The same distinctions that exist in research, advocacy, and legislation exist in the realms of political influence. Since committees are the real seat of specialized congressional knowledge and power, it's exciting to see CRP sort fundraising information by congressional committee, as currently highlighted on their Capital Eye blog.

Since this is often the way tht fundraisers are advertised (For $1500, see the chair of the ____ Committee, who controls ____ issue!!!!), public scutiny of this money should be organized in the same way. Advertising committee positions for fundraising seems only a few steps from the wanton corruption of Duke Cunningham's bribery menu; tracking fundraising by committee is a small step toward dispelling monied interests' undue policy influence.

Ars Technica has an article up about the "hyperconnected"--defined by the Interactive Data Corporation as those people for whom the line between work and personal has been blurred to the point that they're "willing to communicate with work on vacation, in restaurants, from bed, and even in places of worship."

The article offers some criticism of the purportedly overworked, suggesting offhandly that the hyperconnected will pose new challenges for IT departments, and possibly have questionable effects on workers' personal lives.

While these concerns over productivity and relaxation are certainly valid, there's another side of merging personal and workplace that's ignored by the commentary: the same breakdown that leads to work email being written in bed also leads to the breakdown of the limitations on the role of the "professional". Just as communications technology leads to more work being done at home, the Internet allows for the intellectual entrepeneurship of the online volunteer researcher, the blog-based organizer, the midnight advocate. As Clay Shirky's Here Comes Everybody makes clear, individuals who can organize without centralized leadershp form a new, powerful, agile force, harnessing what has been dubbed the "cognigitive surplus" to redefine the way we organize our ideas and ultimately ourselves.

While this may have some effect on the modes of our relaxation, the effects on business, government, and society will more than make up for them.

(full disclosure: I often work in the middle of the night.)

I just discovered DARPA's Policy Analysis Market project. The idea has me wondering what the place is for market based deliberations solutions, and when it's appropriate to give actors a self-incentive that isn't already inherent to a situation.

There's a strong argument to be made for the predictive power of markets, and their stabilizing incentive structures, but their application beyond economics hasn't really been worked out yet. Some examples of market-like political models include Fantasy Congress, and National Journal's Political Stock Exchange.

When success isn't able to be neatly defined as profit (as in financial markets), and when motivators and strategies are as complex as they are in a legislature, sometimes, paradoxically, it's profitable to operate at a loss. Indeed, one could suggest that all non-profits are the pure form of incentives being isolated from broader incentive structures.

(hat tip to this tweet from "hytmal"; my initial response is here)

This afternoon I attended a talk by Aneesh Chopra, the Secretary of Technology for Virginia, hosted by New Media Strategies.

Chopra described his rather unusual job, a sort of newly styled state-CIO position, and gave us his vision for government and the development of the surrounding areas in the process.

Chopra began by listing the three priorities in his job as a cabinet member under the Governor. He sees his job in thirds. The first third deals with tradition IT manangement (are the servers working). The second third is his role as emissary and cheerleader for technology in government, soliciting, recognizing, and fostering creative new ideas, like combining forms to orient agency workflow toward a citizen-centric model. In his description of this aspect of his work, Chopra really shined, probably a sign of someone engaged in something new and constructive, full of ideas, and seeing potential everywhere he looked. He said "just scratching the surface" and "really simple things" repeatedly, more signs of someone enchanted by the possibilities of technology, and in the right position to make things happen. About including the public in his work, he said:

We have failed to tap the hidden talent of the uncredentialed.

I've tried to say this before in other ways--distributed expertise is disconnected from policy creation, etc--but his formulation captures the real potential for transparent and receptive institutions. Chopra sees analysis from bloggers as having huge potential for stimulating reform (and should check out the Open House Project), and, as I often do, bemoans the focus on the political and wonders about people's capacity to add to substantive policy debate and deliberation. His plan to integrate public policy ideas amounts to a small e-suggestions box for now, but Chopra is certainly deeply involved in the practical fight of how to make Virginia's government function more effectively though technology.

He's not just trying to get the government running smoothly, though. Chopra sees the development of the IT sector of our area's economy as the third major goal in his work, and has grand ideas to test about how young people given a real chance and a computer might find their way into the new tech economy.

Virginians are lucky to have such a proactive visionary leading their tecnological development.

In the month since PublicMarkup.org launched, we've gotten 121 comments on our draft reform legislation, the Transparency in Government Act of 2008. The media and blog coverage has been overwhelmingly favorable, but not without a healthy dose of skepticism.

The main questions we've faced attempt to locate the bill within a traditional reform process: Who will sponsor it? When will it pass? What are its chances?

As I wrote when we started encountering these hesitations,

As it stands now, though, we're happy to not have all the answers about where the bill is going. Just like legislation itself, we're not pretending to know the best strategy for the bill, and we recognize that best ideas will be the ones that can benefit from a large community of experts and stakeholders.

Now that we've gotten some real feedback about the bill's provisions, we can make some decisions about how to advocate for the package's implementation. (more)

After previewing it first, I attended last Wednesday’s Hearing by the Constitution Subcommittee of the Senate Judiciary Committee about “Secret Law and the Threat to Democratic and Accountable Government.”

For fuller coverage, see FireDogLake, the Guardian, ACS Blog, or the statements and testimony from the hearing (set off on the upper right).

While my coverage will be far from complete, I find the process of taking and then preparing my notes from committee hearings to be a great way to digest what was presented, and to start to work through some of the issues that relate to open government and accountability, which lie at the heart of this hearing. (more)

Tomorrow morning, the Senate Constitution Subcommittee of the Judiciary Committee will hold a hearing on Secret Law and the Threat to Democratic and Accountable Government. In Chairman Feingold's words:



Senator Feingold is talking about memos put out by the Office of Legal Counsel (OLC), a part of the Department of Justice. The executive branch needs guidance on how the law affects its actions, and the OLC exists to provide legal interpretations for rest of the executive branch. These opinions strongly determine the nature of executive branch activities, and therefore have an undeniable bearing on the public interest. (more)

I'd like to elaborate on an important point about the IG reform measure that just passed the Senate.

The measure includes a requirement that the Inspectors General post their reports on their Web sites. This requirement places the responsibility of disclosure on the agencies themselves, rather than on citizens looking form information. The wording of the mandate takes the language of the Freedom of Information Act, which puts the onus on citizens to request information, and uses it to set a standard of full disclosure of IG reports.

That the government should take responsibility for openness, or make disclosure the rule rather than the exception, is one of Ellen's spotlight ideas; a completely open government would render FOIA unnecessary.

We're happy to see such a specific requirement pass the Senate in the spirit of full digital access.

The Inspector General of each agency shall...that is subject to release under...the Freedom of Information Act...post that report or audit (or portion of that report or audit) on the website of the Office of the Inspector General;

Boing Boing is quoting a talk by Clay Shirky on what they're calling the "cognitive surplus", or the amount of human thought not taken up by necessary pursuits. (I think I'd call it "discretionary cognition", for a financial comparison). They calculate the human-thought-hours taken up by wikipedia, and find:

So how big is that surplus? So if you take Wikipedia as a kind of unit, all of Wikipedia, the whole project--every page, every edit, every talk page, every line of code, in every language that Wikipedia exists in--that represents something like the cumulation of 100 million hours of human thought. I worked this out with Martin Wattenberg at IBM; it's a back-of-the-envelope calculation, but it's the right order of magnitude, about 100 million hours of thought.

And television watching? Two hundred billion hours, in the U.S. alone, every year. Put another way, now that we have a unit, that's 2,000 Wikipedia projects a year spent watching television. Or put still another way, in the U.S., we spend 100 million hours every weekend, just watching the ads. This is a pretty big surplus.

As we consider and build the tools that put political information online, we should remember that we're tapping into something unimaginably vast; we get to help shape the answer of the question "what would all of those people be doing if they weren't watching television?".

Even if only a small amount of that leisure time gets connected to politics and government online, and it is well connected to the substance of oversight and legislation, of politics and elections, then democracy is going to go through a fundamental change. TV can't compete, and the sheer amount of human attention moving online and getting involved in participatory media has enough weight to shift both politics and government. Even if one in 20,000 cares about a specific GAO report, that's enough to make a drastic change, assuming people's interests and abilities are led to those places where their attention matters. To those places where their attention is important, where they can have some effect, where they can add to their knowledge, or to where their knowledge can be helpful.

Since coming across a CRS report on efforts to strengthen the Offices of Inspectors General (OIGs, and IGs), I've been interested in executive oversight structures and the laws that govern them. A section of PublicMarkup.org's Transparency in Government Act even covers IG report publication. It looks like the Project on Government Oversight (POGO) and Congress are also intently focused on the issue, as they've just passed a second version of a measure to strengthen Inspectors General.

POGO's blog explains that the Senate just passed S. 2324 (GovTrack, OpenCongress), after, according to POGO,

an amendment offered by Sen. Jon Kyl (R-AZ) finally broke through the logjam that had blocked the bill's passage since last November.

For more background on IG reform, see especially POGO's February report, Inspectors General: Many Lack Essential Tools for Independence.

Senator Lieberman is among those praising the measure, which still needs to be reconciled with the House version before going to the President.

S. 2324 would amend Title 5 of the US Code, significantly strengthening the independence and effectiveness of oversight by IGs.

Of particular interest to Sunlight is the provision that Inspectors General post copies of IG reports to their Web sites, (as long as they're subject to FOIA, and therefore not classified or otherwise unfit for publication). The text: