The Senate Finance Committee, perhaps the most powerful committees in Congress, finally updated their web site. I emphasize finally for a number of reasons, the first and only one I will explain here being that prior to this update the site proudly displayed this statement, "This site is optimized for Netscape Navigator 4.x or Internet Explorer 4.x." It only took 12 years for the committee to move on from Netscape 4! Congratulations!

Earlier this year, National Journal had some web experts including Sunlight's John Wonderlich review and rate congressional web sites. The old Finance Committee site ranked 33rd out of 36 sites. The new site is pretty slick, as most new congressional sites are.

The Federal Reserve is hiring a former Enron lobbyist in an effort to fix its image. I would say that whoever came with this brilliant idea will wind up in those "jobs lost" statistics next month, but these kind of things do tend to work in the confines of Washington. For the rest of America, this doesn't look so great.

Guess what? Banks are still lobbying and are getting exactly what they want. It's like nothing happened at all. "Bailout? What bailout?"

Some things change, some things stay the same. Ambassadorships are still going to big campaign donors.

If you've ever spent any time looking at congressional web sites you know the unspeakable horror of poor design. Politico gathered together some designers and had them critique the worst of the worst. Favorite line: "There’s enough fonts for a ransom note."

Sen. Max Baucus is spending time meeting with health care and business lobbyists to discuss the forthcoming health care bill. Considering the number of former Baucus staffers who have gone to work as health care and business lobbyists this must have been something of a staff reunion.

A little while ago I posted about Connecticut towns who took their Web sites down because they couldn’t comply with a state requirement to put meeting minutes online quickly. Here is an update from Open Records. One town’s residents decided not to stand for it. Wallingford, CT’s Jason Zandri decided to put up a town Web site himself.

“Sometimes you just have to take matters into your own hands. Wallingford resident Jason Zandri did exactly that.

Zandri spent over 100 hours of his own time to develop a new web site, Wallingford, to pick up where the official town website leaves off. While his site should not be confused with the official town site, he has loaded it with a lot of information not found on the town site, including the minutes of the town meetings, budget info and a list of state lawmakers’ postal and e-mail addresses.”

Incredibly impressive, the internet not only allows citizens to take up the slack when government is having some problems but people can actually improve on what government does from their own home.

Unfortunately there is still a lot of work to be done. (Also from Open Records) Jackson Township, PA has decided not to post meeting minutes online. I believe Board Chairman Dean Moyer summed it up when he said, “Moyer asked the audience if the township is really being run that badly that they need to request public documents. He then said that it is like his mother used to say that sometimes the less you know, the better off you are.”

I wonder if Mr. Moyer realizes that that statement makes me think that transparency is sourly needed in this town. The first thing that needs to happen is a much needed change of attitude.  Transparency should be something government does because it builds trust with citizens.  The Jackson Township should go out of its way to give information to the people they represent instead of making those same people jump through hoops.  

Local governments in Connecticut are encountering issues with a new state mandate that requires “Web sites post public meeting minutes within seven days after the meetings.”  Local governments are finding this new measure difficult because they don’t have the staff to fulfill the requirement and can’t afford to hire more people.  So until they figure out how to fulfill the new requirements they are taking down their Web sites.

I am interested in why Connecticut Web sites, in their current form, are so difficult to edit. This kind of mandate, while inconvenient at first, can challenge local towns to be creative and maybe improve the ways they create Web sites. As well as, how they take minutes and keep records.

How about a wiki for meeting minutes? Live blogging? Video? There is no reason to not use the mandate to find innovative and interactive ways to get citizens involved.

According to a study by Scott Althaus and Kalev Leetaru of the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, the Bush White House has routinely changed pages and statements on the White House web site with no disclaimer stating that the information has been altered. The key findings from the report's web site are below:

• There are at least five documents taking the form of White House press releases that detail the number and names of countries in the "Coalition of the Willing" that publicly supported the 2003 invasion of Iraq. At one time, all five of these documents were archived on the White House web site.
• Today, only three of these five documents can still be accessed in the White House archives. One of the missing lists was removed from the White House web site at some point in late 2004, and the other was removed between late 2005 and early 2006. These two "missing" lists represent earlier and smaller lists of coalition members.
• The text of three of these five documents was altered at some point after their initial release, even though in most cases the documents still retained their original release dates and were presented as unaltered originals. These alterations to the public record changed the apparent number of countries making up the coalition, as well as the names of countries in the coalition. Some of these alterations appear to have been made as long as two years after the document's purported release date.
• Of the five documents, only two appear to have remained unaltered after the date of their initial release. These are the only two of the five that could be authentic originals. However, we find no evidence that either of these press releases was distributed broadly to the media through normal electronic channels.
• Two versions of the coalition list dated March 27, 2003 can be currently accessed on the White House web site. Both claim that there were 49 countries in the coalition, but one lists only 48 by name, omitting Costa Rica. The revision history of this document shows that Costa Rica's name was removed retroactively at some point in late 2004, after the Costa Rican Supreme Court ruled that continued use of its name on the list was a violation of Costa Rica's constitution.
• Taken together, these findings suggest a pattern of revision and removal from the public record that spans several years, from 2003 through at least 2005. Instead of issuing a series of revised lists with new dates, or maintaining an updated master list while preserving copies of the old ones, the White House removed original documents, altered them, and replaced them with backdated modifications that only appear to be originals.

The two researchers sum up their work by stating that, "the removals and revisions of White House documents distort the historical record of what our government has said and done." This effort to alter perceptions through manipulating statements online after they have already been in the public domain is completely unacceptable and violates the norms of behavior online. The altering of information in a non-transparent fashion violates all notions of online communications, where transparency is essential to trust.

This controversy immediately brings to mind the Tim O'Reilly article on web site revision control for the Obama-Biden Transition site change.gov:

There's a profound and simple tool that the Obama administration can use to improve government transparency. It's something that's enabled worldwide collaboration among software developers, and whose relevance for content development has been definitively demonstrated by wikipedia: Revision control. Not only does revision control allow a community to work independently on a common project, it makes it possible to review the changes.

Changing information online can no longer be done in a non-transparent manner. With so many of us able to follow the history on a Wikipedia page or used to the accountability of errors in blog posts, edits and deletions need to be noted.

Rules for giving campaign cash to family members:

1. First, don't do it. It's not against any rules, but it looks just terrible.
2. If you are going to pay family members to help in your campaign, make sure they are competent and qualified.
3. Also, make sure that it does not look like they are simply pocketing the money you are giving them while doing little or no work.

Rep. Charles Rangel has violated all of these rules by paying $80,000 in campaign cash to his son to make some of the worst campaign and PAC web sites imaginable. Here's a screen shot of Rangel's National Leadership PAC, one of the two offending web sites (really, you would think they would pull these down):

If you look at what I've circled on this image, you'll see that they haven't even used spell check. "Maintenace." "Give Contribuition."

How far away are we from a viral "Leave Rangel Alone" YouTube video?