The committee rules, as they stand, contradict the new requirements of S1, specifically section 513, which requires public committee proceedings to be posted online within 21 days of the hearing.  I expect that other committees will have to deal with this issue, and the Finance Committee should be applauded for taking the provisions of S1 seriously, and recognizing that their rules will need to be updated to accommodate its requirements.

Committees, as they adapt to new expectations for online information access, should also recognize that these stipulations are only a (very necessary) first step.  Meaningfully access to committee proceedings is only possible through real-time disclosure and digital records management.  This would enable citizens to follow along with hearings that pertain to their interests or expertise as they happen, and also give members of Congress and their staff new tools to help them do their jobs more effectively.  (Multiple committee hearings, floor votes, interviews, staff meetings and who knows what all happen at the same time, the least we can do is make sure members of Congress can find out what happens in the meetings of the committees on which they serve.)

This disclosure, as outlined in the Open House Project report (committee section), must first be timely.  Committee staff have expressed real concerns about posting official transcripts in time, and one solution to that concern may be to post unofficial versions of transcripts first.  In any case, making public access a priority should enable best practices to quickly emerge, and I’m confident in the committees ability to post proceedings quickly.  Senator Salazar was confident of this fact as well, as he remarked when introducing the amendment to the Senate bill: “I should also add that the amendment will create no serious burden for the committtees”. (link)

OMBWatch also mentions in their note that multiple formats for proceedings are vastly preferred to the one-of-the-above approach that S1 requires.  Not only does this make it easier to watch, digest, quote, or share, but this also will make the committees more likely compliant with the section 508 accessibility standards, giving citizens, staff, and members with disabilities access to records of proceedings.  (Patrice McDermott of OpenTheGovernment.org has also vocally supported robust committee disclosure requirements.)

Finally, our discussion of implementing S1 has led us to realize that new standards for posting public information online lead inevitably to new challenges in digital records management and preservation.  If the committee Web sites become the go to source for committee related information (where before there was no digital source), then who becomes responsible for this digital history?  Committee documents become the property of the National Archives (specifically the Center for Legislative Archives) after each Congress.  As I observed in the previous discussion of this topic, it may end up being easier to get committee documents online than it will be to get them to stay there.  Ideally, I think committees should probably maintain jurisdiction over their documents, and have an easy procedure to link to an archive of previous committee procedures.

Kudos to the Finance Committee (and especially Senator Salazar) for getting the proceedings requirement introduced, and for following up more than year later.

I’m hoping that we can demonstrate some enthusiasm for what happens in committee hearings, since they’re so essential to the legislative process, literally determining the content of our laws and the extent of Congress’s oversight. To that end, I’ve also prepared a brief pledge via pledgebank, where one can pledge to look to committees for legislative information, but only if Congress will meet us halfway and provide access to its proceedings.

You can sign the pledge by visiting pledgebank, or you can also be a signatory to the letter by leaving a comment here.

I’m loving the conversation about debate transcripts that Josh just posted about, because it’s a great example of information becoming increasingly public, even though it was in plain sight all along. All public televised debates are, by their nature, quite public. The transcript or video/audio, however, has been less available, so much that the battle over their fair use continues even now.

Despite this struggle, innovative presentations of this most hotly contested, most scrutinized of public appearances are popping up with increasing frequency. Josh’s post took the speaking time from the NYT and calculated the statistical correlation between candidates’ time speaking and their poll ranking. I just came across this tool (application?) that allows for all sorts of user-defined analysis of the debate transcript. You can see, explicitly, how many times the candidates said a term of your choice, and the text from the transcript is available right along with it. This is the sort of thing that we’re lucky enough to witness developing, as long as the data that drives this sort of innovative presentation stays open and available.

~

Whenever I come across something like this that I’d like to share, I’m confronted with a paralyzing set of choices. I can email those people that I think would appreciate it, I can tag it on delicious, I can link to it on twitter/facebook/jaiku, I can share it on facebook, I can send a link to someone through AIM or google chat, I can write a blog post on one of several blogs I sometimes write on, or if I’m really impressed, I can physically use my mouth to discuss it with someone (again, by phone, by ichat, or by physical space.)

One of the reasons that the Open House Project has been successful is that it started, and has functioned primarily through a thoroughly public interactive space. By gravitating toward the public and the collaborative, we’re inviting input from unknown sources, who always seem to be listening. This also builds trust and approachability, which is clear as people have often approached me to discuss things they wouldn’t necessarily write to the whole list (which I gather can be rather intimidating).

This is exactly what we want Congress to do more often, and better. The form that this will take will probably continue to evolve, just as stenography made a Congressional Record possible, telegraphy encouraged wire services and revolutionized the press, and TV and C-SPAN made hearings and floor speeches public in a new way (thanks in part to the spectacle of McCarthyism.) Evolving technology is also responsible for the permitting lawmakers to go on blogs like redstate or dailykos, soliciting input or even in sprited confrontation.

As political Web use struggles to get its footing, I’m still wondering in just the same way what the best forms are for how we share our awareness of the goings-on online. I recently discovered delicious, or maybe I recently adopted delicious in earnest, and now I love it. I can easily create a public space of links made up of things I found to be notable, find others with similar interests, and tag my links for easy retrieval later. Also notably, delicious has RSS-feeds galore, which means that one can transform or subscribe to tag, an person, or specific person’s tag.

This is particularly interesting to me because it may present the best way to share Open House Project related links with a broader community without constantly deciding whether to blog, email, etc. I think there must be a way to set up a portion of my delicious account so that every time I tag something with “ohp”, it appears in a public way. I’m sure we could add a section to the sidebar that lists the most recent delicious entries with that tag, but I’d like to also give others the ability to add links to that tag. Is the best solution to use a public feed, like ohp? It seems that that would be insufficiently specific. Anyone have a suggestion for a collaborative link-sharing space, preferably delicious based?