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The Open House Project from The Sunlight Foundation

Entries Tagged as 'openhouseproject'

How Do Supreme Court Nominations Work?

May 26th, 2009 · No Comments

OpenCRS.com has the following two reports, for all your nomination questions:
http://opencrs.com/getfile.php?rid=60153
RL31989
Supreme Court Appointment Process: Roles of the President, Judiciary Committee, and Senate
June 25, 2007

http://opencrs.com/document/RL33225/
RL33225
Supreme Court Nominations, 1789 - 2006
September 15, 2006

Tags: openhouseproject

CRS Reports Should Be Publicly Available

May 6th, 2009 · 1 Comment

The campaign to publicly release government reports that provide policy and legal guidance to Congress were the focus of a recent New York Times article by Stephanie Strom. She writes that the Center for Democracy and Technology is spearheading efforts to give the public access to non-confidential Congressional Research Service reports. CRS is Congress’s “think [...]

Tags: openhouseproject

Aneesh Chopra, May 2008

April 20th, 2009 · No Comments

Aneesh Chopra, recently named as the nation’s first CTO, gave a talk organized by Jon Henke at New Media Strategies in May 2008.
I wrote up my reactions to the original talk here, and you can view the whole talk below (the first video of 8 parts).

Tags: openhouseproject

Bulk data downloads approved in the omnibus spending bill (success!)

March 11th, 2009 · 3 Comments

Two recommendations of our report have been moved forward in the FY09 omnibus appropriations bill (H.R. 1105) which cleared the Senate yesterday and the House last month. The first recommendation in our chapter on legislative databases was that the Library of Congress make its bill status database directly available to the public and that the [...]

Tags: Congress · GPO · Structured Data · appropriations · approps · clerk of the house · govtrack · legislation · library of congress · maplight · openhouseproject

Hoyer V Cantor

January 21st, 2009 · No Comments

(source)

Here’s an attempt to embed the video from C-SPAN of Hoyer and Cantor discussing congressional transparency.
It came up on January 15th, provoking discussion on our public google group here.

Tags: openhouseproject

How You Can Help

January 11th, 2009 · No Comments

(email from our google group)
Clay Johnson, Sunlight’s Labs Director, has put together an introductory post and wiki page on how anyone can help participate in the labs work.
In that same spirit, I’ve got three rather simple things that anyone could do to help open the House and Senate.  If editing a wiki is a challenge, [...]

Tags: openhouseproject

Rep McKeon’s Video Tours

January 10th, 2009 · No Comments

If you’re like me, you’ll watch this straight through.  Start with “NEW Behind the Scenes Video”, and see if you agree — this is compelling stuff.
I don’t know what it is that makes this so, but even though I’m not a resident of Representative Buck McKeon’s California House District, I can’t look away.
In the video, [...]

Tags: openhouseproject

CSPAN embeddable video, H. Con. Res. 307

December 1st, 2008 · 4 Comments

CSPAN has come a very long way with their digital video services, evolving from an over-aggressive assertion of copyright to now offering embeddable video.
Here’s a clip of Chairman Brady discussing H. Con. Res. 307, a sense of the Congress resolution on preservation that passed:

Tags: openhouseproject

OpenCongress.org Does Voting Comparisons

November 3rd, 2008 · No Comments

OpenCongress has just released a votes comparison tool.
This strikes me as a big step forward. Several elements of well-coordinated data have been combined to produce something much more useful than the sum of its parts.
A well structured database of bills, votes, Members of Congress, and notable bills (see the “Hot” icon?) allows for a [...]

Tags: openhouseproject

Required Reports: A Proposal for an Aggregated View

October 26th, 2008 · No Comments

Many acts of Congress are passed with a reporting requirement.  Throughout the US Code are various requirements that agencies submit reports to Congress.  This is a good thing, since strong congressional oversight can create constructive incentives within agencies (and, by extension, the entities those agencies regulate).
Here’s the problem: agencies often ignore these reporting requirements entirely, [...]

Tags: openhouseproject