The National Archives and Records Administration (NARA) is seeking public input into their draft plan for digitizing their content. This plan builds on their 10 year strategic vision, published last year, and lays out their goals for moving more of their physical materials into a publicly available digital format.
I found Appendix A particularly interesting [...]

Last night I read the entire CRS report that I posted yesterday, Congress and the Internet: Highlights. There were several things about that report that got me excited, including a beautifully rendered history of Congress adapting to new technology. I’ll write more about that in a bit, since the detail that most caught [...]

Openness is one of the big buzzwords on this website and among the participants. Being able to access and share information about the government is perhaps Goal #1, and we use “open” as a broad term covering different aspects of our goals. The website Open Knowledge Definition (http://www.opendefinition.org/) attempts to make a clear definition of [...]

The Senate Legislative Branch Appropriations Bill (reported out of committee on June 21st) provides a revealing look into the priorities that Congress sets in funding its own operations. The House and Senate pass separate appropriations bills; this page on THOMAS organizes the appropriations bills for each fiscal year in a remarkably useful manner.
While the [...]

I’m writing to give a general update on the status of our recommendations, and to give some other various updates. The impact of this project has always been, to some degree, contingent on the clout generated by the distributed expertise of its participants. This list and project will retain their unique productive appeal [...]

GovTrack.us is a perfect choice to be our first review as an Insanely Useful Website. GovTrack is one of the original web 2.0 type sources for government information: both an excellent example of a new model of political information distribution, and a compelling story of Web-programming genius expressed as an ambitious civic undertaking.
Josh Tauberer, [...]

As I mentioned last night, S. 1: Commission to Strengthen Confidence in Congress Act of 2007 was passed by the House. The House reorganized the entire bill but left most things intact, and added their own House-only provisions. That means the bill goes to a conference committee to resolve the differences, but there aren’t so [...]

I didn’t realize until recently the degree to which transparency reforms can benefit congressional staff.
Today’s Roll Call provides yet another example of how:
House e-mail server problems have left thousands of Capitol Hill staffers wringing their hands in frustration over the past two weeks as Congress has moved into its annual pre-August legislative crunch time.
Of about [...]

When creating an RSS feed, one should have two audiences in mind: first is your human readers that will be subscribing with their news readers, second are the computers that will be mixing your feed with others, and transforming your feed into other formats (iCal feeds, integrating it into a website, etc.) For committees in [...]

When I first started working on what would become GovTrack six years ago, as a college sophomore who had up to that point zero interest in politics, I had no idea what congressional committees were all about. I don’t think they ever came up in any civics-related classes through High School. Really, we’re all lead [...]