The Open House Project from The Sunlight Foundation

Entries Tagged as 'government websites'

Navigating legislation (after the fact, of course)

August 22nd, 2008 · 1 Comment

In May, the Congress passed the 2008 Farm Bill, which regulates various food, nutrition, and apparently biofuel issues. Tufts food policy professor Parke Wilde writes on his blog today:
The 629-page text (.pdf) of the 2008 Farm Bill is so complex and unreadable that the U.S. food policy community has been on the edge of our [...]

Tags: Legislation 2.0 · government websites

Eating well on Independence Day

July 4th, 2008 · 1 Comment

Happy 4th of July. I thought I’d share an interesting website that has nothing to do with government transparency but is about good use of government data. The USDA maintains a big database of nutrition facts about foods. You can download the database and build applications based on it, like a menu planner. This is [...]

Tags: Structured Data · data visualization · government websites

Webcontent.gov updates publishing-data recommendations

June 12th, 2008 · No Comments

I was very lucky this week to have stumbled into the middle of an update being done to a page maintained by the U.S.’s GSA at webcontent.gov on best practices for making data available, for executive branch agencies. The site serves as a collection of best practices and uses OMB policies
as a starting point. I [...]

Tags: OMB · Structured Data · egov · executive · government websites · openhouseproject

Government Data and the Invisible Hand

June 6th, 2008 · No Comments

The guys over at Princeton’s new Center for Information Technology Policy wrote a really great paper for the Yale Journal of Law & Technology on the role data should have, compared to websites, in government. It articulates a point that I think many of us subconsciously have had in mind:
“The new administration should specify that [...]

Tags: Structured Data · government websites

GAO Document on Electronic Dissemination of Government Publications

January 31st, 2008 · No Comments

In 2001, the GAO published a document entitled “Information Management; Electronic Dissemination of Government Publications” (pdf).
The GAO is responding to a congressional request for information on electronic documents dissemination, and ends up discussing the GPO, LOC, and FDLP in great detail. Apparently they considered transferring the FDLP from the GPO to the LOC.
Also, the [...]

Tags: FDLP · GAO · OpenHouse · archive · archivist · government websites · jurisdiction · preservation

S1 Implementation in the Senate Finance Committee

January 30th, 2008 · No Comments

Over the last few days, there’s been a good deal of talk about the ethics requirements going into effect for Senate Committees.  Later today, the Senate Finance Committee is scheduled to reconcile the rules of their committee with the requirements of the Honest Leadership and Open Government Act, often referred informally as “the ethics reform [...]

Tags: CLA · House of Representatives · Open Senate Project · OpenHouse · committees · government websites · transcripts

Reading Notes on The Documentation of Congress

January 27th, 2008 · 2 Comments

After going through the trouble of obtaining and digitizing the 1992 report on congressional documentation, I’ve started going systematically through the document, and, in an attempt to read more closely, have been taking notes.  This is a long post, but the parallels with the Open House Project are startling to me, as are the contrasts: [...]

Tags: CLA · Member Web Sites · NARA · OpenHouse · government websites · jurisdiction · legal research · library of congress · lobbying · lobbying disclosure · ota · preservation · senate · spub 102-20

S.Pub 102-20

December 19th, 2007 · 2 Comments

I’ve been on a mission, since November 14th, to find a digital copy of S.Pub 102-20, a reference document from 1990 giving a very comprehensive analysis of all public congressional information, from an archival perspective.  I’ve finally managed to digitize a copy (after some quality time at the scanner).  It is a large file.  (Click [...]

Tags: CLA · CONAN · NARA · OpenHouse · advocacy · archive · archivist · government websites · jurisdiction · lobbying disclosure

Eight Open Government Data Principles

December 10th, 2007 · No Comments

This weekend an Open Government Working Group conference was held in Sebastopol, CA. It was very useful and productive. I didn’t think that I contributed as much as I should have, personally, but in any case… Sunlight’s Micah Sifry has a good write-up, so I won’t repeat all of those details. (It was great to [...]

Tags: OpenHouse · Structured Data · advocacy · government websites

Web Harvest Archive

December 4th, 2007 · No Comments

I’m glad to have just found the archive of old Web sites from members of Congress, maintained by the Center for Legislative Archives under the National Archives and Records Administration (NARA).
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 [...]

Tags: CLA · Congress · NARA · OpenHouse · archive · archivist · google · government websites · preservation · sitemap protocol · sitemapping