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 [...]

Following John’s note on an OHP mail list email, I adapted the bill comparison tool I developed for GovTrack and used it to analyze the changes made between the draft PDFs that have been circulating of the economic bail-out bill that is now a large package of legislation. I found five drafts, going back to [...]

I’m ecstatic. All right, so this all goes back to late 2006, a bunch of people sitting at their computers writing some emails about what Congress should do with data. I distinctly remember Dan Newman and I both thinking that the Library of Congress should make its raw legislative database (that powers THOMAS) available directly [...]

Happy 4th of July. I thought I’d share an interesting website that has nothing to do with government transparency but is about good use of government data. The USDA maintains a big database of nutrition facts about foods. You can download the database and build applications based on it, like a menu planner. This is [...]

CMF published an interim report Communicating with Congress: Recommendations for Improving the Democratic Dialogue . I had one of those “someone got it right” moments reading the report. Following what seemed to be tireless work by Daniel Bennett and Rob Pierson (Rep. Mike Honda’s office) and CMF staff going back a long time, and a [...]

I was very lucky this week to have stumbled into the middle of an update being done to a page maintained by the U.S.’s GSA at webcontent.gov on best practices for making data available, for executive branch agencies. The site serves as a collection of best practices and uses OMB policies
as a starting point. I [...]

The guys over at Princeton’s new Center for Information Technology Policy wrote a really great paper for the Yale Journal of Law & Technology on the role data should have, compared to websites, in government. It articulates a point that I think many of us subconsciously have had in mind:
“The new administration should specify that [...]

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 [...]