It’s not very pretty because while bill writers have been posting the PDFs, PDFs don’t make it easy to make comparisons. The bill writers are composing the bills in XML, and if they made those available we the public would have an easier time. Maybe we wouldn’t complain to our reps so much either because we could actually understand what is going on better!

The database is great itself, but the cooler website is MyPyramid Menu Planner (mypyramidtracker.gov) (also out of the USDA). You can enter a typical daily roster of what you eat (with a nice sound effect) and it will tell you how it stacks up for a recommended diet for your age (or for me, how to gain weight to a recommended amount for my age). It feels a little over-simplified, but the simplicity keeps me on the site. I find, not surprisingly, that I probably eat about half of the recommended calories and clearly not enough grain or fruit. Well, I knew this in the abstract, but quantifying it helps direct me to fixing the problem.

I’m sure there are other websites that do similar things, but it’s nice to find a case where the government has both published a comprehensive (well structured, well documented) database and has also built a really nice interface for the data. And on a topic that is really very important to daily life, too.

And with that, I think I will take the rest of the weekend off from civics!

This visualization rewards careful inspection–there are stories to be found everywhere: follow the positions of the Presidents, relative to their own party members; note how party leaders are typically close to their own party median, find patterns in individual states’ ideology over time–at any level of inspection, the data offer up a rational yet compelling history.

The history of representative democracy and government is waiting to be similarly told; here’s a broad collection of data indexed on a world map, representing data sets about freedom and government (by Zachary Johnson). When these visualizations are easier to create, and free to those with an Internet connection, our collective ability to visualize societal trends and expressive freedom should continue to develop. What role will this play in shaping the continuing development of industrialized countries? Will a digital view of what we’re up to lead to better policy?

Summary: The Senate’s current position on publishing voting records online is analogous to a reference library that has no copy machine. I explain below why the Senate website should publish its roll call vote records in “XML format”, to facilitate educating the public and strengthening transparency, and why any reluctance there may be should be reevaluated in light of the experience from the House’s use of XML for roll call votes and the presence today of unauthoritative XML for Senate votes. Current Senate website policy should be revised to encourage the use of this “structured data format”.

Though everyone believes an electorate must be informed to make wise decisions at the polls, the complexities of what happens in the Congress are indeed difficult to distill and share with the public. Roll call voting records are of crucial importance to the public for obvious reasons, but at the same time fail to capture the nuances of each situation that may have played a central role in a Senator’s decision making. How voting records, which are easy to convey but oversimplify the big picture, should be responsibly shared with the public is a question for debate. I suggest below that the Senate website publish its roll call vote records in “XML format” (in addition to what is currently available) to help keep the public informed, and that any fears about how the information in XML may be used are not strong enough reasons to avoid this technology.

The Senate’s current position on publishing voting records online is analogous to a reference library that has no copy machine. In a reference library without a copy machine, the information in the stacks is certainly made available, but library members can’t easily share the information with others. They can instruct others how to find the information in the library (i.e. a link), and they can copy the information by hand and make copies at Kinkos, but library members are unable to use the latest technology to help them share the information outside the library. In such a world, the library members’ response is likely to be to haul in their own copy machines into the library. This is exactly what has happened with Senate voting records.

Leaving the metaphor, long ago the Senate took the important step of publishing voting records on its website. Though the votes webpages themselves cannot capture all of the nuances of each vote, these webpages complement what exists elsewhere on the web. For instance, the websites of newspapers, which do try to explain the back-story of legislative issues to present a larger picture, often link to the Senate’s roll call webpages as, in a sense, an extension of their own reporting, that is, so they can provide not just the big picture but also the crucial details. The roll call webpages thus have an important role in educating the electorate and promoting transparency.

The metaphorical copy machine represents what is called structured data, for example “XML.” XML allows computers to more easily process information, and for voting records would help that information be disseminated more widely and in novel ways to the public. While structured data is a part of today’s so-called “Web 2.0″, the current policy understood to be coming from Senate Administration is that the Senate website is not to publish structured data for roll call votes, with the reason understood to be that Senators prefer to have their votes be published not as isolated factoids, where they could be misrepresented, but rather only as part of a larger picture.

This policy warrants review on two accounts. On the one hand, even such isolated facts have a crucial role of complementing the larger picture presented elsewhere, as does the existing Senate webpages for votes as explained above. But further, for several years the House has published its voting records in XML. The New York Times, for instance, makes use of these files to enhance their own coverage of legislation by including visual representations of votes along with their articles — the big picture and the crucial details. XML made the voting information more easily transformed into visual form, a form that has educational value to the public, and so using XML is in this respect in the public interest. The Senate does not publish XML, and while as with the metaphorical reference library this does not prevent wholesale access to the information, it is holding back on technology that facilitates educating others. The Senate should adopt a similar policy as the House to encourage the dissemination of voting information, knowing from the experience of the House that it will be used often to complement reporting of the nuances and the big picture.

Because it does not publish votes in XML, the public has hauled in its own copy machine — and the effect is that Senate vote XML files are available to the public, Senate rules notwithstanding. The independent website GovTrack.us publishes its own XML files for Senate votes, and these are used by several other websites to enhance the public’s understanding of the Congress. Any fears Senators might have had for a future with XML can thus be evaluated today. However, this unauthoritative source for voting information is not an optimal solution, on account of the fact that on rare occasions it disseminates incorrect information to some hundreds of thousands of monthly visitors of the websites using these XML files. An authoritative source of roll call vote XML files from the Senate directly would rectify this problem.

As there is virtually no cost to publishing XML files for roll call votes, and in light of the experience that can be gathered from the House’s use of XML and the presence today of (unauthoritative) XML for Senate votes, the current policy regarding the use of structured data on the Senate website should be reevaluated. The use of structured data should be encouraged for all public information on the Senate website, especially starting with roll call votes, and would signal a renewed commitment to using technology to promote transparency.

I’m loving the conversation about debate transcripts that Josh just posted about, because it’s a great example of information becoming increasingly public, even though it was in plain sight all along. All public televised debates are, by their nature, quite public. The transcript or video/audio, however, has been less available, so much that the battle over their fair use continues even now.

Despite this struggle, innovative presentations of this most hotly contested, most scrutinized of public appearances are popping up with increasing frequency. Josh’s post took the speaking time from the NYT and calculated the statistical correlation between candidates’ time speaking and their poll ranking. I just came across this tool (application?) that allows for all sorts of user-defined analysis of the debate transcript. You can see, explicitly, how many times the candidates said a term of your choice, and the text from the transcript is available right along with it. This is the sort of thing that we’re lucky enough to witness developing, as long as the data that drives this sort of innovative presentation stays open and available.

~

Whenever I come across something like this that I’d like to share, I’m confronted with a paralyzing set of choices. I can email those people that I think would appreciate it, I can tag it on delicious, I can link to it on twitter/facebook/jaiku, I can share it on facebook, I can send a link to someone through AIM or google chat, I can write a blog post on one of several blogs I sometimes write on, or if I’m really impressed, I can physically use my mouth to discuss it with someone (again, by phone, by ichat, or by physical space.)

One of the reasons that the Open House Project has been successful is that it started, and has functioned primarily through a thoroughly public interactive space. By gravitating toward the public and the collaborative, we’re inviting input from unknown sources, who always seem to be listening. This also builds trust and approachability, which is clear as people have often approached me to discuss things they wouldn’t necessarily write to the whole list (which I gather can be rather intimidating).

This is exactly what we want Congress to do more often, and better. The form that this will take will probably continue to evolve, just as stenography made a Congressional Record possible, telegraphy encouraged wire services and revolutionized the press, and TV and C-SPAN made hearings and floor speeches public in a new way (thanks in part to the spectacle of McCarthyism.) Evolving technology is also responsible for the permitting lawmakers to go on blogs like redstate or dailykos, soliciting input or even in sprited confrontation.

As political Web use struggles to get its footing, I’m still wondering in just the same way what the best forms are for how we share our awareness of the goings-on online. I recently discovered delicious, or maybe I recently adopted delicious in earnest, and now I love it. I can easily create a public space of links made up of things I found to be notable, find others with similar interests, and tag my links for easy retrieval later. Also notably, delicious has RSS-feeds galore, which means that one can transform or subscribe to tag, an person, or specific person’s tag.

This is particularly interesting to me because it may present the best way to share Open House Project related links with a broader community without constantly deciding whether to blog, email, etc. I think there must be a way to set up a portion of my delicious account so that every time I tag something with “ohp”, it appears in a public way. I’m sure we could add a section to the sidebar that lists the most recent delicious entries with that tag, but I’d like to also give others the ability to add links to that tag. Is the best solution to use a public feed, like ohp? It seems that that would be insufficiently specific. Anyone have a suggestion for a collaborative link-sharing space, preferably delicious based?

One can’t help but notice that the different candidates are not getting the same amount of speaking time. Clinton spoke more than 3.5 times more words, and the same for speaking time, than Biden. For that matter, basically so did the moderator, who held the floor for more time than anyone but Clinton. It’s no wonder that Clinton is considered “the Democrat to beat” considering she’s in our face more.

If the numbers weren’t so vastly different between the candidates, we’d chalk it up to some random variation that happens from debate to debate. But, from the numbers, the speaking times are clearly planned. It’s so clear that I feel like maybe I missed something. Is it common knowledge that the debates are proportioning time out to the candidates based on their poll numbers (or something equivalent)? It’s not just that the front-runners are getting more time. The statistical correlation is ridiculously high (speaking time versus FOX News/Opinion Dynamics Poll. Oct. 23-24: r=.96). That is, the debate organizers are basically using this formula to determine how much time each candidate should get:

Speaking Time = 8:26 minutes + 25 seconds * Latest Poll Number (%)

Of course, debate organizers can’t control exactly how long each candidate talks for, but the candidates only deviated from the formula by at most two minutes and twenty seconds (Biden, who spoke less, and DoddCORRECTED: Edwards, who spoke more).

So now I’m getting off topic a bit, but in any case: transformations on data can be very revealing!

This stuff is really compelling, and will just become more pervasive and easier to use as data processing becomes better standardized (and therefore easier to repurpose) and as political parties, legislatures, and businesses see that it is in their interest to engage in the collaboration necessary to achieve broad standards adoption and development.

(again, from info aesthetics.)