Transparency Matters is a new social networking site for journalists and others interested in making the U.S. government transparent. It... View Article
Continue readingGreat New Transparency News Resource
This is very cool. Our friends at VoterWatch have just launched a new 'Transparency Recap' -- a regularly updated overview of what bloggers are saying about government transparency and accountability. In their first roundup, VoterWatch highlights Sunlight's latest project, PublicMarkup.org (thanks!), a post from Free Government Information on a report about the National Archives' plan to provide online access to the Founding Fathers papers, All Things Whistleblower's reporting on the raid on the Office of the Special Counsel and on the home of Special Counsel Scott Bloch and the soft launch of the Center for Responsive Politics' newly redesigned OpenSecrets.org site.
We love roundups like this for keeping updated on the news that matters the most. Make sure to add VoterWatch to your feeds!
Committees Still Lag in Transparency
At the end of the 109th Congress I wrote a couple of blog posts (1, 2) showing how congressional committees failed to post transcripts and audio or video files of their hearings on their Web sites. After a careful review of the committees at the time it turned out that approximately 50% of both House and Senate committee hearings were available in any of those three formats. Thanks to the new lobbying, ethics, and disclosure bill committees in the Senate will soon be required to post one of these three formats within 21 days of the conclusion of a hearing for every hearing. Currently the committees of the 110th Congress seem to be slacking on online disclosure just as much as their predecessors. Voterwatch has created a list of links to committee Web sites and their hearing transcripts and audio or video files. It looks like committees continue to fail the openness test.
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