Sunlight Foundation

(cross posted from the Open House Project blog) 

Something pretty exciting is happening over at honda.house.gov; (Congressman Mike Honda's Web site). They have posted their new education related legislation on the site, along with justifications, background, endorsements, and even the ability to leave public comments through the blog area of the site.

This approach to introducing and building support for legislation recognizes the importance of real public input and evaluation, and gives the public the tools they need to understand what legislation is really about: an explanation, a place to link to, a summary, even a list of institutional support.

We're excited to see more legislative initiatives recognize the potential of public engagement online, and also to see an OpenCongress.org widget being used to help track the legislative details.

There's a tipping point somewhere ahead, where public expectations lead to advocacy and legislating functioning through the merits of arguments made in a public setting. We're certainly not there yet, but small steps like publicmarkup.org, legislation 2.0, and now Rep. Honda's online work are all steps in that direction.

I wish the Open Access movement were further along, and academic publications were posted in public online, because that would make it easier to share some of the things I've learned in the last two days at the Digital Government Society Conference. Since I can't link to most of the research I'm learning about, I'll have to just offer my basic reactions:(read more)

The same distinctions that exist in research, advocacy, and legislation exist in the realms of political influence. Since committees are the real seat of specialized congressional knowledge and power, it's exciting to see CRP sort fundraising information by congressional committee, as currently highlighted on their Capital Eye blog.

Since this is often the way tht fundraisers are advertised (For $1500, see the chair of the ____ Committee, who controls ____ issue!!!!), public scutiny of this money should be organized in the same way. Advertising committee positions for fundraising seems only a few steps from the wanton corruption of Duke Cunningham's bribery menu; tracking fundraising by committee is a small step toward dispelling monied interests' undue policy influence.

Ars Technica has an article up about the "hyperconnected"--defined by the Interactive Data Corporation as those people for whom the line between work and personal has been blurred to the point that they're "willing to communicate with work on vacation, in restaurants, from bed, and even in places of worship."

The article offers some criticism of the purportedly overworked, suggesting offhandly that the hyperconnected will pose new challenges for IT departments, and possibly have questionable effects on workers' personal lives.

While these concerns over productivity and relaxation are certainly valid, there's another side of merging personal and workplace that's ignored by the commentary: the same breakdown that leads to work email being written in bed also leads to the breakdown of the limitations on the role of the "professional". Just as communications technology leads to more work being done at home, the Internet allows for the intellectual entrepeneurship of the online volunteer researcher, the blog-based organizer, the midnight advocate. As Clay Shirky's Here Comes Everybody makes clear, individuals who can organize without centralized leadershp form a new, powerful, agile force, harnessing what has been dubbed the "cognigitive surplus" to redefine the way we organize our ideas and ultimately ourselves.

While this may have some effect on the modes of our relaxation, the effects on business, government, and society will more than make up for them.

(full disclosure: I often work in the middle of the night.)

I just discovered DARPA's Policy Analysis Market project. The idea has me wondering what the place is for market based deliberations solutions, and when it's appropriate to give actors a self-incentive that isn't already inherent to a situation.

There's a strong argument to be made for the predictive power of markets, and their stabilizing incentive structures, but their application beyond economics hasn't really been worked out yet. Some examples of market-like political models include Fantasy Congress, and National Journal's Political Stock Exchange.

When success isn't able to be neatly defined as profit (as in financial markets), and when motivators and strategies are as complex as they are in a legislature, sometimes, paradoxically, it's profitable to operate at a loss. Indeed, one could suggest that all non-profits are the pure form of incentives being isolated from broader incentive structures.

(hat tip to this tweet from "hytmal"; my initial response is here)