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CongressTube?
Congress Wants To Allow New Web Tools by Aliya Sternstein, National Journal's Technology Daily, December 12, 2007 PM edition [subscription required]
Congress is slowly moving ahead with rule changes that would allow House members and senators to enhance their Web sites with links and content from commercial sites, like social networks and video-sharing services.
Options under consideration include permitting members to use video-streaming sites if the sites are ad-free and protect the uploaded material from tampering.Continue reading
Get Hearings Fast!
Getting a hearing quickly is difficult if not impossible -- unless you have money. Now, without fanfair, one committee is making it easier. See a list here, and read more about it in Dan Froomkin's article, Citizen Journalists, Start Your Engines! (December 4, 2007).
Continue readingMajor hearings are often transcribed in real-time by CQ Transcripts and the Federal News Service, but those are copyrighted works that are only available to those who pay for them or have a subscription to Nexis.
Up until now, it took more than six months for public-domain transcripts of most hearings to become available. They had to work their way through an arduous proofing and approval process before finally being published by the Government Printing Office.
But now, without any formal announcement, the House Oversight Committee has started Web-publishing the preliminary transcripts prepared by official stenographers as soon as they are available -- typically within a few days of the hearing. In other words, while the news is still fresh.
Let's hope other committees follow its lead.
Wiki the vote
Congresspedia.org has just launched a new site called "Wiki the Vote," a project to build citizen-written profiles on each and every candidate for Congress in 2008. What a cool new tool. Not only will it be collaborative in terms of reader-editors, but collaborative in terms of data -- collating campaign contributions from Open Secrets campaign database together with reader-submitted information on every Congressional candidate for the 2008 cycle.
The project is starting with nearly 300 basic profiles to be expanded and updated by citizens, journalists and even the campaigns themselves (or those of their opponents). Unlike Wikipedia, people connected to the subjects of articles are free to add to them as long as their contributions are rhetoric-free and comprised of fully documented, verifiable facts. The citizen editors are assisted and fact-checked by professional editors. The first set of articles is based on confirmed candidates according to 2008racetracker.com and will eventually expand to cover every candidate on the ballot in the primary and general elections next year. When the OpenSecrets.org 2008 congressional campaign contributions database goes online in a few weeks, the candidate profiles will also display live feeds tracking the money race and who is funding it.Continue reading
Congressional Committees – Secrecy and Delayed Transparency
Perla Ni of VoterWatch says, "We just did a survey of what transcripts/audio/video is available from Congressional Committees. What we've found is pretty sad. Here's the state of available video/audio/transcript for House and Senate committees." (Transparency of committee hearings - transcript/audio/video , Perla Ni, Open House Project group, Sep 4, 2007)
- Congressional Committees - Secrecy and Delayed Transparency
"You'll notice how many committees for which there is no audio, no video nor transcript available. Including the Ethics committee, ironically. Also, for the ones that do post video, either it's not posted until months after or it's posted, but not archived so if you miss it, you've missed it."
And Paul Blumenthal says, "Check out this study I did last year on this very topic. These two blog posts contain all my research from the 109th Congress." (reply Sep 5, 8:00 am)
- House Version: http://www.sunlightfoundation.com/node/1596
- Senate Version: http://www.sunlightfoundation.com/node/1617
Version control of Congress?
What a great idea! Karl Fogel, an open-source software developer, writer and activist for copyright reform had this to say in a recent New York Times article:
Karl Fogel, president of the Subversion Corporation, which produces open-source version control software, He sees its power to shape public behavior. Think of what version control software could mean for the Congress, he was quoted as saying recently at Tim O’Reilly’s blog . If bills were created under a system where strike-throughs and additions were carefully tracked, the public would know which legislator made which change to a proposed piece of legislation as it made its way through the Capitol. At last, there would be transparency in the legislative process. Best-case scenario, it would shame legislators from inserting language against the public interest and only meant to reward political contributors; at worst, it would make such insertions public and allow the voters to punish the politicians who made them."Crossing Out, for Emphasis" by Noam Cohen. NYT 7/23/07. Continue reading
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