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LOUIS Shines Light on Congress, Executive
Today our friends at the Sunlight Foundation made the following announcement:
Sunlight would like to invite you to test out our new search engine of federal documents called LOUIS -- the Library Of Unified Information Sources -- at http://www.louisdb.org. There's a screencast available on its homepage to help familiarize you with the site. LOUIS makes it easy to search from a collection of over 300,000 documents from seven sets of federal documents dating back to 2001:After briefly exploring this tool, I think it will be highly useful. And it's a great example of the type of creative uses of government information that is endangered if the government decides to go to a tiered model of information access where fully usable data is only available to those who can pay and agree not to release non-drm'd version of info to the public and free access is restricted to some sort of page at a time display. Since the Future Digital System was designed to be "policy neutral, the reuse friendly policies of today could be converted into the crippled drm'd policy of tomorrow with a few buttons. Don't let that happen. Work for the locally built, Internet accessible depository system of the future. Study our digital library technologies page, check out LOCKSS or just start tagging documents of value. Continue readingLOUIS, which updates its document depository daily, even allows you to set up a "standing query" as an RSS feed, to get alerts every time Congress or the executive branch takes action that references the subject of the initial query. In addition, LOUIS delivers these federal documents in an electronic, printable, text format for easier use. LOUIS also lets you access all the pages of a debate in the Congressional Record printer-friendly Web page. We've also made available the LOUIS API -- Web access methods that any computer programmer can use to build their own application using the database and the computer code that powers LOUIS. Test it out - we encourage your feedback. Thanks, Gabriela -- Gabriela Schneider Communications Director The Sunlight Foundation 1818 N Street NW, Suite 410 Washington, DC 20036 P: 202/742-1520 ext 236 F: 202/742-1524 gschneider@sunlightfoundation.com www.sunlightfoundation.com
- the Congressional Record,
- congressional bills and resolutions,
- congressional reports,
- congressional hearings,
- GAO reports,
- presidential documents
- Federal Register.
Official U.S. House Committee Lists Released
Posted in the past day or so from the Clerk's Office * Official Alphabetical List of Members with Committee Assignments Also available as PDF. 20 pages. * Official List of Standing Committees 66 pages; PDF. Continue reading
2007 Congressional Pig Book Released and Online
CAGW (Citizens Against Government Waste) have released their 2007 Congressional Pig Book. From the news release: The 2007 Pig Book identifies 2,658 pork projects at a cost of $13.2 billion in the Defense and Homeland Security Appropriations Acts for fiscal 2007. Only two of the 11 appropriations bills were enacted by Congress and the remaining nine were subject to a moratorium on earmarks. CAGW has identified $254 billion in pork since 1991. 2007 Summary and Previous Books (back to 1991) The complete pork database can be downloaded as an Excel file. Also, historical trends: Thanks to my friend and colleague, Shirl Kennedy, for posting this one on DocuTicker. Continue reading
Congress Remix: OpenCongress.org Launched
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.
Open House Project from Sunlight Foundation
The Sunlight Foundation has just issued a press release about its new Open House Project. The goal of the project is to explore ways that the workings of the U.S. House of Representatives can be made more transparent using the Internet. The most encouraging news: the project has the support of Speaker Pelosi. The initial list of participants includes high-profile names such as Markos Moulitsas-Zuniga of Daily Kos and my favorite masher of congressional info, Josh Tauberer of Govtrack.us. The group intends to make a report to Congress in March 2007. Continue reading
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