Will Johnson notes in a post to the OpenHouse Project mailing list that RSS feeds from Members of Congress are almost impossible to find and,  "I'm pretty sure that some of the offices aren't aware that their CMS [Content Management System] is generating a feed."  To help out he has set up an interesting remix/mashup called PolFeeds, which grabs those feeds as well as those from candidates.  He describes it this way:

PolFeeds. n. A website that brings you virtually all of the RSS feeds offered by Presidential Candidates, Members of Congress, and the White House together in one place.

In his post he describes a bit about how flexible this is:

If you want info from a particular politician, you can just go to "name.polfeeds.com".  For example, barackobama.polfeeds.com will give you the content for all of Obama's feeds, Twitters, YouTube videos, blog posts, Flickr photos, everything.  Of course, you can limit your view to particular types of items. If you want to see only blog posts by House members, you can go to polfeeds.com/house/blog.

Appending "/rss" onto the end of any url will give you the rss feed for the items on that page.  You can also subscribe to the feeds individually or create a custom feed.  For example, you could put together videos from Pelosi with blog posts from McCain and press releases from Boehner.

Very cool!

Researchers at The Center for Public Integrity and the Fund for Independence in Journalism have assembled a full-text database of every public statement made by eight top Bush administration officials from September 11, 2001, to September 11, 2003, regarding (1) Iraq's possession of weapons of mass destruction and (2) Iraq's links to Al Qaeda.

The database was assembled from official government publications, news accounts, books, and more. Sources include the websites of the White House, State Department, and Defense Department, transcripts of interviews and briefings, texts of speeches and testimony, prepared statements, articles from major newspapers, transcripts of television programs, government studies or reports, and books.

• Searchable database
• Overview of the Project
• methodology

The "Overview" of the research says that

President George W. Bush and seven of his administration's top officials, including Vice President Dick Cheney, National Security Adviser Condoleezza Rice, and Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, made at least 935 false statements in the two years following September 11, 2001, about the national security threat posed by Saddam Hussein's Iraq.

Press coverage:

• Study: False statements preceded war by Douglass K. Daniel, Associated Press, Jan 23, 2008.
• Web Site Assembles U.S. Prewar Claims by John H. Cushman Jr., January 23, 2008

The Fund for Independence in Journalism, is a nonprofit, tax exempt organization "created to foster independent, high quality public service journalism in the United States and around the world." It provides legal defense and endowment support for the Center for Public Integrity, The Center for Public Integrity is a nonprofit organization "dedicated to producing original, responsible investigative journalism on issues of public concern. The Center is non-partisan and non-advocacy."

According to AllPoints Blog, there will soon be connections between Google Books, Google Earth and Google Maps.

Google has posted locations found in some texts (Michael Jones' demo at the New York State Geospatial Summit showed only publicly available ones) to Google Earth. When you click on a placemark you jump to the book's page and to the exact page on which the location information was found. And you get a Google Map of all the places mentioned in the book.

Here are 2 examples. Scroll to the bottom of the book's "about" page, and you'll see a google map of every place mentioned!

• Investigation of Organized Crime in Interstate Commerce
• Look Homeward Angel

This is definitely an indicator of where the net is going. As David Weinberger posits (and I'm seriously paraphrasing!), in his new book, Everything is Miscellaneous, the seemingly paradoxical idea of opening up or giving away your library's metadata to the world is what will drive users to your library.

I've added two new items to our Remixes page.

• OpenCongress, which was covered before by Peggy Garvin (Congress Remix: OpenCongress.org Launched)
• An article about mashups and remixes, etc.: Mashups, Blogs, Wikis Go Federal, by Laura Gordon-Murnane, Searcher (March 2007) Vol. 15 Issue 3, p33-39. [subscription required] and its free list of links [no subscription required]. "The article focuses on the creation of mashups, blogs and wikis that deal with issues concerning the U.S. government. FedSpending.org is a resource maintained and operated by OMB Watch that enables anyone to see what fundings the U.S. Congress has appropriated in the form of contracts and grants. The Sunlight Foundation has established Sunlight Labs as a pilot project to develop technological ideas to improve government transparency and political influence discourse. The library at the North Carolina State University in Raleigh has put together a U.S. Congressional Committees Meeting Index."

Thanks to Peggy and her article! GovTrack and OpenCongress Go Beyond THOMAS, By Peggy Garvin, "The Government Domain," LLRX.com March 18, 2007.

The website OpenCongress.org was launched today by the Participatory Politics Foundation with help from the Sunlight Foundation. As stated on the website: "OpenCongress brings together official government data with news and blog coverage to give you the real story behind each bill" and also "OpenCongress is a free, open-source, non-profit, and non-partisan web resource with a mission to help make Congress more transparent and to encourage civic engagement." The site incorporates:

• Official Congressional information from Thomas, made available by GovTrack.us: bills, votes, committee reports, and more.
• News articles about bills and Members of Congress from Google News.
• Blog posts about bills and Members of Congress from Google Blog Search and Technorati.
• Campaign contribution information for every Member of Congress from the website of the non-profit, non-partisan Center for Responsive Politics, OpenSecrets.org.
• Congress Gossip Blog: a blog written by the site editors of OpenCongress that highlights useful news and blog reporting from around the web. The blog also solicits tips, either anonymous or attributed, from political insiders, citizen journalists, and the public in order to build public knowledge about Congress.

According to Govtrack creator Josh Tauberer, "OpenCongress is based (mostly) on the data set that GovTrack assembles and makes available for others to reuse, so I'm particularly happy that someone has finally reused it to make something new. As you can see from the front pages of the two sites, the focuses of the sites are fairly different, GovTrack being mostly reference and tracking, while OpenCongress is taking a stab at some analysis."

I'm sure every library in the country has a copy or three of the Iraq Study Group Report but here's a fascinating remix of the report by Lapham’s Quarterly in association with the Institute for the Future of the Book. The project brought together a "quorum of informed sources (historians, generals, politicians both foreign and domestic) to add marginal notes and brief commentaries at any point in the text seeming to require further clarification or forthright translation into plain English."

Carl Malamud gave a talk at the 2006 OSCON (O'Reilly Open Source Convention) on "10 Government Hacks." He has posted his presentation materials as a series of 10 movies with textual commentary on the Internet Archive. He says he...

...whirled through 10 hacks in 15 minutes. I left myself 23 seconds to sum it up. The hacks all have a point, and that point is that government should be less about private interests and more about the public interest. The skills we use in the open source world are tools of civic engagement, tools of citizenship. And, if we apply those skills of engagement to our government, it is possible, at least sometimes, to drag the political system (kicking and screaming perhaps) towards the common good.

Here are links to each of the 10 with short annotations on a couple of my favorites:

• Hack 1: Be Media
• Hack 2: Get Standing (Somebody Sold the Attic)
• Hack 3: Be Government
• Hack 4: Adopt the FCC
• Hack 5: Enforce ODF By Proxy
  In my world of vaporware hacks to government I'd love to see, I imagine a Firefox extension that detects any proprietary format in a .gov URL and talks to a backend proxy running tools like docvert to convert-on-the-fly and store the doc for the next user. Government rarely provides even minimal security (https URLs, MD5 signatures on documents, signed email, etc.., etc...), so one could add value to lots of government data by signing on their behalf.
• Hack 6: Audit the Feds
• Hack 7: Link Check the Feds (Link Check the Mayor)
  ...periodically run a link checker against all the departments, then send the head of the agency a list with the number of broken links, ranked by department. Oh, and send a copy of the list to the chairman of the congressional oversight committee. And to each department head in the agency so the ones on the top can have something to chat about with the ones on the bottom while they're on the golf course.

  This hack works at any level of government. For example, link check your city government and send the results to your local newspaper. Pick a slow news day and your ranking will probably even make the evening news.

• Hack 8: Annotate Hearings
  ...take the time to watch a hearing and blog the good parts, it definitely gets the word out. For this hack, adopt a committee or an issue, and make a habit of watching what they do and systematically annotating them. If nothing else, you help set the terms of the conversation.
• Hack 9: Hold Hearings
• Hack 10: Map Spectrum (Summation)

As we reported the other day (Remixes, Mashups in the news) there are several sites that have online tools for visualizing word use in the State of the Union speeches. Here are two more, one by Jason Giffey who is a librarian at University of Tennessee - Chattanooga.

• State of the Union Project by Brad Borevitz at onetwothree.net
• Tag Cloud for 2007 State of the Union, by Jason Griffey, Pattern Recognition (January 24th, 2007)

Remixes (now more often called Mashups) are in the news this morning. The Wall Street Journal has an article about the Chirag Mehta's US Presidential Speeches Tag Cloud.

• State of the Speeches -- Time Waster: Web Site Tracks a History Of Presidential Buzzwords by Aaron Rutkoff. Wall Street Journal. (Eastern edition). Jan 22, 2007. [ProQuest link. subscription required] Also available from the WSJ by subscription here. And it may still be available without subscription here

Chirag has a story about the story on his blog: 'Blog for Tuesday, January 23, 2007. We covered the site earlier here: remix: US Presidential Speeches Tag Cloud.

And the New York Times has an online application that is similar to Chirag's: The Words That Were Used.

Note: News of this project was originally posted on the govdoc-l list.

The Congressional Committees Project is a wiki who's main goal is to "facilitate participatory democracy by encouraging an informed citizenry through the advocacy of legislative transparency and the gathering of legislative information." Contributors are asked to organize information on committees, and to share resources and information. Although this is hosted on the wiki section of dailykos, a democratically partisan blog, the project is deliberately *non-partisan* and "does not imply the endorsement of daily kos or its creators." I'm adding this to our list of remixes.

This would be a very valuable project for govt documents librarians to get involved in. After all, who better than docs librarians to know about the workings of the US government and to share that information! To get the ball rolling, I just edited the section on the House Committee on Science, noting the name change because of Deb Liptak's post earlier today about that news!!

[Thanks to Patrice McDermott, director of Open the Government for originally posting to the list!]

Lapham's Quarterly and the Institute for the Future of the Book "present a new form of discussion and critique -- an annotated edition of the ISG Report on a website programmed to that specific purpose, evolving over the course of the next three weeks into a collaborative illumination of an otherwise black hole."

Iraq Study Group Report, With a running conversation in the margins...

We've opened up the report to a quorum of informed sources both foreign and domestic, asking them for notes, commentaries and corrections at any point in the proceedings that incites them to further clarification or forthright translation into plain English. The respondents are free to address any one of the seventy-nine recommendations, to doubt an assertion or deconstruct a paragraph, to bring to bear an historical perspective on an opaque sentence or a clichéd chapter heading, to lend the ballast of their collective marginalia to the hot air balloon of a text sorely in need of tethering to the ground of common sense and geopolitical reality.

—Lewis Lapham

Also see: live, on the web, it's the iraq study group report! if:book (12.21.2006)

Building on James R's post, I ran two major GPO/Council documents through Tag Crowd:

• “Knowledge Will Forever Govern”: A VISION STATEMENT FOR FEDERAL DEPOSITORY LIBRARIES IN THE 21ST CENTURY - Published by the Depository Library Council
• A Strategic Vision for the 21st Century - published by GPO management.

The difference in tag clouds is both striking and disturbing:

Knowledge will forever govern

Note that out of these 50 tags, four of the largest are: Government Information Public Library. Readers of FGI will know we like this outcome. It shows that Council was at least partly listening to the user community when they drafted the final version of the vision paper.

Contrast that tag cloud with the one for Strategic Vision for the 21st Century:

Note that out of the 50 tags shown her, five of the largest are: Government Digital Documents GPO Business. Library is barely detectable, but at least it is larger than the tag for "public", at least in my view.

The Strategic Plan is the document that GPO brought to Congress as the vision of the GPO Management. TagCrowd's admitted simple visualization analysis appears to show that the Strategic Plan is very far away from the vision of the documents community. This should worry us. Or at least lead to a discussion of visualization tools!

One of the many benefits of no-fee public access to basic government information is that individuals and groups can take gov't info from many sources and create something new. Call it a "remix" of government information. Sometimes this "remix" is made freely available, and other times fees are charged. As long as the underlying basic gov't info isn't trapped by false claims of vendor ownership, FGI doesn't have a problem with that.

This page will highlight some of the free "remixes" of existing free government information done by individuals and other groups. If you know of a qualifying project, either use the "talk to us" link below, or post a comment.

• Congressional Committees Project -- The main goal of this wiki is to "facilitate participatory democracy by encouraging an informed citizenry through the advocacy of legislative transparency and the gathering of legislative information." Contributors are asked to organize information on committees, and to share resources and information. Although this is hosted on the wiki section of dailykos, a democratically partisan blog, the project is deliberately *non-partisan* and "does not imply the endorsement of daily kos or its creators."
• Congresspedia - Congresspedia is a not-for-profit, collaborative project of the Center for Media and Democracy and the Sunlight Foundation and is overseen by an editor to help ensure fairness and accuracy. Anyone—including you—can edit citizen's encyclopedia on Congress.
• GovTrack.us - Legislation and Congressmember activity tracker created by Josh Tauberer, a first-year grad student at the University of Pennsylvania. Tracking reports can be put into e-mails or into RSS feeds. GovTrack draws information from THOMAS, House and Senate pages, Congressional Budget Office, and Federal Election Commission (indirectly)
• Historical Census Browser - The Library of the University of Virginia worked with the Inter-university Consortium for Political and Social Research (ICPSR)to transcribe paper Census publications from 1790 to 1960. The resulting data allows you to: produce tables of data by state or county, sort data by selected categories, create ratios between any two data categories, generate maps of selected data, and more. This sort of project could not be done if the older census data had been protected by DRM technologies or had originally been produced electronically and not carefully preserved.
• Iraq Coalition Casualty Count, by Pat Kneisler. This site is the work of a single individual who gets data from official government sources (US Central Command, DoD news releases and others) and compiles them in a way that the government does not. Thanks and a big tip of the FGI hat to Sandra G. Rizzo, Business / Government Documents Librarian, City of Mesa [Arizona] Library who suggested this site as a good example of a government 'remix'! She is very impressed with the site and the work involved and notes, "This site has a feature that enables you to organize the information by state, age, gender, place of death, country of death, cause of death, branch, unit, and rank of soldier. You can see it all - hostile fire, non-hostile vehicle accidents. What's more, this site includes deaths of contractors (many killed through suicide bombing, ambush, and execution) and you can limit to Afghanistan war-dead. The site features statistics and graphs." The site has been written about in the Chicago Sun-Times (December 1, 2004), Editor and Publisher (July 2004), the Washington Post, among others.
• Iraq War Casualties Map - This one's related to the Iraq Casualty Count above. Google Maps, casualty information from Iraq Coalition Casualty Count, and Latitude/Longitude information from the U.S. Census Bureau.
• Justia Regulation Tracker - This free service takes Federal Register data and provides the ability to create RSS feeds of search results. The search gives you more options than the GPO Advanced Federal Register Search because the Justia search gives you agency dropdown choices and the regulations abstracts appear on the results pages. Justia is led by former CEO and FindLaw co-founder Tim Stanley. They make their money from advanced web services to lawyers, but provide free basic legal info to the public.
• Job Tracker. The AFL-CIO affiliate organization, Working America, has a web site that pulls together data from government and other information sources in order to help non-unionized workers. The online database has information on more than 60,000 companies, listing information about their executive compensation, overseas job outsourcing, and violations of labor, safety and health standards. It includes information from many sources, including: the Case Activity Tracking System (CATS) maintained by the federal National Labor Relations Board (the AFL-CIO filed Freedom of Information Act requests to gain access to these data, most of which are not otherwise publicly available; The federal Occupational Safety and Health Administration (data obtained with FOIA requests); OSHA inspections; Worker Adjustment and Retraining Notification (WARN) Notices; SEC 10-K reports. For more information, see the Job Tracker sources and data page and: Labor Web Site Keeps Tabs on Business Workers Can Check Executive Salaries, Company Violations, By Amy Joyce, Washington Post, November 18, 2005; Page D03.
• LegiStorm (Storming Media) -- US congressional staff salaries in an easy to browse web interface. They obtain the data from the official record books: the Secretary of the Senate and the Clerk of the House reports.
• Mashups, Blogs, Wikis Go Federal, by Laura Gordon-Murnane, Searcher (March 2007) Vol. 15 Issue 3, p33-39. [subscription required] and its free list of links [no subscription required] This is an article that "focuses on the creation of mashups, blogs and wikis that deal with issues concerning the U.S. government."
• OpenCongress (the Participatory Politics Foundation with help from the Sunlight Foundation) OpenCongress brings together official government data with news and blog coverage to give you the real story behind each bill. See also: Congress Remix: OpenCongress.org Launched and GovTrack and OpenCongress Go Beyond THOMAS, By Peggy Garvin, "The Government Domain," LLRX.com March 18, 2007.
• OpenSecrets.org - Created by the Center for Responsive Politics using Federal Election Commission data to allow easier access to contribution information. Contributions database searchable by industry, party, candidate, zip code and more.
• Presidential Signing Statements - The full text of each presidential signing statement issued by George W. Bush is provided. All text was initially copied directly from the White House website on May 31, June 1, and June 2, 2006, or the Government Printing Office (GPO) website on June 3 and 4, 2006. Thereafter, text will be copied as statements are issued. Except where otherwise noted, text came from the White House website.
• Public Papers of the Presidents of the United States (University of Michigan) - The Public Papers of the Presidents of the United States contains material that was compiled and published by the Office of the Federal Register, National Archives and Records Administration. It includes volumes covering the administrations of Presidents Hoover, Truman, Eisenhower, Kennedy, Johnson, Nixon, Ford, Carter, Reagan, Bush, and Clinton. As subsequent volumes are published, they will be added online. Working in conjunction with GPO, the University of Michigan agreed to digitize PPOTP, and will continue to host it, as well as providing GPO with a copy of the files (TIFFS, OCR and metadata). The project was intended to demonstrate that useful digital copies of Government legacy collections could be produced as part of the routine reformatting efforts of larger libraries.
• Scorecard.org - Scorecard provides a tool to find out about the pollution and toxic chemical problems in your community and learn who is responsible. The information comes from publicly available data on polluters collected by federal regulatory agencies and distributed in digital form.
• U.S. Congressional Committee Meetings Index. (North Carolina State University, Raleigh, NC) Much of the work of the U.S. Congress occurs in committees. The daily Congressional Record briefly notes meetings held by Senate, House, and Joint committees in a section called the "Daily Digest." The NCSU Libraries takes that information, reformats the entries into XML records; indexes them; and makes them available via this interface. Coverage begins with the 99th Congress (1985) and continues to the present and is updated monthly.
• US Presidential Speeches Tag Cloud by Chirag Mehta.
  Tag cloud of word frequency in 360 speeches, official documents, declarations, and letters written by the Presidents of the US between 1776 - 2006.
• Votes Database, Washington Post. This site lets you browse every vote in the U.S. Congress since 1991. The data comes from several sources: the Biographical Directory of the United States Congress, Women in Congress site and the Women in the Senate page, THOMAS, and the Web sites of the Senate, the Clerk of the House of Representatives.