Here’s a great video of Carl Malamud speaking at a Google Talk about freeing government information through his unique combination of technological acumen and activist ambush:

The Office of Management and Budget offers tons of information publicly, and does a great job of archiving and indexing pdfs relating to their reports, budgets, and testimony.
I find the Statements of Administrative Policy to be particularly helpful, since the administration’s official policy positions on various legislative initiatives are all available as they’re available.
Now if [...]

Two interesting uses of technology from prominent House members, a republican and a democrat.
First, Minority Leader John Boehner has a twitter badge up on his Republican Leader website. This allows him to post status updates on his whereabouts to a very specific degree. While it appears to only have been updated once [...]

The National Archives (NARA, or National Archives and Records Administration) has a great video on their website, telling the story of citizens holding their government accountable through empowered investigation of public documents.
Check it out.

I find it hard to stay away from compelling data visualization. That’s probably a big part of why I’m passionate about government information. The connection isn’t entirely clear to me, but it goes something like this: digital analysis of information illuminates subtle connections and trends that would have gone otherwise unnoticed. New [...]

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, [...]

While much of our report was written by people that, at least currently, are in the game of spreading information in an issue-neutral way — that is, information for the sake of information — it’s always nice to hear that those that are in the game of policy come to (at least some of) the [...]