Recommend Changes to THOMAS
Let Rob know what changes you would like in THOMAS, today!
What changes would you like to be seen in the next version of Thomas (the publicly available website of federal legislation)? LIS (Legislative Information System, which is a more powerful version only available for hill staffers) is in the process of adding several new features, including RSS feeds, an XML database for all bills, and they plan on developing web services (an API, from what I understand). Thomas has a nice looking site, but they have lagged behind LIS for several years. I am meeting with the folks in charge of Thomas tomorrow afternoon [June 4] to urge the implementation of changes below.Read Rob's suggestions and comments from OpenHouseProject members :
- Thomas Feature Requests? by Rob Pierson, OpenHouseProject group, Jun 3, 2007.
Secret Senate Block of Senate Transparency Bill
The Senate Campaign Disparity Act (S. 223), which would require senators to file their campaign finance reports electronically, has been blocked twice by an anonymous Republican senator. Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell is hiding the identity of that senator.
The Sunlight Foundation has launched a campaign to reveal which senator is blocking passage of the bill. See:
- What’s McConnell Hiding? by Paul Blumenthal, Sunlight Foundation, June 1, 2007.
The website for the campaign is: What’s McConnell Hiding?
The irony in this situation is that there is a secret objection to legislation that would generate more transparency for senators. Now is your chance to put the pressure on to move the transparency bill forward.Continue reading
OpenHouse Project Op-Ed on House Committee information
John Wonderlich, the program director for the Sunlight Foundation, has written an Op-Ed in The Hill about making House committee information more available:
- More access to committees, by John Wonderlich, The Hill, May 22, 2007.
Wonderlich highlights reforms that the House can take including: requiring committees to post transcripts of their open meetings online within 14 days, requiring committees to post substantially verbatim transcripts of their proceedings online, making use of RSS feeds to provide updates on committee events, publishing documents in XML, and suggesting that committees stream and archive video content.
This is one of a series of Op-Eds written by contributors to the OpenHouse Project's recent report on congressional information. The complete report is available as a pdf document: Congressional Information & the Internet (The OpenHouse Project, May 8, 2007). The earlier Op-Eds are:
- Give bloggers Capitol access, by Robert B. Bluey, April 30, 2007.
- No light in basement, [campaign finance documents] by Tim La Pira, May 08, 2007.
- Inexplicable anomaly [CRS Reports], by Leslie Harris and Matt Stoller, May 15, 2007.
Cyberattacks shut down Estonia
I've been following this fascinating story for a few weeks now. It started when Estonian authorities began removing a bronze statue of a World War II-era Soviet soldier from a park in Tallinn, Estonia. The removal sparked violent protests from Estonians of Russian descent as was to be expected. What was unexpected was what the NY Times -- in the article entitled, "Digital Fears Emerge After Data Siege in Estonia" -- and others have called the "first war in cyberspace." The country was beseiged by a flood of distributed denial-of-service attacks on the country's digital infrastructure, "clogging the Web sites of the president, the prime minister, Parliament and other government agencies, staggering Estonia’s biggest bank and overwhelming the sites of several daily newspapers." The cyber-attacks went on for several weeks. The story was also slashdotted.
The 10 largest assaults blasted streams of 90 megabits of data a second at Estonia’s networks, lasting up to 10 hours each. That is a data load equivalent to downloading the entire Windows XP operating system every six seconds for 10 hours.Continue reading
Welcome UC Berkeley bloggers for June BOTMs
We have a special treat this month, as the Government Documents Librarians from UC Berkeley have agreed to be FGI's collaborative guest bloggers for June. They normally hang out at their own govinfo blog. The group includes Jim Church, Harrison Dekker, Tim Dennis, Glenn Gillespie, Susana Hinojosa, and Jesse Silva (full bios are here). I'm really excited about this collaborative experiment! And thanks also for May's BOTM, Angie Cope! Angie introduced us to a bunch of mapping information including:
- National Atlas of the United States and the U.S. National Map
- International Polar Year March 2007-March 2009
- USGS Launches Land Cover Data Web Tool
- National Wetlands Research Center Library
- TIGER Mapping Service using public geographic census data
- NASA Global Map Projections online
- NGA GEOnet Names Server (GNS)
- GPO dives into digital future
- Real-Time Water Data for the Nation
- Map Collections - Treasures of the Library of Congress
- USGS Pilot Project Makes High-Quality Landsat Data Available Through Web
- Baghdad Reference Map from National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency
- Geodesy for the layman (or woman) from NGA
- Map Scanning Registry and online map collections
- Federal Geographic Data Committee
- Global Change Master Directory of data sets