This Wednesday, the House of Representatives will host an unprecedented public meeting from 3:30-7:30 to discuss how the public can get better access to congressional information. While the event is called the "Congressional Facebook Hackathon," what will take place is much broader than the name suggests. Wednesday will present an opportunity for technologists and policy wonks to talk about and collaborate on improving how congressional information is made available to the public. It has important bipartisan hosts, Reps. Eric Cantor and Steny Hoyer, who deserve significant credit for coming together on this important transparency issue.

The event will start with short opening presentations by the House of Representatives on its open data initiatives and Facebook on its latest platform updates. Afterward, participants will break out into discussion groups, focusing on legislative data/workflow, constituent correspondence, casework, and press/ public relations. Of course, there will be sufficient flexibility for the conversation to follow the interests of the participants.

There have been several previous collaborative efforts by members of the transparency community to outline how the House of Representatives can be more open and accountable, of which an enduring touchstone is the Open House Project Report, issued in May 2007. It's recommendation remain relevant today:

• Legislation Database—publish legislative data in structured formats
• Preserving Congressional Information—protect congressional information through archiving and distribution
• Congressional Committees—recognize committees as a public resource by making committee information available online
• Congressional Research Service—share non-partisan research beyond Congress
• Member Web-Use Restrictions—permit members to take full advantage of internet resources
• Citizen Journalism Access—grant House access to non-traditional journalists
• The Office of the Clerk of the House—serve as a source for digital disclosure information
• The Congressional Record—maintain the veracity of a historical document
• Congressional Video—create open video access to House proceedings
• Coordinating Web Standards—commit to technology reform as an administrative priority

These issues are still outstanding. We have yet to see bulk access to THOMAS or public access to CRS reports, important legislative and ethics documents are still unavailable in digital format, many committee hearings still are not online, and so on. There has been some progress, however, including a written directive from the House leadership pledging to do more and an important Committee on House Administration hearing that hints at progress-to-come. But there is a need for more, which is being recognized by the event's hosts.

If you have not RSVP'd, there's still time. We hope that this will be the kick-off to a much broader discussion. If you want to get a head start, join in the conversation on our Open House Project listserv.

Now that we've seen the final Rules package that the House will pass later today, we can talk about what's changing with a little more certainty.

Late this summer, we released a detailed set of recommendations for Rules changes, and we're delighted by how many of those changes will be incorporated into the House Rules.

Final Bill Availability: As Lisa noted yesterday, the public will have a much better chance of being able to read bills before they're considered on the floor. While House Rules are waivable, and this one is by no means ironclad, we have probably, finally, moved beyond the dispiriting spectacle of voting on bills which haven't been posted online first.

Sunlight has long been the leading force behind the ReadtheBill movement.

New Committee Responsibility for Electronic Publication: The new Rules give the Committee on House Administration (CHA) responsibility for setting standards for how documents are made available online. This dovetails nicely with the new bill publishing that will now be happening, and it's heartening that someone will be specifically responsible for how information is posted online. Today's Rules have a number of first steps, and CHA will have its work cut out for it in working through online publication for the House.

This closely echoes chapter 12 of our 2007 Open House Project report.

Committee Hearing Notice: Sunlight has long called for structured, online advanced notice of committee hearings. The new rules require a week's notice before hearings, and three days notice before meetings. This notice is required to be "publicly available in electronic form."

Markup Text: Committees are now required to post copies of legislation to be "publicly available in electronic form" at least 24 hours before markups.

Committee Votes Online: Maybe this perennial fight can now end -- the new Rules require committees to post all recorded votes online. This was in the 2007 Open House Project report, and in our recent Rules package.

Committee Amendments Online: Amendments adopted in committee must now be posted online within 24 hours.

New Disclosure for Testimony: Anyone testifying in the House will now not only submit disclosures to the House, but those will be posted online as well. This provision was in our Rules package.

Committee Rules: Committees must now post their committee rules online, another Sunlight recommendation.

Committee Coverage: The House Rules now require committees to broadcast their proceedings, with the caveat that is the phrase "to the maximum extent practicable." The wording implies both live and archived access to proceedings.

Votes in the Rules Committee: The Rules Committee will no longer enjoy an exemption to the requirement that they put their recorded votes into committee reports. (Another Sunlight recommendation.)

Electronic Devices on the Floor: Electronic devices are now allowed on the House floor, as long as they don't impair decorum.

Press Treatment: Provisions that singled out specific media organizations or types of media organziations for access to official proceedings have been broadened. (Another Sunlight recommendation.)

Oversight Plans: The House started posting committees' oversight plans more reliably during the 111th Congress, after our urging, and the 112th House Rules broaden committees' required activity reports, and also increase their frequency.

Interim Online Posting: Until the House Admin Committee determines a central location, bills will be posted online on the Rules Committee site, or on majority committee sites.

Office of Congressional Ethics: The Office of Congressional Ethics will continue to function in the 112th Congress, as Daniel recently noted, and Sunlight pushed for.

Exercise Facilities: Lobbyists (or former Members married to lobbyists) are now further restricted from the House exercise facilities.

Yesterday, Sen. Joe Lieberman introduced a resolution (S. Res. 118), with a bipartisan cast of cosponsors, to allow for the public release of Congressional Research Service (CRS) reports. CRS reports are some of the best research documents in the nation and are currently used by lawmakers and their staff to inform their decisions and help in crafting legislation. Currently, CRS reports are not supposed to be released to the public, however, some web sites collect them from lawmaker offices distributing them anonymously. Many of these sites are pay sites, save for Open CRS, which is operated by the Center for Democracy and Technology (CDT).

CDT lauds the new Lieberman resolution in a blog post:

The public can also purchase copies of the reports from CRS report resellers, but obtaining copies of all the reports that are relevant would cost a great deal of money for reports that are entirely taxpayer funded in the first place. Senate Resolution 118 would change that by allowing lawmakers to provide access to CRS services to the public on official website. Rather than creating a new tool for public access, the resolution would let Members and Committees share reports with the public using the same online services that are available on Congress’ internal CRS website.

Critically, the new resolution also requires that an index of CRS issue briefs and reports to be made public. Currently, Open CRS receives updates on reports as they are published from an anonymous lawmaker, but a public index of reports would simplify this process. It would be simple to provide this index, and to let the public know what their lawmakers are reading- and for them to read it too. It is high time for an officially sanctioned, free way to distribute the reports to the people.

This is a resolution that deserves strong support. The free release of CRS reports has always been a top priority of The Open House Project.

Here's a little fun for your weekend. Yesterday, the Open House Google Group turned into an outright poetry slam.

David Weller kicked it all off with this submission titled “Government data” …

Info, not information Data, now, well, data? Databases galore Needing some more

Government info Is data consumed The truth as we know it Can I make a profit?

Then Joshua Gay added “Three Haikus for Internet Transparency and Change in 2009” …

"I will execute..."-- Ha! WhiteHouse.gov launched already--Haha!

I see my shadow on recovery.gov, Punxsutawney Phil.

Good start, kind of. Now, make sure we can read the bills-- that is, all of US!

Not to be outdone, GovTrack.us’ Josh Tauberer added this limerick…

There once was a man named Mike Honda, A congressman us geeks are quite fond 'a, In markup sessions takes on the chairman, a hulk, so that we the people can get our data in bulk.

His friend maverick Joe likes transparency too, Senate votes in XML he says long overdue, At party politics he snorts, Because the public should see those CRS reports.

And last we hear of the executive's new plan, For a CTO and CIO... ...perhaps YesWeScan?

And to top it all off, Sunlight’s John Wonderlich added what he called “An old haiku”…

Opening Congress blog net nerds bring scrutiny, Sunlight Foundation

and a new limerick:

The power that sprang not from Kings, but the merit the populace brings, thrives on data and docs, not closed doors with locked locks. Online access gives ideas new wings.

I always knew the open government movement was full of talented people…But they never cease to amaze.

Today, YouTube announced the creation of two channels made specifically to accomodate videos posted by congressional lawmakers. The channels have been in the works for some time as Congress finally freed themselves of cumbersome regulations governing the use of outside web sites. As one of the authors of the Open House Project section calling for the restrictions to be lifted, it is great to see this success and what the future of a connected Congress looks like.

There are few differences in the channels from the rest of YouTube. The main difference is the lack of advertising and the removal of the watermark (the little YouTube logo on every video) from each video. These changes were necessary to ensure compliance with long standing congressional rules. The most notable difference is the launch page for each channel. Each launch page contains a Google Map interface allowing users to click on a given state to see a listing of lawmakers with YouTube accounts.

The YouTube channels are accessible at youtube.com/senatehub and youtube.com/househub. And here's a video announcing the channel launch from the congressional party leaders:

Building on the achievements of the Open House Project, today we are launching a parallel initiative, the Open Senate Project. This bipartisan, collaborative project will study the Senate's current information-sharing practices to recommend how to improve public access to the Senate's work on the Web.

We hope that you to join us in figuring out what technological reforms we should recommend to the Senate so it can make its work more accessible and user-friendly online. You can do that by subscribing to Google group listed on the top right-hand corner of the Open Senate Project's homepage. Through that online group, we'll have an ongoing conversation and collaborative preparation of our recommendations.

John Wonderlich, program director for the Sunlight Foundation, will lead the effort in collaboration with project coordinators Josh Tauberer, creator of the nonpartisan Web site GovTrack.us, and Jon Henke, a former Senate staffer who now blogs at TheNextRight.com.

As John blogged recently, with your help, the Open House Project was successful in jumpstarting a public discussion that prompted the House of Representatives to make its work available online in new ways, including releasing legislative data in more user-friendly formats and establishing new rules that allow lawmakers to use Web services like YouTube and Twitter to communicate with their constituents.

But, we can't do it without you. Together, we can open the Senate.

On Friday, we told you about the happy ending to months of negotiations to modernize the Franking rules that govern how members of Congress can use the Internet to communicate with us about their work. The new rules just passed by the House and Senate allow members of Congress to communicate with us on sites such as Twitter, YouTube and Flickr without recrimination. (We advocated for these rules changes through our bipartisan collaborative effort, the Open House Project, and through our popular Let Our Congress Tweet campaign, the first Twitter-based petition to Congress, which hundreds of you joined.)

Before these new rules were passed, lawmakers could not officially embed a YouTube video on their official Web site, nor could they join us in political conversations around the popular virtual water cooler that Twitter has become.

To celebrate this historic precedent, we created Capitol Tweets, a widget you can embed on your site that updates you every 10 minutes with the latest tweets from members of Congress who use Twitter.

Download the widget, and while you’re watching the tweets fly, check out this effort by David All (who co-wrote the Open House Project chapter on Franking reform with Sunlight’s Paul Blumenthal) to grade them on their tweets.

Shouldn't members of Congress be able to connect with all of us freely and easily online? I'd guess most of you would think that's a good idea. So, when Sunlight's Open House Project Google group got riled up this week about this issue, we were inspired to do something to rally citizens to ensure lawmakers can freely connect with us all online.

In that spirit, we are launching a new campaign, Let Our Congress Tweet, to urge Congress to make clear guidelines that do not inhibit lawmakers from freely interacting with constituents where they already go online to share ideas-through Web services like YouTube, Twitter, Facebook and MySpace.

Join our petition right now and make your voice count.

Last year, Sunlight's Open House Project issued a report recommending straightforward technological reforms to increase transparency and public access to the work and members of the U.S. House of Representatives. One of our major recommendations was to permit lawmakers to take full advantage of Internet resources. Wonks will know this as our recommendation to modernize the Franking Rules that govern how members of Congress use the Internet to communicate with constituents, primarily through their official Web sites.

Unfortunately, these rules are decided ad hoc in advisory opinions. (A guidebook given to lawmakers about all their activities includes some rules about their Web use. When Congress first developed rules governing lawmakers' use of the Internet, it viewed the new medium as an extension of telephones, mail, radio and television, putting e-mail and member Web sites under the purview of franking regulations. Franking regulations were developed to restrict lawmakers' sending of unsolicited mailings to constituents, but today the differences between the old and new forms of communication are so great that a rethinking of franking policy over electronic communications is necessary.

Under the current system, members of Congress are forced to break rules to use new technologies and services to do what their constituents ask of them: connect, listen and be held accountable. So, that YouTube video you saw on a lawmaker's Web site? Illegal! Couple that with the vagueness of only having ad hoc opinions to guide lawmakers in their Internet communications on a case-by-case basis, and you get confusion as to what lawmakers are or aren't allowed to do...resulting in a chilling effect.

As Congress reconsiders the restrictions placed on congressional Internet use, you can tell Congress to embrace the communication technologies that we already use. Join us and tweet the petition now.