The Library of Congress announced that the legislative information website THOMAS is scheduled to stop functioning on July 5, with Congress.gov to replace its functionality. This will allow the Library to focus all its energy on Congress.gov instead of having also to maintain a very awkward, 21-year-old website. I’m sure that many news reports will give […]
Is our representative democracy dying? Daniel Stid writes “the idea of representative democracy” is “on the ropes” in the lead to his thoughtful article exploring whether a representative democracy is still workable. He notes that public opinion is “giving it a beating.”
Today the Government Publishing Office published the House Manual — which contains Rules of the House of Representatives, Jefferson’s Manual, and other important legislative documents — online in a structured data format on GitHub. GPO did so pursuant to direction from the House Rules Committee, which was acting in accordance with the rules package passed at the beginning of the 114th […]
The Committee on House Administration will host its fifth annual Legislative Data and Transparency Conference on June 21, from 9–4 in the U.S. Capitol. Free registration is now open. Per the invite: The #LDTC16 brings individuals from Legislative Branch agencies together with data users and transparency advocates to foster a conversation about the use of legislative […]
For the fifth year in a row, today members of the Congressional Data Coalitionsubmitted testimony to House Appropriators on ways to open up legislative information. The bipartisan coalition focused on tweaking congressional procedures and releasing datasets that, in the hands of third parties, will strengthen Congress’ capacity to govern. The testimony took note of notable successes: We […]
Part IV: The Way Forward Towards A Stronger Congress How do we use technology to build congressional capacity to perform its work? In part, the work of the Congressional Data Coalition is powering this virtuous cycle in partnership with Congress. Congress works best with a single entity that represents public stakeholders, and the Congressional Data Coalition is a trusted […]
Part III: Bootstrapping Congress Into the Digital Age How can Congress muster sufficient resources to properly fund its essential functions in an era of asphyxiating budgets? Unsurprisingly for a 227-year-old institution, congressional operations often are inefficient, expensive, or no longer necessary. There’s not a lot of money there, but there’s enough to invest in greater productivity. Moving to […]
Part II: How Congress Broke Itself How can Congress get out of the mess it finds itself in? The approach I suggest is to provide Members and staff greater tools and resources do to their jobs. This will enable them to think long term and remove their undue reliance on special interests dedicated to the status quo. In […]
Part 1: A Thought Experiment on Our Broken Legislature Imagine astronomers discover a giant asteroid on a collision course for Earth, scheduled to collide in 100 years. It is possible to build the technology to deflect the asteroid if we spend $2 trillion dollars now. What would Congress do? We can guess at the answer. […]
Tomorrow, the Committee on House Administration will hold a markup on a resolution that governs member spending. As Politico explains, the “sweeping changes” to how Members of Congress spend money was prompted by stories on former Rep. Aaron Schock (R-IL), who reportedly misspent public money redecorating his office, filing inappropriate requests for travel reimbursements, and other misdeeds. Shock is under federal […]
GPO and the Library of Congress Should Collaborate with the Public At a meeting in April, the Government Publishing Office announced its collaboration with the Library of Congress to digitize all bound volumes of the Congressional Record from 1873–1998. The Congressional Record is the official record of the proceedings and debates of the United States Congress. […]
In recent years there has been a lot of talk about opengov at the state, local and international levels, but when it comes to the federal government people just shake their heads and mutter. That is unfortunate, because a lot is happening at the federal level. Here are five areas where the federal government is […]