Coordinating House Web Use and Making a Lasting Commitment

Recommendation Summary

It is important for the House of Representatives to make a lasting commitment to using the Internet to promote transparency, regularly reevaluating the best use of technology as the Internet changes and providing coordination across House Web sites and electronic data distribution channels. Coordination can set minimal standards for the timeliness, clarity, availability and preservation of official documents on the Web. Moving to Internet communication will also reduce redundancy and promote data standards— ultimately benefiting the public, who should be treated as advisers in the coordination process.

Coordinating Web Standards and Making a Lasting Commitment

While the recommendations presented in this report cover some of the most important changes that Congress can make in its Web presence to make itself more open and informative, in the coming years the Internet is bound to evolve in ways that no one can foresee today. For this reason and others presented below, it is important for the House of Representatives to make a lasting commitment to using the Internet to promote transparency. We are not in a position to say what such a lasting commitment should look like—it may take the form of a new mandate for an existing office or the creation of a special task force. ⁹⁰ The 1993 report of the Joint Committee on the Organization of Congress, for instance, recommended the creation of a Joint Committee on Information Management, in order to:

(1) coordinate information management for Congress;

(2) establish standards and applications policies for Congress and its support agencies for information technologies, including telecommunications, electronic files and indexing, publishing, and information dissemination within Congress and to the public ⁹¹

If the need was clear nearly 15 years ago, it is all the more relevant today. Whatever form this lasting commitment takes, it should have the following goals:

Staying ahead of Technology

In last decade the Internet has changed dramatically, and the next ten years are bound to be even more exciting. As the Internet makes new opportunities for transparency possible, it will be important to continually reevaluate Congress’s use of the web and set new goals and directions to be adopted by the many Web sites that make up house.gov . If and when “Web 3.0�—the “semantic Web�—emerges, we may find at our disposal entirely new methods of fostering civic engagement, disseminating information, creating accountability and maintaining ethical standards. The House must not only be ready to make changes, but should become a world leader in using the Internet to bring a new level of transparency to the American public.

Coordinating Web Standards

Because a number of Web sites fall under the umbrella of the House, some degree of coordination among them would benefit both the public and the House itself. Minimal standards for House documents and Web sites should be established to address their accuracy, timeliness, completeness, clarity, availability and preservation. We have shown earlier in this report that committee Web sites vary widely in these regards. As committees move forward with digital information, coordination will prevent redundancy in the development of data standards and software to manage electronic publications. Such coordination also will help the public digest the information. Completing and duplicative data standards makes it more difficult for tools to integrate data across sources, such as in aggregating hearing notices from all committees. Coordination has been proposed before, ⁹² and there is an opportunity now to make the needed changes.

The House should also be proactive in coordinating standards with related data sets maintained outside of the House, such as those created by the Senate, the Federal Election Commission and, of course, the Library of Congress. The overlap in each organization’s data sets suggests that coordination between the organizations will again reduce redundancy, promote technological advancements and allow the public to mesh the data sets together in new, creative ways.

Additionally, document formats and metadata protocols should be standardized through centralizing jurisdiction in the House. All documents should have permanent and human-readable Web addresses, and be made available in source XML. Standards for metadata use could be codified through the creation of a centralized tag dictionary, permitting further coordination with state legislatures, standards organizations, private companies and other interested parties.

A Congressional Internet Library

As Congress raises the bar for itself by mandating the creation of new databases, such as lobbying disclosure databases, travel and gift databases and earmark databases, it becomes far too easy for the public to be overwhelmed by the number and diversity of information sources. Coordination at the level of distribution will also be of value. Modernizing the Legislative Resource Center or creating a Congressional Internet Library could make distribution and documentation more efficient and uniform, provide a location for the databases to be preserved historically and ensure the technical database users among the public can find and understand the information that has been assembled for them.

Reexamining Institutional Barriers

Constituents are not the only ones suffering from an information overload. The web of rules governing members’ use of the Internet, in the jurisdiction of administration, franking, appropriations and ethics rules causes confusion, reducing the capacity of members to participate in a vibrant Internet-enabled public sphere. A permanent body charged with reexamining and removing the institutional barriers to members’ participation in the online public sphere would be useful.

Treating the Public as Advisers

Finally, because the data sets on legislation are often produced for the benefit of the public, it is important to have an ongoing dialogue with the technical users of the data about the most effective means of publishing the data. Throughout this report we have provided examples of how new uses of technology can benefit the House and the public alike, and in doing so we hope it is evident that treating the public as advisers on how best to use technology is a benefit to all.

Making a Lasting Commitment

History has shown us that in the past the speaker’s office has been a leader in using the Internet to promote transparency. We urge the speaker to come together with other leaders in the House and Senate and with those who are responsible for the publication and distribution of official documents to coordinate the continuing development of Congress’s use of the Web, to implement the ideas mentioned throughout this report, and to prepare for the changes to come.

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