In the last 24 hours there have been three significant developments on providing the public with better access to legislative information. The Appropriations Committee approved a fundamentally flawed report; Rep. Honda spoke out in favor of bulk access to legislative information; and Speaker Boehner's spokesperson reaffirmed House Republicans' commitment to bulk data while simultaneously praising the move by appropriators.

As best as I can tell, House appropriators tried to move forward on the House's broader commitments to openness and transparency but became entangled in its implementation. Instead of striking a balance between the desire for openness with legitimate concerns about process, they fell victim to fears and misunderstanding about technology that resulted in a ham-fisted process that will likely freeze any forward momentum, or maybe even turn back the clock.

What remains to be seen is whether appropriators will be able to right themselves even at this late date; whether other congressional actors will weigh in; or if these transparency efforts will be dealt a staggering blow that will take years to recover from.

Approps Approves a Flawed Report

Yesterday the House Appropriations Committee approved a legislative report that provides lip service in support of bulk access to legislative data while effectively undermining it. The flawed language that we criticized yesterday has remained in place. Here's the good and bad, in two sentences, from the report.

The Committee has heard requests for the increased dissemination of congressional information via bulk data download from non-governmental groups supporting openness and transparency in the legislative process. While sharing these goals, the Committee is also concerned that Congress maintains the ability to ensure that its legislative data files remain intact and a trusted source once they are removed from the Government’s domain to private sites.

In other words, the report expresses concern that citizens will mash-up and make use of legislative information in ways that Congress cannot control. Indeed, that is the point, and it is already common practice. When citizens have access to raw legislative information, they built sites like GovTrack, Open Congress, Washington Watch, and Scout. After all, the information belongs to the American people.

The report's solution to this "problem" is to establish a task force to look at the issue ... without a date by which the task force must report, a mechanism for public input, a requirement for open meetings, or the inclusion of any members of the public as members. And the questions the task force is supposed to address have already been evaluated by the same people who will serve on this new task force.

We know this because we have a copy of a March 2008 Library of Congress memo that looked into "what resources would be needed to make the underlying raw THOMAS data available to the public in XML, so that other sites can re-package the data in different ways without having to link back to THOMAS." The best part of that 2008 report is its final sentence:

Finally, efforts are underway at the Library of Congress to undertake a study of the relationship between LIS and THOMAS that will serve as the basis of a strategic plan for THOMAS. This will provide a sound basis by which we can better assess the expectations of Congress and the public, and how best to meet them. The study will also include an examination of accuracy, permanence and authentication of legislative data, along with any attendant issues, risks and workload.

In the words of Yogi Berra, it's deja vu all over again. We're not even asking for new information to be made available, but rather for currently-available information to be made available in computer-friendly ways. Our fear is that the task force is simply a way of sweeping everything under the rug. It's happened before.

Rep. Honda Speaks In Favor of Bulk Access Now

Representative Mike Honda, who has been a consistent leader on bulk access to legislative information and is the ranking member of the Legislative Branch Appropriations Subcommittee, spoke out on the issue in his remarks yesterday. He has been involved since the beginning, and his remarks are particularly important because of the story they tell.

I represent Silicon Valley, the center of technological innovation in this country. Since I joined this subcommittee, I have tried to push the House and other agencies to explore technological solutions to issues such as transparency, evacuation management, and data storage.

As you probably know, Federal agencies, including our own in the legislative branch, can be slow to change and adapt new technologies. This is mentioned in the report, which includes language on the issue of bulk data downloads of legislative information, something I requested and secured language about in this bill in fiscal year 2009.

This effort is now also being championed by leadership on both sides of the aisle, as it is a way to increase transparency by allowing the public to easily download and analyze government data.

There are some concerns about cost and the ability to authenticate the data that the language in the report tries to address.

I think, however, that these are relatively simple matters to overcome, as data is already being compiled in a format that can easily be distributed and technology support staff has indicated that only a simple procedure is needed to make the bulk data available.

Furthermore, the GPO already employs an authentication standard for its own accessible bulk data through its FDSys website that we could also utilize.

I look forward to working with the Chairman and leadership of the House as this bill moves through the legislative process to advance these efforts to increase public access to legislative data. I believe the time to implement this is now. (emphasis added)

Speaker Boehner's Blog Reiterates Support for Bulk Access While Commenting on the Move by Appropriators

Speaker Boehner's Digital Communications Director Don Seymour wrote a blogpost called "House Moving Forward on Bulk Legislative Info." It is noteworthy for two reasons.

It reaffirms the House's commitment to make Congress more open and transparent, including by "releasing the House's legislative data in machine-readable formats." Simply put, the House has made significant strides towards online transparency, as we've written about many times before. A partial list must include the House's transparency portal, the Legislative Data and Transparency Conference, the Congressional Hackathon, the Boehner-Cantor letter, and the rules package. But bulk access to legislative data is the result that many of these efforts are working towards.

The blogpost also describes appropriators efforts to create a task force as "taking another step today toward making bulk legislative information easily available to the public." As we've described elsewhere, the devil is in the details, and the details in the committee's report would apparently undo some of the House leadership's current transparency efforts. While the approps bill moves through the legislative process, it may put all of the other data liberation efforts on ice while everyone waits to see what happens. I cannot imagine that's an acceptable solution to leaders in either party, to members of Congress, or to the public at large.

by Daniel Schuman and Eric Mill

House Appropriators may deal a tremendous blow to prospects for improving public access to legislative information. In a draft report expected to accompany the Legislative Branch Appropriations Bill for 2013, scheduled for a full committee vote tomorrow, appropriators misunderstand how data can be "authenticated," and kick responsibility for improving public access to legislative data to a non-public task force with no set reporting date. Unless corrected, this draft report represents a tremendous step backward for transparency, and fails to seriously grapple with the history of efforts to free legislative information for widespread public use.

Legislative Information Should Be Widely Disseminated

The purpose of THOMAS is to bring legislative information to as many people as possible; preservation and authentication is best handled through other long-established methods that THOMAS was never intended to address. The lack of authenticity to THOMAS data does not present a problem for most users. Rather, the largest problem with THOMAS is that the data is not provided so that it can be easily copied, placing a significant burden on citizens who wish to make sophisticated use of the information. The THOMAS website directly provides nearly a million users each month with an "inauthentic" version of information about legislative activities, a practice that will continue unabated under the draft committee report. While THOMAS often links to a GPO document that is "authenticated," its display of bill text, legislative summaries, cosponsor data, and other information is not certified as being correct, and often changes because of the Library's errors in how it publishes the data.

To the extent to which THOMAS information should be authentic, the report does not engage with best practices around authenticity of data on the Internet. Verifying the authenticity of data can be performed securely and reliably with the use of metadata external to the data itself. In fact, this is precisely how GPO's FDSys currently authenticates XML documents of the US government, including its legislation, regulations, and laws. GPO accompanies each document it publishes with a "PREMIS" metadata file that includes information needed to cryptographically verify the authenticity of documents. For example, here's the PREMIS file accompanying HR 6289. Worries about authenticity are a red herring.

Bulk Access is a Separate Question from Authenticity 

Bulk access to THOMAS data is a simpler and less controversial step than this draft report contemplates. The underlying information is already publicly available on the THOMAS website, and third parties already are scraping the data from the site to make it available in bulk. It simply makes sense for the Library to meet the needs of the public directly through providing the data in bulk itself. This merely opens up another avenue to access info that's already being released. It would also eliminate any errors created through the scraping process.

The Draft Report Creates a Secret, Never-Ending Process

The draft report would require the establishment of a task force to examine and report back on a number of issues raised in the report regarding bulk access to legislative data. This is seriously flawed in several major ways.

First, bulk access is about granting the public better access to legislative information. It stands to reason that the public should be included in all discussions. However, the proposed task force does not include any non-governmental participants. A number of individuals and organizations are expert in these matters, and should be full participants.

Second, the draft report imposes no deadline for a report from the task force. The last time Appropriators required a task force on a similar matter, four year ago, it never reached any conclusions or reported back. Without a deadline, the same will happen here.

Third, the task force's report should be provided to the public as well as to the committee at the time it is completed. Draft reports should also be made available for public comment.

Fourth, the report language is terribly overbroad: it prohibits the establishment of bulk data downloads of legislative information prior to the reporting back of the task force. Making use of modern technology to provide information in better ways should be something that is encouraged, not prohibited. Information is already being provided to the public in bulk regarding certain legislative activity. Would this report language stop the GPO from providing bulk access to the Congressional Record, as it does now? Would it prohibit the House of Representatives from providing bulk access through its innovative docs.house.gov portal? If so, that would be a disaster for transparency.

Finally, the idea of a task force to assess these questions ignores that these issues were already addressed by the Library of Congress in a 2008 memo.The memo explained that the XML database containing bill metadata was expected to be able to be released in bulk by May 2008. It also stated that "CRS... will continue to identify and analyze ... the following policy matters for the Committee's consideration," including "data accuracy" and "data permanence and authentication." Where are the results of CRS's analysis? What is the strategic plan for THOMAS referenced in the memo? Where is the study promised that would engage in "an examination of permanence and authentication of legislative data, along with any attendant issues, risks and workload?"

Simply put, the draft committee report's establishment of a task force is another recipe for delay. We saw this four years ago, the last time the Library was pressed to make improvements on this issue. The time is long past for action, and the Appropriations Committee will be judged on whether it makes another plan to make a plan, or whether it establishes real deadlines for progress. THOMAS itself was created in a matter of months when the Speaker of the House decided it was a priority. Bulk access to legislative data will also come about when legislators decide that being transparent is more important than establishing a task force to talk about it.

The House Appropriations Committee just announced it will hold a full committee markup this Thursday (May 31) on the Legislative Branch Appropriations Bill for FY 2013. While the Sunlight Foundation is hopeful this legislation will address a number of our transparency priorities, we will be watching in particular to see whether the longstanding issue of improving public access to legislative information will finally be addressed.

At the subcommittee markup, there was a tantalizing hint that the committee report will contain language to require bulk access to THOMAS data, the importance of which the public interest community has addressed many times before. We are hoping this bill will require the Library of Congress to implement bulk access to THOMAS within 120 days of the legislation's passage, and require the Library to create an advisory committee on THOMAS.

While we were able to observe that the subcommittee adopted this draft legislation without amendment, the accompanying report (where language regarding bulk access was inserted) has not been released to the public. Congressional staff have told me the report will not be released to the public until the full committee markup.

Committee members will get a look at the bill and accompanying report no later than Tuesday, which is three calendar days before the hearing (if you count Thursday as a calendar day, otherwise it should be available today, Friday), in accordance with Committee rule 6(j). The public must wait get a look at the bill no later than Wednesday at 11am, which is when the committee chairman must electronically post a copy of the bill according to committee rule 4(d)(4). The committee's rules makes no mention of when committee reports must be released to the public, although such a report will presumably be ready when the draft bill is released to the public.

In the last 18 months, the House of Representatives has made significant strides towards greater openness and transparency in congressional deliberations, but significant work remains. The Legislative Branch Appropriations Bill for 2013, which was marked-up by a subcommittee last week, presents a major vehicle for the House leadership to make good on its promise to implement common-sense transparency measures this session.

While there are many issues that can be addressed a number of different ways, Sunlight will be looking at  the full committee markup to see if the bill:

-- Provides bulk access to THOMAS data

-- Fully funds the Office of Congressional Ethics

-- Requires Publication of  CRS Reports online

-- Publishes the Constitution Annotated online as it's updated in XML

-- Reinstates the Office of Technology Assessment

-- Makes reports to Congress available online

-- Publishes House spending information in an appropriate format for the data

Improve Public Access to THOMAS Data

THOMAS was created by Congress to make legislative information freely available to the public, but the Library of Congress has not kept up with best practices. One such practice -- "bulk access" -- would ease the development of new tools and technologies by publishing THOMAS data files online, promoting accurate and timely information dissemination. Congress has expressed its support for bulk data as have many organizations, but the Library continues to stall despite a 2008 memo describing how easy it would be to implement.

At the recent legislative subcommittee hearing, Rep. Honda mentioned that text has been inserted into the committee's report that would in some way address the bulk data question. The last time this happened, the language was watered down sufficiently so that the Library of Congress successfully evaded its obligations over the last half a decade. We hope the bill will contain these two provisions:

(1) Congress directs the Library of Congress to implement bulk access to THOMAS within 120 days of passage

(2) Congress directs the Library of Congress to immediately create an advisory committee on improving public access to legislative information that is composed of people inside and outside of government.

Fully Fund the Office of Congressional Ethics

The Office of Congressional Ethics is the House of Representatives' independent ethics watchdog. It came into existence in March 2008 after a series of corruption scandals prompted congressional leaders to explore creating a transparent, outside enforcement entity. While OCE is not as robust as originally contemplated, it plays a crucial role in ethics oversight. Last year, the office survived a counterproductive effort by nearly 100 members of Congress to significantly reduce its funding. This year's appropriations bill maintains OCE's funding at $1,548,000, which is the same level as last year. We believe that OCE should be strengthened, but at a minimum, its funding should be sustained at least at this level.

Publish CRS Reports Online

Congressional Research Service reports undergird the public's understanding of Congress, but CRS no longer directly releases the reports to the public. As a consequence, while many reports used by citizens, courts, and government employees are on the internet, they are often out-of-date, and a fair number are available only for a fee or not at all. By comparison, sister agencies like CBO and GAO regularly publish reports online. For more than a decade, organizations and members of Congress have urged that CRS reports be publicly available, and CRS concerns have been refuted by a former counsel to the House of Representatives. The reports are already digitized and available on Congress's intranet; it would take a trivial effort to publish them online.

During the markup of the 2012 Appropriations Bill, Rep. Leonard Lance introduced an amendment that would have required the Clerk of the House and the Secretary of the Senate to maintain a website containing CRS Reports and Appropriation products while protecting confidential advice from CRS. Similar legislation has been introduced by Rep. Quigley. We hope that House Appropriators will move to make these reports more readily available to the public.

Release the Constitution Annotated Online

The Constitution Annotated (or CONAN) is a continuously-updated 100-year-old legal treatise that explains the Constitution as it has been interpreted by Supreme Court. Maintained by CRS and printed by GPO, a hard copy is published (and put online) only once a decade, with printed updates every two years. However, CONAN is updated frequently, with those updates available on Congress' internal website. In November 2010 (18 months ago), the Joint Committee on Printing directed that the continuously-updated version of CONAN be made available online as a searchable PDF, but it still is not. Many organizations have asked that the underlying document be published online in its original (XML) format, which is more user friendly than a PDF, and would take minimal effort to release.

This upcoming year, the Constitution Annotated will be up for its once-a-decade print edition. With at least 4,870 statutorily mandated copies, at an estimated cost of $226, the House and Senate will pay over $1.1 million for a document that will go out of date almost immediately. We suggest that some of these costs may be recouped by asking House offices if they wish to receive a print copy, as a continuously updated web version is already made available to all congressional offices. Regardless, we urge that the web version that is already made available to congressional offices also be made available to the American people in its web friendly format. While publishing the document as a PDF would be a small step forward, the best use of taxpayer dollars to maximize usability would be to publish it in XML, the format in which it is prepared.

Other Provisions

Sunlight support additional measures in the Legislative Branch Appropriations bill. Those provisions include:

The reinstatement of the Office of Technology Assessment, as proposed by Rep. Rush Holt last year. OTA provided Congress http://sunlightfoundation.com/blog/taxonomy/term/Office-of-Technology-Assessment/ with the “means for securing competent, unbiased information concerning the physical, biological, economic, social, and political effects” of technology.

Inclusion of the Access to Congressionally Mandated Reports Act, which would would gather together all reports to Congress from federal agencies in one place. It requires that they be published online by GPO in bulk, in open formats, and in a timely fashion, so that people can easily learn about the work of the federal government. The legislation would not require any additional appropriation, and would bring much needed transparency and coordination. It has already passed the Committee on Oversight and Government reform, was introduced in the Senate, and is awaiting action by the House.

Avoiding decreasing funding levels for the House of Representatives and certain legislative support agencies below the subcommittee proposal. Funding for the House has already diminished by at least 10% over the last two years. This raises the concern that congressional staff may become more susceptible to influence from lobbyists, and that support entities (like GPO, the Clerk, and the Library of Congress) that have transparency roles will be less able to fulfill their missions.

Publishing the House Expenditure Reports in a data-friendly format such as CSV. The quarterly reports contain all spending by the House of Representatives, and are currently published online as a PDF. Starting in 2009, then Speaker-Pelosi began publishing House Expenditure Reports online, which was a significant step forward in making them available, as they had only been published in giant books. Unfortunately, publishing columns of data in a PDF does not allow for the data to be analyzed. Simply put, we're only halfway to House spending transparency. The Sunlight Foundation goes through significant effort to scrape the data from the PDFs and put them into spreadsheets, but this should really be done by the House. It would increase accuracy and timeliness -- and so long as the House releases the information, it should do so in the most useful way possible.

As I wrote yesterday, each day seems to bring a small step forward on improving public access to legislative information, with two notable developments today.

First, Rep. Honda gave a tantalizing hint of progress on bulk access to legislative data at this morning's subcommittee markup of the Legislative Branch Appropriations bill (sorry no video). He said that "there is exhaustive discussion on bulk data downloads in the [sub]committee report." It's not clear exactly what this means -- the subcommittee report won't be made available to the public until the full committee markup, which is tentatively scheduled in two weeks -- but it's an indication that public attention has joined with bipartisan support from appropriators, overseers, and leadership to make progress on making legislative information available to the American people.

From what I've heard, the pushback is coming largely from the support agencies, although the nature of those concerns are not clear. With the Law Library of Congress taking the lead on THOMAS in recent years, including making some small but useful changes to the site, there is hope that they will grow into their role as facilitators of online transparency. All along, the public interest community has been asking for bulk access to THOMAS data and the creation of an advisory committee on THOMAS.

Second, the objections raised by legislative support agencies are not particularly weighty, at least according to a 2008 memo from the Library of Congress to the Committee on House Administration regarding the availability of THOMAS data. As far as I'm aware, this is the first time it's been made accessible to the public. What's notable is how the Library of Congress was technologically positioned to deliver on legislative data transparency four years ago, but apparently did not move forward. At a minimum, it should alleviate concerns about the difficulty of technological implementation.

According to the memo, the Library expected to finish developing an XML database containing bill metadata such as bill summaries, status of bills, and information on co-sponsors four years ago (in May 2008.) What's revealing about this is that much of the information about legislation has been available in a structured database for nearly half a decade -- and in the kind of format that developers need.

Moreover, the Library reports that "the resources will be available to copy the database daily into an Anonymous File Transfer Protocol [FTP] site so it is accessible to the public" by the time the LIS 2.0 database is completed. This would allow the data to be made available in bulk. (There are better ways to do so, but this is an acceptable solution.)

Also at the time of the memo, March 2008, full text of bills and committee reports were available on GPO Access, but not in XML. From what we can tell, nearly all bills are now available in XML, although it is unclear whether committee reports are prepared in XML. All of this could also be made available in bulk using the technology described in the memo.

The memo raises one major policy implication concerning who owns the data, contemplating that it belongs to the House, Senate, Congressional Research Service, and Government Printing Office. In the literal sense, that's backwards: the information is owned by the American people and held in trust by Congress and its legislative agencies. These entities do serve as repositories of the information, however, and deserve consideration as to the technological means by which it is made available. However, that's with the understanding that these entities should strive to meet the public's need for the information and expansively follow the policies set by Congress in favor of transparency.

We'll continue to keep a close eye on how all this develops.

Library of Congress letter to Committee on House Administration on THOMAS

Today 30 organizations from across the political spectrum joined together to ask Congress to improve public access to legislative information. Our joint letters to congressional appropriators and rulemakers urges Congress to direct that the THOMAS legislative database be published online and to establish an advisory committee on further improvements.

THOMAS, Congress' legislative information website that provides basic information about legislative and congressional actions, has fallen far behind the needs of its users. Many have turned to important websites like GovTrack, OpenCongress, and WashingtonWatch to monitor congressional activities.

These sites and others, which repackage and add important context to legislative activities, extract data from the THOMAS website through a painstaking and often brittle process. To make this process easier and more reliable, the Library of Congress should publish THOMAS information "in bulk," which makes the entire legislative database available for download at once, instead of publishing information in such a way that it can only be gathered by scraping data from hundreds or thousands of webpages.

Bulk access to legislative information is already common practice inside and outside the government. For example,

•  The Government Printing Office publishes six major databases, including the Federal Register, in bulk;
•  The House's Office of Law Revision Counsel publishes the U.S. Code in bulk;
•  New Jersey and New Hampshire publish their legislative information in bulk; and
•  Data.gov has nearly 400,000 datasets available in bulk, including 4,395 high-value datasets.

The transparency community, technology innovators, journalists, good government organizations, and private companies have long sought bulk access to legislative data. In May 2007, a coalition of organizations called on Congress to "embrace structured data by publishing the status of legislation and other information to the web ... in structured data formats". In 2009, Congress articulated support for bulk access to legislative data in an explanatory statement accompanying an appropriations bill. And in November 2011 one of the action items emerging from the House's Congressional Facebook Hackathon was an endorsement of releasing "structured machine-readable legislative data ... in a bulk format."

This past year the Sunlight Foundation, GovTrack, and Open Congress submitted testimony to House Appropriators calling for bulk access to legislative information. We applaud the major strides made by the House of Representatives in improving public access to the House's legislative information, but what's missing is the kind of information only available through the THOMAS website. This includes bill summaries, bill status information, bill co-sponsors, and other information that provides important context for legislation.

We estimate that for every person that goes directly to the THOMAS website, at least two people visit a third-party website. But even these sites must rely on legislative information generated and maintained by Congress, which is only available through the difficult-to-use THOMAS website. There will always be a need for a congressionally-mandated website, but Congress should ensure that the innovative and transformative uses of legislative information by third parties is grounded upon accurate and timely data. And that means providing bulk access to everyone.

Organizations encourage rulemakers to publish THOMAS legislative information in bulk

Organizations urge appropriators to publish THOMAS data in bulk

Making sure that people can get information about what our government is doing is the heart of what we do at Sunlight. And right now, there’s a chance to make some big changes.

A committee in Congress is working on an appropriations bill that could make it easier to find out what Congress is doing by changing how information is released by the Library of Congress through a website through THOMAS. They’re writing the bill as we speak (er, type...), so this is a perfect moment to speak up for greater transparency.

Why we need quality information from the Library of Congress

Currently, the only way we can get to know about legislation and see any action taken on a bill is through a website operated by the Library of Congress -- known as THOMAS. Because THOMAS is not easy to use for ordinary folks, a few tech groups including Open Congress, GovTrack and PopVox have built tools to make the process of reading government legislation online much easier. However, extracting information from THOMAS is no walk in the park. This is because the information has to be collected from thousands of pages and can be glitchy and delayed.

We need Congress to change that. They can do this by requiring the Library of Congress to put online legislative data in THOMAS using a “geek” favorite process known as “bulk access.” This process makes accessing online information simpler, faster and easier. And really, all the cool kids in government are doing it these days. Literally hundreds of thousands of data sets are available on Data.gov, the House of Representatives has a spiffy new transparency portal and even the good ‘ol Government Printing Office has gotten into the act. Bulk access means that the public gets reliable information right when they need it -- immediately. And legislative information, what Congress is doing and actions on bills, pretty obviously falls into the category of information the public needs to be especially accurate and available immediately.

Topics like the release of quality government information online isn’t something members of Congress are used to hearing about from their constituents, but that’s why it’s so important that we take action. Every call that we make will be that much more impactful, and knowing that constituents are paying attention will go a long way toward making sure that Congress does the right thing by increasing transparency.

Four people in Congress that have the ability to make this change right now. They are the chairmen and ranking members of this committee: Rep. Ander Crenshaw (FL-4), Rep. Mike Honda (CA-15), Sen. Ben Nelson (NE) and Sen. John Hoeven (ND). And they need to hear from us.

If any of these four are your representatives, call them! Call 1-888-793-9786 and enter your zipcode to be connected to their offices.

If you’re not, that’s okay -- this is an issue that affects of all of us, and we need to spread the word. So go ahead and contact them, but do it in a way that lets other people in their districts hear about it -- online.

Click on any of the below links to tweet at them or post on their facebook pages that Americans deserve to know what our government is doing. Make sure to tell them this bill -- the legislative branch appropriations bill -- needs to do two things:

• Require the Library of Congress to implement bulk access to THOMAS
• Create an advisory committee of people both inside and outside government to make sure we have the best public access to legislative information possible

Write on Sen. Ben Nelson's Facebook wall: http://www.facebook.com/senatorbennelson Or tweet at him: Tweet to @SenBenNelson

Write on Sen. John Hoeven's Facebook wall: http://www.facebook.com/SenatorJohnHoeven (Sen. Hoeven doesn't appear to have a twitter account)

Write on Rep. Ander Crenshaw's Facebook page: http://www.facebook.com/pages/Congressman-Ander-Crenshaw/ Or tweet at him: Tweet to @AnderCrenshaw

Write on Rep. Mike Honda's Facebook page: http://www.facebook.com/RepMikeHonda Or tweet at him: Tweet to @RepMikeHonda

This week I participated in an international meeting on "Achieving Greater Transparency in Legislatures through the Use of Open Document Standards." It was co-hosted by the United Nations, the U.S. House of Representatives, and the Inter-Parliamentary Union, and included representatives from 16 parliaments, non-governmental representatives, multi-lateral organizations, and academia. It is impossible to recapitulate all the conversations that took place, but  presentations are (or will be) available online here and video will be available online as well.

I was struck by the candor of the participants, the breadth of the undertakings by the various parliaments, and the apparently sincere desire of many parliaments to learn from each other and from the non-governmental community. For my part, I made a presentation on the state of legislative transparency in the American context, with a focus on principles to evaluate whether electronically-stored government data is being properly made available for public use, followed by an examination of first steps that parliaments can take to increase public access to legislative information. The full text of my remarks are available below.

Access to Parliamentary Information and Open Data Standards

Earlier this week, appropriators held a hearing on funding for the legislative agencies that make government information available to the public.  Three members of the open government community, the Sunlight Foundation, the Participatory Politics Foundation, and Josh Tauberer, filed comments on the importance of making legislative information directly available to the public as a downloadable database, instead of item-by-item, which is the current practice.

The Sunlight Foundation testified on this topic (a.k.a. "bulk access")  last year, and has sketched out some interesting new tools that it could empower. But of course, one major use would be to strengthen the already fantastic services available at OpenCongress and GovTrack, while supporting additional innovations.

Progress on bulk access has been slow. Several years ago, the Congress required the Library of Congress and others to examine the issue, but these agencies have dragged their heels and -- as far as we know -- have failed to finish that analysis. Sunlight's comments are available below.

Sunlight Foundation Bulk Access to THOMAS Testimony Leg Approps 2012-02-06