"What used to take hours to dig up and analyze is now laid bare for you to see in seconds or minutes," so states the homepage of MAPLight.org, a new website that brings together campaign contributions and how legislators vote, creating more transparency of the connections between money and politics. This includes:

- How each legislator voted on each of the 5,000 bills in the 2003-2004 California legislative session.

- All campaign contributions made to each legislator from 2001-2004, categorized by the interest or industry of the contributor.

- Supporters and opponents of each bill, and the industries and interests those supporters and opponents represent.

- A brief description of each bill, and the subject the bill is about.

- The full text of each bill, including committee reports and amendments.

So far, MAPLight.org currently includes all 5,000 bills in the 2003-2004 California legislative session and all California campaign contributions from January 2001 through December 2004. They are seeking donations and support to extend MAPLight.org to include data for other states and U.S. Congress. This is a very promising project, so let's give them our support!

The Special Library Association (SLA) announced today that EPA plans to re-establish the closed libraries by September 2008.

SLA met with EPA officials today to review the agency's report to Congress on the future direction of its library network.

The report, submitted to Congress yesterday, includes a summary of the network standards developed with respect to physical space, on-site collections, staffing and services of EPA’s Regional and Headquarters libraries, as well as a plan for allocating resources from the the 1 million dollars given to them by Congress:

•Re-establish on-site libraries in Region 5, 6, and 7, and the consolidated EPA Headquarters Repository and Chemical Library in DC.
•Enable Regional EPA libraries to update their collections, facilities, and equipment to meet Network standards.
•Conduct a formal needs assessment for EPA library services to support future development.

I am glad to see that EPA took the hearing's recommendations to meet with affected stakeholders and library organization officials seriously, but I do not think they met with anyone before the report to Congress was due, as was recommended at the hearing. At least, I have not heard or read about any such meeting. Correct me if I'm wrong. Nevertheless, EPA states:

"Over the next few months, we will continue to engage affected stakeholders (including our employee unions) as we finalize our specific plans for each library. The Agency is committed to working with its employees and outside parties on its future digitization plans (based on the third party review), a customer needs assessment, and long term strategic planning efforts".

Lawrence Lessig gave a lecture at the National Press Club on Thursday and introduced a plan designed to increase congressional transparency via the launch of Change-Congress.org.

The website provides a venue for data on earmarks, campaign financing, etc. and advocates an end to corporate and private interests. It organizes citizens to push candidates to make four commitments: No money from lobbyists or PACs, vote to end earmarks, support publicly-financed campaigns, and support reform to increase Congressional transparency.

Change-Congress.org has ambitious goals, that's for sure. Will it work? Greater transparency is needed, and this initiative will certainly help in that effort. But can "big money" every truly go away? Nevertheless, it is a noble effort, and I urge you to join their cause, take the pledge, and volunteer your efforts in contacting candidates to take the pledge!

Just a reminder that Lawrence Lessig will lecture at the National Press Club on Thursday, March 20th at 1:30 pm. The lecture will also be available via webcast. Lessig will introduce a plan designed to increase congressional transparency, called "Change Congress". More information about Lessig and this event can be found at the Sunlight Foundation website.

The FAS Project on Government Secrecy Blog contains an informative post about secret sessions of the House of Representatives, including one that took place on March 13th to consider classified matters concerning the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA).

For more information about secret sessions, read "Secret Sessions of the House and Senate" and "Secret Sessions of Congress: A Brief Historical Overview," by the Congressional Research Service. I knew that the Senate held secret sessions (54 since 1929), but I did not know that the House only held three secret sessions since 1830 and they took place in 1979, 1980, and 1983! However, there were unsuccessful attempts to hold a secret session to discuss the assessment of the war in Iraq in 2006 (search for page H7371) and the Intelligence Authorization Act for FY 2008 (pages H4795-4796, H4808, and H4867-68). Also, the proceedings of a secret session are not published unless the House or Senate votes to release them. If they vote to release them, then the transcripts will be printed in the Congressional Record, but if the House votes not to release them, then the they are preserved at NARA and may be available to the public after 30 years.

I finally found some good news to cheer me up after writing the last two posts. ;-)

UC Berkeley Library used wiki software to create a congressional research tutorial called Congresearch. It includes Flash tutorial videos on finding a bill, a hearing, a congressional debate, etc. This one is my favorite. Over time, more tutorials will be added. You can offer them feedback too.

The tutorial homepage also contains links to current congressional news, recent votes and a link to their customized Congressional Search Engine created with Google CSE to create a focused Google search on current official U.S. Congressional websites and news organizations focusing on Congress.

I am in Gov Doc 2.0 Nerd Utopia.

Here is a great example of "Government Documents 2.0" in action: OpenCongress.org offers several Web 2.0 tools such as the OpenCongress Facebook application, where you can put bills that interest you on your Facebook profile. You can show your support or opposition to each bill, or simply remain neutral by selecting the "just following" option. Each bill links back to OpenCongress, so your patrons or friends can get all the information they need in order to understand and become involved with the issues themselves.

One of their Web 2.0 tools that I use for my GovGuides Wiki (a work in progress, mind you!), is the "Bill by Issue Widget". I created one for the Environmental Law GovGuides Wiki page I'm working on. It displays the latest bills introduced in Congress on anything to do with environmental law enforcement.

If you are not familiar with OpenCongress, it's 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". OpenCongress is a joint project of the Sunlight Foundation and the Participatory Politics Foundation. It uses data provided by GovTrack.us, which collects data from official government websites, such as Thomas. For more info, see previous FGI posts about OpenCongress: My OpenCongress, Congress Remix, and FGI's "Remixes page".

OpenCongress makes it easy to understand each bill by giving a brief summary, who sponsored it, its status, and related bills. And yes, there are links to the full text of the bill and its voting history from Thomas. However, I do encourage students in my instruction classes to cite the original sources that OpenCongress leads them to, such as the full text of the bill from Thomas, congressional record references, or the homepages that OpenCongress links to for various committees and congressmen, etc. And of course I remind them that not everything is online, especially older government information, so they must turn to the print sources that I show them how to locate and use. By that time, the students are much more apt to pay attention and understand the importance of the exotic experience of handling/using the 1945 volume of the Monthly Catalog of U.S. Government Publications or a Congressional Record volume from 1918. ;-)

I find OpenCongress to be a very user friendly and a convenient "one stop shop" for learning about legislation. Students in my library instruction classes seem to love using it, so if it gets them excited about government information, then I love it too!

C-SPAN has recently released a great new online resource with lots of potential:  the  C-SPAN Congressional Chronicle (currently in beta) is an index to the C-SPAN video recordings of the House and Senate floor proceedings. According to C-SPAN the video recordings are matched with the text of the Congressional Record as soon as it is available.  Each appearance has a video link where users can watch and listen to the actual remarks.  C-SPAN  hopes that this site will provide a useful tool for viewers and followers of Congress to research, watch, and review the actions of the Congress. They welcome  bloggers and websites to create links to various videorecordings and also welcome comments and suggestions for improving the service. 

The Sunlight Foundation and the Participatory Politics Foundation have announced My OpenCongress (registration page).

• Announcing "My OpenCongress": Network, Comment and Vote on Congress

You can create a personalized view of all the information you want about the laws being made in Washington, track any bill, senator, representative, or issue area and much more.

See  these suggestions that they put together on how to get started.

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.

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).

Major 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.

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.

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

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.

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:

• the Congressional Record,
• congressional bills and resolutions,
• congressional reports,
• congressional hearings,
• GAO reports,
• presidential documents
• Federal Register.

LOUIS, 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

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.