Josh Ruihley, of Sunlight, and creator of OpenHearings.org, recently found an XML feed of committee schedules from the Senate. (via Twitter.) They're advertising this fact via a link on this page. On first examination, he reports that the data format looks solid, and should prove useful. In fact, Josh has already integrated the new information to feed the OpenHearings schedule database. Time for the House to catch up!
Continue readingDigital Preservation Under Threat?
Via dotgovwatch, it looks like the National Archives is discontinuing their Web Harvest program:
For the first time since the Internet began, the National Archives and Records Administration (NARA) will not record a snapshot of Executive Branch websites at the end of a Presidential administration.
In the article, Coby Logen notes that the valuable work of non-profits like archive.org shouldn't entirely supplant the work of the government. Federal agencies exist to protect the public interest, through a public mechanism. Our national government has a responsibility to protect and document its history. They are uniquely positioned to do so; no one else has both the reliable public mandate and the public accountability necessary for protecting historical documents.
Federal Web sites are historical documents, and NARA's Web Harvest program should be enthusiastically supported. Digital records management should enable easier and cheaper preservation, and brings the promise of more meaningful disclosure and access to both current and historical documents.
The fact that digital preservation is done by others outside NARA isn't an excuse for NARA to abdicate their responsibility, but an argument that they should be capable of fulfilling it.
As Members of Congress and Federal Agencies increasingly move their work online, robust digital archiving will only become more important, so we can understand how our government is performing its duties.
Continue readingPublicMarkup.org’s First Week
The first week of PublicMarkup.org's launch has exceeded our expectations.
As I write this post, there are now 63 comments on our draft legislation, which you can now keep track of through an RSS feed. While many of the posts come from allies familiar to Sunlight, we're delighted to find excellent, new ideas throughout the comments. Interest in congressional information reaches well beyond the inside-the-beltway advocacy community, and we're happy to provide a forum for substantive reform ideas.
Talking with members of the press has been really enjoyable too, especially as they try to use traditional approaches to writing about legislation. The initial questions tend not to quite fit with a model of advocacy that is entirely open, so questions like "who is sponsoring it?" or "when might they vote on it?" tend to miss the mark. Questions like "What would constitute a success?", or "Why aren't other organizations doing this sort of thing?" might be better starting places. Conducting advocacy in the open is a rather new idea, though, so we'll have to develop some new ideas together about what constitutes consensus, success, and a productive drafting process.
As it stands now, though, we're happy to not have all the answers about where the bill is going. Just like legislation itself, we're not pretending to know the best strategy for the bill, and we recognize that best ideas will be the ones that can benefit from a large community of experts and stakeholders.
One thing is clear: if PublicMarkup.org's second week is anything like its first, our reform ideas -- and the open advocacy strategy we're using to develop them -- will both have very bright futures.
GovTrack.us Opens Source Code
Josh Tauberer, founder and creator of GovTrack.us (and Open House Project contributor), announced today that his site is now "officially totally open source." Josh's broadened commitment to opening the code that runs his site is very exciting; GovTrack can now benefit from the same kind of public examination and participation that the site encourages from citizens in dealing with their national legislature.
While the database of legislative information is in the public domain, "the front-end and back-end are licensed under the new GNU AGPL license, which basically means that you cannot modify the files without making the modifications publicly available," writes Josh. Scott Wells, Sunlight's administrator, and an enthusiastic open standards advocate, observed that this license is "the fun, new one", proving that Josh is as adept at licensing options as he is at screen-scraping and designing the semantic web.
Greg Elin, on the Sunlight Labs blog, suggests that everyone have at the source code. Josh deserves some reinforcements, after singlehandedly putting together such a complex site on which so many other sites rely.
Linking to Sections
In Sarah Lai Striland's write-up of PublicMarkup.org's launch yesterday, on the Wired Threat Level blog, she manages to do something rather remarkable. She links to one of the bill's provisions:
One idea from Sunlight that all journalists are sure to welcome: Limiting the time government agencies can delay fulfilling Freedom of Information Act requests. Sunlight suggests implementing a rule that would force government agencies to fulfill such requests within 60 days of the requests' original due dates.All she did was hyperlink, which is regular fare on blogs. This is rather extraordinary, however, because the links takes you to the actual provision of a piece of legislation. As Congressional legislation is currently published, this is nearly impossible, as bills are published in html or in pdf formats, erecting a barrier to substantial analysis and discussion. Would legislation be different if all news stories and discussion of them were easily traced to the actual text of the bill, or if you could find your way from the bill other relevant analysis and context?
Small, useful, practical steps online lead to enormously different results, and make new kinds of engagement possible.
On Government Documents Management
Building on my earlier post about listing collaborative options for government or congressional agencies, I'm thinking about useful ways to distinguish between different types of government information, and what that implies about records management.
At the recent IPDI Politics Online panel on radical transparency, Peggy Garvin made a great point about one fundamental distinction that can be made within government information. She suggested that all government information is either collected from regulated entities, or pertains to the operations of government itself. (much more below)
Ethics Reform not just about Corruption
The Hill and Roll Call are both covering the political struggle to reform the ethics review process within the House. These articles cover very real concerns about how effective oversight can be negotiated for the most bottom-up of our three branches of government. Legislators are understandably reluctant to relinquish control over their own standards and affairs, regardless of how ineffective Congress's current enforcement mechanisms may be.
Legal and Academic Open Access
For far too long, getting access to important documents has meant having a very expensive subscription to an exclusive service. This has held true across disciplines, including politics, law, and academia. The Internet is starting to change this, lowering the cost of storing and transferring information to nearly nothing. With the help of pioneers like Carl Malamud and Lawrence Lessig, essential information -- whether governmental, academic, legal, or scientific -- is being freed from the boundaries set by traditional publishers, whose role as information stewards has too often ignored the interests of the general public, and served the needs of paying specialists.
(Disclosure: I'm happy to say that Professor Lessig is on Sunlight's Advisory Board, and Public.Resource.org is a Sunlight grantee.) (more)
Transparency in Healthcare and Scientific Research
(from the Open House Project blog)
As the research of the Harvard Transparency Policy Project has made abundantly clear, applying the principles of openness and transparency to complex systems demands a careful approach to epistemic nuances; questions like what should be knowable to whom need to be answered before disclosure requirements are implemented, and need to be built into a disclosure regime's initial design. (more)
Continue readingS1 Implementation in the Senate Finance Committee
Over the last few days, there's been a good deal of talk about the ethics requirements going into effect for Senate Committees. Later today, the Senate Finance Committee is scheduled to reconcile the rules of their committee with the requirements of the Honest Leadership and Open Government Act, often referred informally as "the ethics reform bill". (Sean Moulton of OMBWatch tipped us off to this fact first in this OHP Google Group Thread.) (more)
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