Is the GPO a Digital Printer or a Digital Publisher?

by Matthew Rumsey

March 4, 2013, 3:32 p.m.

The tension between the Government Printing Office's traditional role as a printing operation and its future as a publisher of digital government information was apparent at a meeting of the House Appropriations Committee's Legislative Branch Subcommittee last week.

In her testimony, acting Public Printer Davita Vance-Cooks stressed the GPO's efforts to transition to the digital age and acknowledged that the agency's role has evolved to that of a publishing operation. Unfortunately, the GPO has often failed to take steps that would allow it to fully embrace that role and ensure its future as an essential source of information.

GPO is Closing Gap on Public Access to Law at JCP's Direction, But Much Work Remains

by Daniel Schuman

Feb. 19, 2013, 1:35 p.m.

The GPO's recent electronic publication of all legislation enacted by Congress from 1951-2009 is noteworthy for several reasons. It makes available nearly 40 years of lawmaking that wasn't previously available online from any official source, narrowing part of a much larger information gap. It meets one of three long-standing directives from Congress's Joint Committee on Printing regarding public access to important legislative information. And it has published the information in a way that provides a platform for third-party providers to cleverly make use of the information. While more work is still needed to make important legislative information available to the public, this online release is a useful step in the right direction.

Narrowing the Gap

In mid-January 2013, GPO published approximately 32,000 individual documents, along with descriptive metadata, including all bills enacted into law, joint concurrent resolutions that passed both chambers of Congress, and presidential proclamations from 1951-2009. The documents have traditionally been published in print in volumes known as the "Statutes at Large," which commonly contain all the materials issued during a calendar year.

The Statutes at Large are literally an official source for federal laws and concurrent resolutions passed by Congress. The Statutes at Large are compilations of "slip laws," bills enacted by both chambers of Congress and signed by the President. By contrast, while many people look to the US Code to find the law, many sections of the Code in actuality are not the "official" law. A special office within the House of Representatives reorganizes the contents of the slip laws thematically into the 50 titles that make up the US Code, but unless that reorganized document (the US Code) is itself passed by Congress and signed into law by the President, it remains an incredibly helpful but ultimately unofficial source for US law. (Only half of the titles of the US Code have been enacted by Congress, and thus have become law themselves.) Moreover, if you want to see the intact text of the legislation as originally passed by Congress -- before it's broken up and scattered throughout the US Code -- the place to look is the Statutes at Large.

In 2011, GPO published 58 volumes of the Statutes at Large, covering 1951-2009, but did not break the volumes down into their constituent documents. Up until that point, the public laws were available as individual documents on THOMAS from 1989 to present as HTML (and PDF in some instances), and from 1789 to 1875 as TIFF (unwieldy image) files from the Library of Congress. Even with this recent release, 76 years of federal law are still unavailable online in any format from any official source; and the files released for the years 1789 to 1875 by the Library of Congress are difficult to use.

House Convenes Second Public Meeting on Legislative Bulk Data

by Daniel Schuman

Feb. 14, 2013, 12:03 p.m.

On January 30th, the House of Representatives held a public meeting on its efforts to release more legislative information to the public in ways that facilitate its reuse. This was the second meeting hosted by the Bulk Data Task Force where members of the public were included; it began privately meeting in September 2012. (Sunlight and others made a presentation at a meeting, in October, on providing bulk access to legislative data.) This public meeting, organized by the Clerk's office, is a welcome manifestation of the consensus of political leaders of both parties in the House that now is the time to push Congress' legislative information sharing technology into the 21st century. In other words, it's time to open up Congress.

The meeting featured three presentations on ongoing initiatives, allowed for robust Q&A, and highlighted improvements expected to be rolled out of the next few months. In addition, the House recorded the presentations and has made the video available to the public. The ongoing initiatives are the release of bill text bulk data by GPO, the addition of committee information for docs.house.gov, and the release on floor summary bulk data. It's expected that these public meetings will continue at least as frequently as once per quarter, or more often when prompted by new releases of information.

As part of the introductory remarks, the House's Deputy Clerk explained that a report had been generated by the Task Force at the end of the 112th Congress on bulk access to legislative data and was submitted to the House Legislative Branch Appropriations Subcommittee. It's likely that the report's recommendations will become public as part of the committee's hearings on the FY 2014 Appropriations Bill, at which time the public should have an opportunity to comment.

Access to Legislation Gets Better, Promise of More to Come

by Daniel Schuman

Jan. 10, 2013, 3:12 p.m.

Earlier today, Speaker Boehner and Majority Leader Cantor and the Government Printing Office announced an improvement in how legislation is made publicly available. Starting in the 113th Congress, GPO will make all bills available for bulk download in XML format. While this doesn't change much from a technological perspective, it does mark a significant change from a policy perspective.

Congress launches THOMAS successor Congress.gov

by Daniel Schuman

Sept. 19, 2012, 1:40 p.m.

Seventeen years after the creation of THOMAS, Congress today launched a sleeker, more intuitive and user-friendly legislative information website, beta.congress.gov.

What's noticeable about this evolving beta website, besides the major improvements in how people can search and understand legislative developments, is what's still missing: public comment on the design process and computer-friendly bulk access to the underlying data.

We hope that Congress will now deeply engage with the public on the design and specifications process and make sure that legislative information is available in ways that most encourage analysis and reuse.

It's also worth remembering what the Library of Congress said in 1996 as it considered what should be included in its legislative information system:

To be most useful to Members of Congress, the legislative information system must provide access to a wide range of current and historical information, including existing statutes, support agency analyses, academic studies, court decisions, budget and financial data, regulations and executive branch policies, public and private sector analyses, lobby group position papers, and newspaper reports from local, national, and international sources.

We will have more to say as we dig deeper into the website. The Library of Congress' news release is below.

LOC News Announcement on Beta.Congress.gov

Looking for the "Constitution Annotated" on Constitution Day

by Daniel Schuman

Sept. 17, 2012, 10 a.m.

It's been 225 years since the signing of the U.S. Constitution in September 1787, so the three years that have elapsed since we first asked the Library of Congress to publish the invaluable legal treatise Constitution Annotated online in a machine-readable format are little more than 1.3% of the age of our country. And the 670 days (i.e. 1 year and 10 months) that have flown by since Congress directed the Constitution Annotated be published online as it is updated, along with two other "vital legislative and legal documents," are but a brief flicker in geological terms. But in political terms, another congressional session is about to pass without the Library of Congress and GPO making good on their obligation to provide this important document to the American people.

I've run out of clever ways to say this, especially with so many others saying the same thing, but here goes. The Constitution Annotated is an important legal treatise that provides an easily understandable exploration of how Supreme Court decisions interpret the U.S. Constitution. It's already published on Congress' internal website as it is updated, and it should be published online in the same way. At a minimum, the Library and GPO should meet their obligation to do as Congress directed: publish these documents online "as quickly as possible." An informed public is the cornerstone of our democracy, and they should have this information readily available to them.

How to Count Regulations: A Primer for Regulatory Research

by Sunlight Intern

Aug. 8, 2012, 1:26 p.m.

Data and Research Intern Alex Engler wrote this post.

The regulatory process is a politically charged arena, where the perception of over-regulating, or not regulating enough, can become a political liability. Whether it’s Tom Donohue of the Chamber of Commerce warning of the oncoming “tsunami” of regulations from President Obama, or the National Resource Defense Council striking at the Bush administration for an “assault on our clean air protections,” there can be no doubt that the perceived level of regulation matters.

However, one should look skeptically towards assertions about the degree of rulemaking, especially when those assertions include specific numbers. These claims are often based on research that can be structured so as to intentionally mislead. And beyond the political motivation in how one measures regulatory action, there are also many opportunities for genuine methodological error.

After 578 Days, Where's the Constitution Annotated?

by Daniel Schuman

July 17, 2012, 3:38 p.m.

578 days ago, Congress directed that the legal treatise Constitution Annotated be published online, but it's still not available. The Constitution Annotated, aka CONAN, is a 100-year-old continuously updated congressional report that explains the US Constitution as it has been interpreted by the Supreme Court. With so many important rulings coming out of the High Court, it's important to understand the effect of its decisions on the Constitution.

Here's what Congress, via the Joint Committee on Printing, required in a November 17, 2010 letter:

Update the online edition [of the Constitution Annotated] as frequently as possible, and to create new and improved functions on the CONAN site. The Congress and the public should find this site accessible and user-friendly.

The master file for CONAN is updated frequently and is available as a website accessible only to Congress. (The public version is updated only once a decade and is released in a barely usable format, which is why JCP sent the letter in the first place.) Many organizations have asked that CONAN be published online in its original (XML) format. JCP has directed that it be published online in a timely fashion, but in the less-useful PDF format. (It would be fine to publish it in both.)

This shouldn't be a particularly hard project, so we can only help but wonder why there's been such a long delay, and how much longer we'll have to wait? As an interim measure, it may be simplest for Congress simply to release to the public what it already publishes on the Congress' internal website. That should require the technological equivalent of flipping a switch.

This upcoming year, CONAN will be up for its once-a-decade print edition. With at least 4,870 statutorily mandated copies, at an guesstimated cost of $226 per copy, the House and Senate will pay over $1.1 million to prepare a document that will go out of date almost immediately. (Even assuming that 60% of the costs are for layout, which is necessary for an online edition as well, that's still $440,000 to print a very heavy doorstop.)

Some of these costs may be avoided by asking Congressional offices whether they prefer a paper version or electronic access, as is the practice with other legislative documents. But the bigger question is: what's taking so long? Is this a sign of bigger problems inside the Library of Congress and GPO? When will this finally be finished?

It looks like we'll have to continue to wait and see.

Media Spotlight on Congress Stalling Open Access to Legislation

by Nicko Margolies

June 5, 2012, 3:56 p.m.

The media's magnifying glass is concentrating attention on actions by the House Appropriations Committee that could stall progress on the public's access to legislative information. The Sunlight Foundation and our allies continue to push Congress to stop dragging their feet and join the 21st century by allowing developers access to open legislative data to build the tools to keep citizens informed about what their government is doing.

Please find and call your Representative at 202-224-3121 or write to reinforce the American public's hunger to read and follow legislation. Here are some excerpts from recent media coverage on this important transparency issue:

Roll Call reports on Republican House leadership's strong support for bulk access and quotes Rep. Crenshaw misunderstanding the issue of authentication:

“The Speaker pledged to make the 112th Congress the most open and transparent Congress in history and to make legislative data available online and in bulk,” said Michael Steel, spokesman for Speaker John Boehner (R-Ohio). “He continues to look for the best way to do that.”
“Facilitating public access to bulk legislative data ... has been and will continue to be a priority for this committee,” echoed Salley Wood, spokeswoman for the House Administration Committee. But lawmakers’ hands would be tied until a task force could be convened and report back on its findings, according to the House report language.
“We wanted to create a system where we could have this available but also make sure we protect the authenticity and integrity of all this information,” said Rep. Ander Crenshaw (R-Fla.), chairman of the Appropriations Subcommittee on the Legislative Branch.

The Washington Examiner addresses the committee's confusion over how citizens use and should access government information:

Folks with computers -- notably, professional and citizen journalists -- would be able to take information about massive numbers of bills and analyze them in myriad ways -- if Congress would allow such information to be downloaded from THOMAS in bulk.
It won't. And, according to a new draft report from the House Appropriations Committee, it won't be allowing bulk data downloads from THOMAS anytime soon.
Instead of taking a step towards greater transparency, the committee got hung up on whether people would know if the data they're seeing on the Internet were accurate and really from Congress -- "authentication," they call it.

FierceGovernment notes the lack of a deadline for decision making:

The report retains language decried by transparency opponents that would indefinitely postpone public bulk downloads of legislative information in XML. Good government groups, including the Sunlight Foundation, have pressed for the Library of Congress to release the bulk data used to track legislative developments in the library's THOMAS website, arguing that they could do a better job of presenting information.

TechPresident reports on the frustration among transparency advocates:

Open government advocates are up in arms over what appears to be another attempt by government bureaucrats to stall the move to enable bulk data downloads of legislative information online.

Slashdot opens the issue for conversation to their community:

The House Appropriations Committee is considering a draft report that would forbid the Library of Congress to allow bulk downloads of bills pending before Congress. The Library of Congress currently has an online database called THOMAS (for Thomas Jefferson) that allows people to look up bills pending before Congress. The problem is that THOMAS is somewhat clunky and it is difficult to extract data from it. This draft report would forbid the Library of Congress from modernizing THOMAS until a task force reports back. I am pretty sure that the majority of people on Slashdot agree that being able to better understand how the various bills being considered by Congress interact would be good for this country.

Legal Informatics also has a nice collection of blog posts on this issue.

Follow the latest developments here.

#FreeTHOMAS

by Daniel Schuman

June 4, 2012, 2:42 p.m.

Does information about legislation belong to Congress or to the American people? This basic question is at the heart of a fight over how Congress releases data about what it does. Americans increasingly use the Internet to make sense of the world around them, and open data opens up Congress in a way that's never been possible before.

In the pre-YouTube pre-iPhone pre-Amazon days, Congress built a website -- THOMAS -- to let citizens follow legislation from home. THOMAS was revolutionary ... in 1995. But the Internet continued to develop, becoming more sophisticated and interactive, allowing web developers to easily share the data behind their websites with others. It's why we can book flights on Travelocity, check the weather on our phones, and follow legislation on OpenCongress and GovTrack.

Unlike Travelocity and the National Weather Service, Congress doesn't share the data behind THOMAS with anyone. Instead, web developers must reverse-engineer the website to transmute its pages into usable data, like assembling a puzzle from thousands of ragged pieces without a picture on the box as a guide. This slow, difficult, and time-consuming process isn't perfect, but it's responsible for how most Americans follow what's happening in Congress.

The better approach is for Congress to publish the data behind THOMAS. Government regularly does this elsewhere, and "bulk data" is responsible for clever new uses of information developed by citizens, journalists, and even the government itself.

In upcoming days, the House is likely to pass legislative language that pays lip service to releasing THOMAS data while putting the idea in a deep freeze. This would be a disaster. But it's not too late. Tell your representative that you want Congress to publish legislative data now.

PS. For more information and the latest developments, go here.