based on the format the GPO is publishing in.)

I’ll likely be writing more about this soon.

GSA Newsletter:

Finally, I’d like to point again (as Steven Clift recently did), to the General Services Administration’s recent newsletter “How E-Government is Changing Society and Strengthening Democracy” (available near the top of this page).

I know of no better survey of current e-government and digital democracy survey, showing what enterprising citizens and government employees are doing with the Internet.  (I wrote about the Open House Project in the newsletter too.)

Sorry this is so long, but there’s a great deal going on, and I’m trying to keep up with keeping what I’m doing as public as possible.