Yesterday, House Minority Whip Steny Hower (D-MD) gave an interesting speech on renewing the American people’s faith in government. He ticked off four major areas for reform: campaign finance reform, voting rights, redistricting reform, and government technology. While there’s a lot to digest in his speech, I want to highlight the part that concerns government technology.
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. […]
The Second Congressional Hackathon will take place at the U.S. Capitol on October 23 from 10–5. Hosted by Majority Leader McCarthy and Democratic Whip Hoyer, the hackathon is intended to explore how we can modernize Congress–from open data to updating constituent engagement. To RSVP, go here. The First Congressional Hackathon–#InHackWeTrust–was a great event, with tons of […]
Remarks delivered at the #CryptoSummit on July 15, 2015. • • • Good morning. Thank you for inviting me. Congratulations to ACCESS for holding such a successful summit on the vital issue of encryption. Encryption is part of a suite of technology and privacy issues that have kept things interesting up on Capitol Hill. As we saw recently, […]
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 […]
Introduction In the last few years “Open Government” has emerged as a social movement that reframes the public’s relationship to government. While the concept of Open Government is not new — the federal Freedom of Information Act is a well-known example — the digital revolution has prompted new actors to publish and reuse government information for civic purposes. Libraries, […]
The Tuesday, May 12 #Hack4Congress awards ceremony at the House of Representatives’ majestic Judiciary Committee hearing room was the culmination of a 6 month long effort to engage technologically savvy members of the public with making Congress more open and efficient. The three winners of congressional data hackathons in Cambridge, San Francisco, and Washington, D.C. presented their projects to […]
I thought it would be useful to identify legislative data projects in advance of the House’s annual Legislative Data and Transparency Conference and #Hack4Congress, a congressional hackathon we are co-hosting with our friends the OpenGov Foundation. I have written about some ideas previously, and others are newly published or elaborations. Not all are mine, but I like them all. {Update: a […]
Here is a rundown of free digital tools any self-respecting congressional staffer, Member of Congress, journalist, or public advocate should consider using. All are free, run on information published by Congress or cobbled together from official sources, and most are built on open source code. (Many of the developers are members of the Congressional Data Coalition.) […]