Introduction and Summary of Recommendations

Citizens have a difficult time understanding Congress.

Many institutions have evolved to connect constituents with the complex body of information essential to their democratic self-determination. Americans rely on the news media, interest groups, libraries and direct communication with lawmakers to stay informed about their legislature. While these communication channels operate quite effectively within the spheres of their function, they are not without their drawbacks.

As society’s developing appetite for political information stretches these institutions to their full potential, their limitations become clearer. Traditional means of sharing congressional information are incapable of fully serving the needs of an increasingly aware society. Cost, popular appeal, equal access, comprehensiveness, timeliness and accuracy are all variables traded against one another as each news access point determines the identity of its unique service. Comprehensive coverage may be chosen at a prohibitive cost, or popular appeal may be given priority over measured analysis.

The inherent limitations of the traditional media force lawmakers to focus on controlling a narrative, often granting priority to the theatrical over the substantive. Legislative realities are only partially integrated into election politics, decreasing accountability and granting undue influence to monetary concerns. The legislative and the electoral should not be so distant from each other.

The Internet has the potential to change the way Congress and constituents interact.

Emergent forms of political technology online are leaving behind traditional constraints and redefining the role of legislative information in our society. As congressional information becomes more readily accessible online, representatives’ legislative and electoral work come closer to merging. An empowered citizenry can be more confident in its federal legislature when transparent processes discourage corruption and increase accountability—politicians’ work is free to be the legislative task at hand when the country better understands what politicians do.

There now exists a unique opportunity for Congress to earn the public’s trust.

The transformative potential of free and open access to influential data has inspired the creative analysis and presentation of political information, now being utilized by large communities of civically engaged Web users.

The emergence of new forms of civic engagement online brings the opportunity to reconsider the manner in which the House of Representatives makes itself visible online. Internet technology has enabled Web designers to make political and legislative information available and useful to less experienced observers, and the public’s capacity for meaningful oversight and awareness is increasing as a result. By embracing the promising potential of new social and technical realities online, the House can meet halfway citizen organizers, transparency advocates and Web designers.

The Internet’s potential does more than create a new set of responsibilities and expectations. If new technology will serve to better connect constituents to Congress— effectively spreading civic responsibility throughout society—it follows that the burden of designing and implementing online transparency reform will, similarly, be shared between Congress and an online community of civic technologists. Since both Congress and the Internet-using public hold an enormous stake in the unhindered flow of political and legislative information, only a discourse between the public and Congress can adequately address the situation.

It is in the spirit of this shared sense of responsibility for society’s greater interest in Congressional transparency that the Open House Project has been undertaken.

Together, we are opening the House.

Bringing together participants from the right and the left, the Open House Project was formed to identify attainable technological reforms and facilitate meaningful public access to the House of Representatives. Contributors with backgrounds in media, government, information technology, blogging and public policy have converged around issues raised throughout the House.

Each step of this report’s production has been collaborative, whether it has been choosing topics through conversations on a Google Group, researching house institutions and reforms through blog posts and a wiki or authoring sections of the report informed by collaboratively produced online documents. Preparing this report with the input of an entire community has informed it with the perspectives of a diverse group of contributors, and galvanized that group into a central forum for transparency advocacy.

A consensus was developed around the importance of reforms in the following areas, with a section of our report devoted to each topic. Detailed discussion of each recommendation can be found in the corresponding section.

1. Legislation Database

Congress should make available to the public a well-supported database of all bill status and summary information currently accessible through the Library of Congress. This database, as well as its supporting files, should be in a structured, non-proprietary format such as XML. Records in the database, including supporting files, should be updated in a timely manner. Such a database would enable independent Web sites to use information in new and creative ways, including educating the public about Congress and providing citizens with customized views of its proceedings. The database, being authoritative, would ensure the accuracy of the information presented to the public by independent Web sites. We also make recommendations regarding THOMAS (Library of Congress) and Government Printing Office products, the availability of bills online before they are debated and legislative language for future congressional databases.

2. Preserving Congressional Information

While it is essential that citizens have timely access to current congressional information, it is equally important for citizens to have guaranteed permanent access to the historical record of congressional activities. The provision of timely access does not, by itself, guarantee long-term access. Preservation and long-term access require specific procedures in addition to those that are necessary for short-term access. Those procedures include providing timestamps and hashes for documents, establishing policies for the inclusion of copyrighted works in public materials and distributing documents to memory institutions.

3. Congressional Committees

The House should follow the Senate’s lead and adopt a rules change requiring all House committees to promptly post online substantially verbatim records of their proceedings.

Guidelines should be set standardizing the offerings on committees’ Web sites, recognizing their essential legislative and oversight roles and realizing their potential as a public resource, given their central functional role. Specifically, committees should seek to:

•explain their functions

•link to relevant resources on THOMAS

•publicly post all relevant documents and information, including:

•recorded votes (as per H. RES. 231) using XML

•testimony and transcripts

•hearing and meeting schedules, on individual committee sites and on a centralized site, using RSS feeds for schedules and for notification of other offerings

4. Congressional Research Service

The closed nature of Congressional Research Service (CRS) reports should be revisited. While CRS is meant to be a research arm for Congress, this does not preclude the possibility of some of its reports being made available to the public. This would let the public benefit from the nonpartisan, objective analysis that CRS performs with public funding. Although current policy is that reports are generally off-limits to the public, most reports are already readily available to those with money or influence, and thus the current policy already requires revision. Issue briefs and other categories of reports should be made available to the public, with appropriate measures put in place to ensure that public access does not hinder CRS’s ability to perform its primary function as a research arm for Congress.

5. Member Web-Use Restrictions

Regulations governing members’ use of Web sites and e-mail should be updated to reflect the current nature of Internet use, taking into account the differences between old and new forms of communication, not just their similarities. The Committee on House Administration should convene a special, bipartisan task force composed of members of Congress, congressional staff on the Committee on House Administration and citizens, to better identify the intent of rules and regulations that are effectively prohibiting smarter use of technology on Capitol Hill. They should establish a new process, specific rules and new standards governing members’ use of the Internet.

6. Citizen Journalism Access

The House should create an Online Media Gallery to oversee the credentialing process for news Web sites, citizen journalists and bloggers. The gallery would serve as a sister organization to existing congressional press galleries, adapting the rules of those galleries for individuals who operate exclusively on the Internet. The formation of the gallery would allow a committee of peers to establish new rules for Web sites.

7. The Office of the Clerk of the House

The clerk of the House can greatly improve government transparency and strengthen public confidence in the House of Representatives and its members by:

•improving the quality of disclosure rules by offering more guidance

•requiring disclosure reports to be filed electronically

•indexing more records

•using common identification codes for related databases

•publishing all data from disclosure reports in a structured, non-proprietary database

•making data available free of charge and in a timely manner

•enforcing the relevant House rules and statutes by conducting regular audits and evaluations of compliance

8. The Congressional Record

The Congressional Record should accurately document what occurs on the House floor, as required by law ¹ . While still providing space for extended remarks, the House should support an update in procedures to ensure that the Congressional Record can be used to ascertain what has actually been said on the floor. The Joint Committee on Printing should be directed (and funded) to uphold standards of accuracy, to educate members and staff about updated procedures and to publish the Record in a manner that clearly distinguishes extended remarks from words that were actually spoken.

9. Congressional Video

The ability of the public to watch the legislative proceedings of Congress—both floor debate and committee hearings—is a significant component of what makes our government open and accessible. C-SPAN’s continual coverage on television and webcast video feeds from some House committees make it possible for citizens to see first-hand how Congress operates. Unfortunately, while all other records of government proceedings are a part of the public domain, C-SPAN’s de facto monopoly over broadcast-quality and archived video significantly restricts the ways in which the press can use video records when reporting on Congress. The House can and should provide the media greater access to its proceedings by extending its current recording infrastructure to cover all committee hearings, and by making live and archived access to these videos available directly to the public via the Internet.

10. Coordinating Web Standards

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.

This set of suggestions should be a first step in a developing dialogue between Congress and the American public. Just as Congress struggles to keep up with current technology, meet the demands of constituents, function within a limited budget and coordinate an array of technical systems under various jurisdictions, politically active citizens will be grappling with the immense responsibility and potential brought by developing information technology. Since members of Congress and the people they represent all stand to gain equally from transparency reform, the suggestions in this report offer an opportunity for bipartisan cooperation in developing reform.

As lawmakers work to modernize congressional information resources, a growing community of transparency advocates will be working with them to provide ongoing guidance—hoping for many opportunities to praise positive development, and looking forward to putting to good use the information acquired.

Given the possible impact of the reforms advised in this report, and the level of interest and involvement generated in the growing community of transparency advocates, this report is being released as a first step in an ongoing collaboration between Congress and a community of involved citizens.

The Open House Project report will be posted online, to encourage further discussion and collaboration. As technology develops, laws change and new information is acquired, it will be revised accordingly. This report is intended to encourage the review of reform efforts and congressional procedures and to strengthen the growing relationships between Web designers and congressional technology directors, between transparency advocates and legislators, and between Congress and its constituents.

For further information, please contact John Wonderlich, Program Director for the Sunlight Foundation.

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