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2Day in #OpenGov 7/27/2011

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Here are Wednesday’s transparency-related news items, congressional committee hearings, transparency-related bills introduced in Congress, and transparency-related events. News Roundup: Lobbying

  • A former member of Congress took to the floor of the House to urge current members to vote against Boehner’s debt ceiling increase, which led some to question that violated congressional lobbying rules. (Roll Call)
  • Mitt Romney held a fundraiser yesterday which included a number of K-street lobbyists. (Roll Call)
  • Representative Pitts has donated the money he received from a lobbyists who allegedly violated laws relating to contributions on behalf of a foreign government. (Politics PA)
Access to Information
  • A US District Judge denied a motion to compel the US Department of Interior to release documents responsive to a FOIA request. (Saipan Tribune)
  • Opinion: The Washington Post Editorial Board urged members of the House to take up the Faster FOIA law, which unanimously passed the Senate earlier this year. (Washington Post)
Revolving Door
  • The ties between oil and gas companies and government works remain tight despite efforts by the Obama Administration. (Yahoo!)
Ethics
  • Open Secrets speculated about what will happen to Representative Wu’s campaign cash and lobbyists bundling for presidential candidates. (Open Secrets Blog)
Technology
  • The General Services Administration became the first federal agency to transition its emails to a cloud-based system, using Google Apps for Government. (Federal Computer Week)
State and Local
  • The Los Angeles Board of Supervisors considered amendments to the county’s campaign finance laws to allow larger individual contributions and contributions from PACs. (LobbyComply Blog)
  • A county in Delaware hired a federal lobbyist with ties to the city as county administrator. (Delaware Online)
  • City officials in Sioux City, MO were outraged after the US Postal Service said that charges for its FOIA request could run as high as $831,000. (Sioux City Journal)
International
  • The Provincial Government in British Columbia unveiled three websites dedicated to releasing government data and making information available to the public. (O’Reilly Radar)
  • Opinion: An editorial applauds Vancouver Province for efforts to make data more available for public use and scrutiny. (Vancouver Sun)

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It’s Not Okay for Congressional Websites to Crash

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Clearly, Washington hasn't been covering itself in glory lately. The debt ceiling standoff in particular seems to have catalyzed an outpouring of frustration over what many think has been an especially feckless congress.

Naturally, opinions differ about where blame should lie. But I hope we can all agree about this much: the fact that many congressional websites went offline last night is deeply shameful.

There was a reason for it, of course. The President addressed the nation and urged citizens to contact their representatives. Something like that is going to produce a lot of web traffic.

But the vendors who manage those systems should have been prepared for it. Congressional websites are not particularly complex. Caching technology, aggressively and properly applied, should have been able to avoid most of this problem. To the extent that it couldn't, there still isn't much of an excuse. We're now several years into the cloud computing revolution. Competent vendors should be ready for spikes in demand, and able to spin up additional resources as necessary.

The congressional phone system also shouldn't escape blame. I was at a hackathon in SF recently where one of the teams demoed a Twilio-based app that dialed their local representative's office -- in this case it was Nancy Pelosi. It was the weekend, and they were so confident that her voicemail inbox would be full and unable to accept new messages that they'd even written a little gag about it into their pitch. It was a funny joke, but it's not particularly amusing that this inability to communicate can be counted on to happen.

This stuff is important. Too often, people in Washington look at the huge volume of emails, letters and phone calls that arrive on the hill and shrug. There are a ton of messages, so handling them necessarily becomes a bit like a factory job. And the many correspondents can be counted on to have differing opinions, so no single call or missive can ever be given very much weight. As a result, it's tempting to view dealing with constituent communications as a pointless chore -- a pressure valve by which citizens can blow off steam, but not much else.

That view is tempting, but deeply wrong. These channels are the cheapest, fastest and most egalitarian way for citizens to exercise their constitutional right to petition their government. Making sure these channels stay up and running is a serious responsibility -- one that the Capitol Hill vendor community ought to take more seriously.

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Sunlight Live bets it all with casino hearing

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This Thursday, when the U.S. Senate Committee on Indian Affairs examines the National Indian Gaming Commission, Sunlight Live will be on hand to show the connections between the committee members and the industry it oversees. The committee's members have received thousands, and in the case of Sen. John McCain, R- Ariz., millions of dollars in campaign contributions from the casino and gaming industry, and drawn interest from the Native American tribes many of the committee's members represent. During the hearing, we'll work to untangle the strings that tie legislators, witnesses and special interests in real time ...

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2Day in #OpenGov 7/26/2011

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Policy intern Eric Dunn contributed to this roundup. Here are Tuesday’s transparency-related news items, congressional committee hearings, transparency-related bills introduced in Congress, and transparency-related events. News Roundup: Government

  • The current debt ceiling talks have been secretive and un-transparent, despite modern political rhetoric favoring open government. (Politico)
  • The Congressional Management Foundation reported that Congress has adapted new social media tools faster than it has picked up on technology in the past; Facebook is more popular than Twitter among Hill offices. (The Washington Post)(The National Journal)
  • Opinion: The U.S. Department of Transportation lags far behind other agencies in social media utilization. (Gov Fresh)
Lobbying
  • Lobbyists are hard at work trying to convince legislators to come to a debt-ceiling agreement, but are having little success. (Washington Times)
  • Opinion: Lobbyists should support the Lobbyist Disclosure and Enhancement Act. (Sunlight Blog) (Sunlight Foundation consultant Lisa Rosenberg wrote this in response to a piece by Howard Marlowe, president of the American League of Lobbyists.)
Ethics
  • Roll Call responded to an inquiry regarding whether or not ethics training is required for lobbyists. (Roll Call)
  • Rep. David Wu declared that he did “nothing illegal” in his sexual encounter with a teenage family friend last Thanksgiving. (Politico)
Campaign Finance
  • A Congressional Quarterly study revealed that House lawmakers have made their spouses among the high-paying employees of their election campaigns. (Roll Call)
Technology
  • The Joint Committee on Printing redirected its website to the House Administration Committee following a Sunlight report that criticized the website. (Roll Call)
  • The director of the U.S. Computer Emergency Readiness Team resigned after recent breaches in cybersecurity on government networks. (Tech Daily Dose)
State and Local
  • Alex Tourk, a former lobbyist who ran into trouble with the San Francisco Board of Supervisors, has signed on to Bevan Duff’s campaign for mayor. (Huffington Post)
  • Over a hundred people participated in a training session in Topeka, KS that focused on explaining the state’s transparency related laws. (The Topeka Capital-Journal)
  • State disclosure laws are finding it hard to keep up with the money being spent by lobbyists to influence health care legislation in Vermont. (Forbes)
  • Opinion: A local group advocated for public officials in Florida to sign an open government pledge. (TC Palm)
International
  • A watchdog group determined that an agency in Ottawa, Canada gave preferential treatment to certain employees for a public advisory committee. (CTV News)
  • Hopes are high that a new member of the Public Health Foundation of India, Narayana Murthy, will bring greater transparency to the publicly funded organization. (MoneyLife)
  • A look at the progress the UK has made since Prime Minister David Cameron unveiled a pledge to make government data more transparent. (Tails Consulting)

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New Sunlight Health App points to problems at an Illinois nursing home

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On October 19, 2010, a Rockford, Illinois man was admitted to a local hospital. Emergency room staff found seven large bed sores on his body; some spanned several inches and had advanced to stage IV, the most severe. One wound, according to emergency room notes, was infected and covered his entire tailbone.

The man, identified in inspection reports only as "R1," had developed all of his wounds since arriving at Rockford Nursing & Rehab Center, a 67-bed facility in Rockford, Illinois. Bed sores -- also known as pressure ulcers -- are lesions that typically form when a patient has limited mobility, and her ...

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