His office also submitted a second paragraph which I’ll get to below.

Rob Pierson in Honda’s office writes on the OHP mail list:

I’ve mentioned on the list some of the steps my boss (Congressman Honda) has been taking, with counsel from many folks on this list, to guide Congressional policies on the path towards effectively leveraging technology to open up access to the public. There are actually quite a few other staffers who also follow this list, and we’ve certainly learned quite a bit from the conversations posted here, so I wanted to throw out a quick note of appreciation to everyone who has been contributing to the discussions.

With guidance from the conversations on this list (and the OHP report), Congressman Honda recently submitted the following sections into the House Legislative Branch Appropriations Report. The following (or possibly very similar versions) were included in the Leg Branch Subcommittee markup of the bill:

*Public Access to Legislative Data (as submitted)*

The Committee believes that the public should have improved access to legislative information through more advanced search capabilities such as those available through the Library of Congress’ Legislative
Information System. The Committee also supports 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 Committee requests that the Library and Government Printing Office report on the progress towards these goals within 90 days of enactment of this Act.

Note that the GPO has also been stuck in there. More more on that, see this post.

The second paragraph that Honda’s office submitted John noted was parallel to the final chapter of our report, Coordinating Web Standards. (Hmm, I principally wrote that chapter too….)

*Congressional Technology Coordination (as submitted)*

The Committee recognizes the need for the House of Representatives to develop 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 an IT evaluation and decision-making process.
No later than 90 days after the enactment of this Act, the Committee requests that the Chief Administrative Officer, the Clerk, and the Sergeant at Arms report to the Committee of their efforts 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, which prevent it from taking advantage of economies of scale.

This is of course fantastic news for anyone that supports transparency, which is, well, everyone in their right mind, I think. So thanks to Congressman Honda for taking the initiative on this!

(Other links: last year’s leg branch appropriations blog post, my first or one of my first posts here about structured data)

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?