Congressman Mike Honda (D, CA-15) is one of this project’s heroes in the House. In fact, I can’t recall any other congressman picking out a recommendation of the Open House Project and saying publicly that it’s a good idea, and referencing this project. In November, he took real action to further transparency in Congress by [...]

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 [...]

Following up on yesterday’s post on the Finance Committee’s consideration of new committee rules, here’s the relevant section of their new rules, as posted on their Web site:
Rule 18. Transcripts of Committee Meet-
ings.—An accurate record shall be kept of all
markups of the committee, whether they be
open or closed to the public. A transcript,
marked as ‘‘uncorrected,’’ [...]

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 [...]

This morning I had the pleasure of attending the 34th meeting of the Advisory Committee on the Records of Congress.  Since congressional reform and improvement efforts all take place within a rich political, administrative, technological, and historical context, any time the institution of Congress coordinates broadly to assess itself, we should be paying attention.
Organizational realignments [...]

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: [...]

Worth checking out: EveryBlock.com just launched, promising to aggregate local digital content.  From their description:
We aim to collect all of the news and civic goings-on that have happened recently in your city, and make it simple for you to keep track of news in particular areas. We’re a geographic filter — a “news feed” for [...]

In order to clarify this post, I wanted to organize some of the governmental support agencies and bodies with responsibility or jurisdiction over congressional information access.  This list is still probably partial, as any such list would be, since jurisdiction and responsibility are ultimately a matter of habit and practice as much as they are [...]

From the Open House Project Google Group discussion, here’s a partial list of recent transparency reform legislation, passed or pending.
Transparency bills that passed in 110th Congress, 1st session:
1. S.1 Honest Leadership and Open Government Act of 2007:

Requires online posting of committee hearing transcripts/audio/video (Senate only)
Expands lobbyist disclosure to require quarterly filing, disclosure of bundled contributions, [...]

Last week, Princeton’s Center for Information and Technology Policy had a conference on “Computing in the Cloud“, and Josh Tauberer (of GovTrack.us), Andrew Page (of MapLight.org), and me (John Wonderlich) got to be on a panel together.
Here’s a video of our panel; the other panels are accessible here.

The main thing I took away from the [...]