Closely watching legislation progress through the House can be difficult, especially given the discretion the Speaker and the Rules Committee have in scheduling and controlling the floor.
The House Rules Committee is making legislation a little easier to follow online, by voluntarily posting updates of special rules, as they are approved, to their website in a […]

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 […]

I always find it interesting how although our government is run by fairly strict procedural rules that have been written out in various places, starting with the constitution and ending somewhere past the horizon, sometimes it’s just impossible to locate exactly at what point in the procedural game “reality” is. For instance, the constitution outlines […]

Following up on Ari’s post- At yesterday’s Senate HSGAC hearing, Senator Lieberman noted briefly:
Furthermore Senate votes, unlike House votes, are intentionally presented in a format that limits the public’s ability to examine Senators’ voting records.
I confirmed with HSGAC that Lieberman was indeed referring to making Senate votes available in XML format, like the House does. […]

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 […]

The following is an update of what I’ve been up to recently, in several different areas…
Transcript Pledge and Letter:
Even if the leadership in both parties make a priority of publicizing committee proceedings, the committee chairs in their variable discretion (as we called it in the report) still need to make it a sufficient priority for […]

Even though that video centers on intellectual property issues, Lessig talks about how his focus came to shift away from hoping Congress would pass rational policy. He remarks that the "economies of influence" that dictate congressional policy are fundamentally corrupt, as a system. That made me reflect that Sunlight’s mission is, […]

(This is written in the style of a letter to the Senate… because hopefully it will turn into just that. Comments on its persuasiveness are welcome.)
Summary: The Senate’s current position on publishing voting records online is analogous to a reference library that has no copy machine. I explain below why the Senate website should publish […]

Here’s a visualization of voters reactions to politicians’ statements distributed across either time or geography.
This stuff is really compelling, and will just become more pervasive and easier to use as data processing becomes better standardized (and therefore easier to repurpose) and as political parties, legislatures, and businesses see that it is in their interest to […]

This post from information aesthetics has me thinking again about ontology, linguistics, and semantically derived hyperlinks. How else can you describe a system that effectively matches photos’ content in a maneuverable spatial context than a successfully implemented visual semantic web?
(this video is really amazing. follow the above link.)