Public appetite for transparent health care negotiations is driving us toward more transparency.

While Congress has rightly responded to that public pressure by posting bills online for 72 hours, the public dialog about the process of shaping health care legislation is more focused on transparent deliberations.

President Obama's promise to put healthcare negotiations on CSPAN, in combination with the question of formal conference proceedings, has become shorthand for several more fundamental questions. Formal requirements for public proceedings, while sometimes appropriate, are far short of what we should all be aiming for.

Firm requirements for public deliberations, since they are essentially prohibitions on private speech, are probably inappropriate for issues like health care in Congress. Since you can't require those negotiations to be public, Promises and Requirements are downgraded to Suggestions and Inducements.

Maybe that's why it's been so easy to ignore what's possible for health care deliberations. Since President Obama promised deliberations on CSPAN, shouldn't we all focus there? It's right to focus on a Presidential candidate's promises, and they should mean something. But if it turns out to be a failure, that doesn't mean we should all just go home. By focusing too much on requirements and promises, we're missing out on a chance to conceive and create public dialog that does work.

That's the realm that we shouldn't be ignoring. Where hard and fast requirements can't deliver what we're all looking for, we should focus on thinking of what can deliver it. "Put it on CSPAN!" should start to address those more basic questions.

We've all been so focused on the precise language of President Obama's campaign promise -- did he or didn't he keep it? -- that everyone was gobsmacked by last Friday's appearance before the House Republican retreat.

Since the appearance was almost universally welcomed, why haven't there been calls for just such an appearance? Because the public dialog has been focused on evaluating promises and procedures (the realm of the requirement, which is ultimately insufficient for public deliberations) rather than on what we actually want to see.

That's what was shocking to me about last Friday. Not just that the President and House Republicans were engaged in an honest, unscripted public debate, but that it wasn't orchestrated beforehand, or the direct result of public pressure.

House Republicans and President Obama innovated in the face of diffuse public pressure.

We live in a world where live streaming, immediate clippable archives, and all manner of new public interaction are now possible. We should balance our judgment of the world of public deliberations requirements (conference committees, or exaggerated promises) against the world of what is possible and desirable.

We should also remember that inducing public deliberations into the public sphere is exactly the point of much of our politics. Sunday talk shows, discharge petitions, Dear Colleague letters, caucus meetings, and editorials are all, in their own way, attempts to cajole, drag, and otherwise induce a policy conversation into the public eye.

Of course, our new technological capacity is having an effect on each of those spheres as well.

We advocate for a 72 hour rule precisely because it empowers all of us to take part in a more substantive, valuable public dialog. Government information empowers participation, and the Sunlight Foundation exists to empower the public through access to information.

As technology leads us to have higher expectations, and politicians are forced to respond with new methods for including the public, we should all respond with better expectations about the possible and the desirable.

If we don't, we'll become more susceptible to fake public engagement, and lose the chance for new technology to lead to a better relationship between citizens and their representatives.

Now it's getting down to the wire and debate over the health care bill not only extends to what's in the final package but how public the final negotiations are going to be. There's even a public fight about legislative procedure – whether the bills will go to a formal conference committee, whether C-SPAN will be able to broadcast those hearings so the public can see the sausage being made.

But much of this discussion about transparency is partisan driven so it makes me grit my teeth (which my dentist tells me I really shouldn't do).  More importantly it misses the mark. There is much Congress can do to improve transparency in its lawmaking, such as providing better access to legislative data, to committee and floor video, to voting records, ethics filings, and earmark requests, and we and others have called for these and many other changes. A conference committee is hardly the be all and end all of Congressional transparency.

But that is not the end of the matter: we should never allow Congress to pass legislation which has not seen the light of day. After the House and Senate have ironed out the details of this health care legislation – or any bill --  a final opportunity for real transparency can be had by posting the full bill online for 72 hours prior to the final debate and vote.  (And if major amendments are added during the 72 hours that the bill is available to the public, then those amendments should be made public on the Web for another 72 hours, too.)

Think of posting something on line for 3 days as a ‘safety valve’ – a final chance for citizens, media, lawmakers and lobbyists alike to look at the whole package giving everyone one last opportunity to raise questions and concerns about the bill. If readers are in an advocacy mode they have time to  mobilize others in support or opposition, and/or take action in whatever form they see fit.

There is no measure more important to debate in the open than health care, and this is a moment when we all need to be champions for public, online disclosure and engage with our government. With 72 hours, the buck can actually stop with citizens the way our Founders intended. We know that Congress do it because congressional leadership has already done so at other critical points in this debate.

This is what real transparency would look like.

Over the last few days, there has been considerable discussion over transparency and the health care bills.

It has been widely speculated that congressional leaders will forgo formal conference proceedings, and, in an unusual move, C-SPAN called for access to "all important negotiations."

As Paul pointed out Monday, evaluating transparency in the current health care bill is trickier than it may seem. Discussing health care has led partisans on both sides to cry foul on secrecy, or to cry foul on transparency. In that last link, the Wonkroom blog goes so far as to conclude that "when it comes to legislating, transparency is overrated."

Legislative transparency work should not be dismissed quite so casually, or equated to a few opportunistic calls for access to conference deliberations.

The Sunlight Foundation has long called for a number of specific measures to create more legislative transparency throughout the legislative process. We've called for bills to be posted online for 72 hours before final consideration. We've worked for better access to legislative data, to committee and floor video, to voting records, ethics records, and earmarks. Sunlight has called for these and many other changes, while at the same time recognizing that some conversations will always happen in private.

C-SPAN's call for access to conference proceedings has led many to believe that conference committees are the more transparent route, perhaps a significant opportunity for public involvement. That conclusion, however, ignores the reality of conference committees, which, in actuality, are rarely a public window into actual negotiations. Far from it -- many conference committee proceedings are nothing more than hollow formalities.

To set up conference committees as the panacea for public access to major legislation is to operate on an unrealistic idealized version of how Congress works. Paul Blumenthal is writing a more detailed look at the changing dynamics of the legislative process, and there's a CRS report here that details the procedures by which the two chambers can reconcile legislation.

Of course, with or without a formal conference committee, the health care bill will probably be riddled with giveaways and special accommodations for specific legislators. The New York Times referred to these provisions as intended for "Very Specific Beneficiaries." There's a separate discussion to be had about when such haggling is appropriate, and when it's corrupting and wasteful. Legislative negotiation, however, won't be significantly altered by formal conference proceedings, and neither will they be affected by simplistic calls for all negotiations to be public.