According to POGO and TPM Muckraker, the hold on the nomination of Neil Barofsky to head the bailout oversight office has been released. Still no word on whether the senator who placed the hold was Sen. Jim Bunning. Kagro X, at Congress Matters, speculates as to whether the disclosure rules for holds forced the offending senator’s hand.

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Embattled Rep. Charles Rangel writes a letter to the New York Times taking issue with their latest investigative article into his activities. The Times responds with a rebuttal. Here’s the link.

I really enjoyed the presentation.

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The California First Amendment Coalition and MAPLight.org (a Sunlight grantee) filed suit in California courts to force the Legislative Counsel “to provide an electronic database containing information on bills and lawmakers’ voting records.” The suit comes more than a year after the groups filed a Freedom of Information request to obtain the database records from the Counsel. The Counsel’s office refused to comply with the request.

The Legislative Counsel currently only provides public access to legislative information in text files. This practice is archaic. The information may as well be simply tacked to the front door of the Legislature. This is what is meant by a text file:

Yes, that is a bill status page. The presentation here makes using the data, as MAPLight.org wishes to, impossible. The barrier to information access that the Legislative Counsel has created here is massive and unacceptable.

MAPLight.org is attempting to obtain the database records that make up the Counsel’s site to integrate this public data into their database highlighting special interest influence in legislative activities.

Here’s hoping they succeed.

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Here’s some pretty neat activity from Rep.-Elect Jared Polis of Colorado. He’s blogging the freshman orientation and has posted their entire schedule over at ColoradoPols. It’s interesting to see the group of experts that provide perspective to new members of Congress. The schedule he posts is of a Harvard sponsored orientation event. In the comments thread, in response to praise from a couple of Republican commenters (Polis is a Democrat) thanking him for posting this, Polis writes:

Thanx LB and Haners. Hopefully more elected officials will realize that real people communicate this way and that the erstwhile trolls and sockpuppets of election season disappear come election day yielding to more civil but nonetheless spirited discourse.

Amen.

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A couple weeks ago, I blogged about the “midnight regulations” the Bush Administration is inserting into federal rules such as the one approved yesterday allowing mining companies to dispose of waste into streams and valleys. ProPublica is doing a terrific job shining a light on the midnight regs. Check out their chart here. They are keeping the list updated by adding new rules they discover, including links to news reports on each rule, and tracking each rule through the rulemaking process. Here’s a link to their tip sheet to help individuals ferret out the midnight regs themselves.

OMB Watch has been following the midnight regs too, where they chart out the more controversial rules. Their Regulatory Resource Center is designed to educate citizens on how they can become involved in the regulatory process and to inform the public about the regulatory process.

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(cross posted from our Google Group)

Jon Henke wrote the following provocation, and I decided to respond to the whole list, since it’s a topic I think many here will be interested in. (I asked his permission to post in full.)
(more…)

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In a reiteration of just about everything we cover here at Sunlight, Congressional Quarterly released a terrific article examining the many ways in which Congress is not transparent and open. If you read the blog here, or are familiar with Sunlight’s work, these problems will be very familiar:

• Bills are often dropped hours before a vote. With no time to read the bills, large programs get voted on with little review from lawmakers and no review from the public. In one egregious case, lawmakers went scurrying for information on the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act amendments, legalizing domestic spying programs, as the final version of the bill was not available when the vote was held.
• Some committees are secret, some are open. Sometimes a bill can travel through multiple committees with varying degrees of transparency.
• Conference committees are supposed to be open, but openness is often circumvented or multiple conferences are held, some open, some not.
• Congressional Research Service reports, the information pipeline for most congressional offices, are not widely, publicly available.
• There is a large amount of over-classification of legislative activities related to defense and intelligence.

And so it goes. Congress still has leaps and bounds to make towards true transparency. Over the past two years, there have been some encouraging developments including the Honest Leadership and Open Government Act, the rewriting of franking restrictions for lawmaker web use, and the voluntary transparency of some individual lawmakers.

One thing that does stand out in this article that needs to be challenged is the suggestion that transparency could cause greater disapproval of Congress:

Lawmakers in the 1970s reasoned that more openness could benefit not just voters, but Congress itself. That isn’t necessarily true, said Princeton’s Zelizer, thanks to 19th Century German Chancellor Otto von Bismarck’s saying that the two things no one should want to see being made are sausage and legislation.

“It might not result in better ratings for Congress,” the professor said. “They thought, ‘If you make it more open, people will like it more.’ That actually didn’t happen.”

Zelizer, one of my favorite congressional experts, isn’t wrong here, but his lessons don’t necessarily apply to transparency as conceived of in the Internet-powered 21st century. While the reformers of the ’60s and ’70s did believe that openness would build trust with the public, they did not build interactivity and connectivity into that push for openness. Transparency, different from openness, proposes that information should not just be available and accessible, but that the public should be able to freely interact with both the information and all actors involved, including lawmakers, staffers, and other members of the general public. Unlike simply making information available, transparency would go a long way to help repair the image of Congress by actually connecting and involving citizens.

To see what this transparency could look like read my colleague Greg Elin’s excellent review of the interactivity at change.gov, the Obama-Biden Presidential Transition web site.

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The Government Accountability Office (GAO) came out with its first report on the $700 billion financial bailout. Its title, “Additional Actions Needed to Better Ensure Integrity, Accountability, and Transparency,” is quite an understatement if there ever was one.

The report found that the Treasury Department has no mechanism in place to monitor what the banks are doing with the money. “The question of whether the banks would hoard the invested capital or use it to buy weaker banks instead of lending it out has been a concern since Treasury Secretary Hank Paulson first announced the program,” wrote Paul Kiel in ProPublica. Another concern is that there are no limitations on executive compensation and dividend payments. As Zachary Roth at TPM Muckraker writes, “It’s a no-strings-attached deal, it would seem.” GAO highlights the need “to formalize transition planning efforts and establish an effective management structure and an essential system of internal control.” House Speaker Nancy Pelosi was right to call the report “discouraging,” citing its lack of transparency and accountability.

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TPM Muckraker has been all over the hold placed on the nomination of Neil Barofsky to lead the oversight of the bailout. All signs point to the initial suspect, Sen. Jim Bunning. If Bunning stays shut like a bad clam, the identity will have to come out in a few days anyways. In replying to my post from two days ago, Kagro X writes at Congress Matters:

I actually count three session days since Chairman Dodd’s November 21st statement noting the hold — pro forma sessions on the 24th, 26th and 29th. The calendar at Majority Leader Reid’s site lists a pro forma session for yesterday, December 2nd, with another scheduled for Friday, plus a working session on Monday. That’d take us to six session days since Dodd’s acknowledgment of the hold, which may or may not have been in place for a few days prior to the Dodd statement.

So in all likelihood, next week will see us pass the necessary sixth session day required under the new rule, and we’ll know who the chowderhead behind this delay is.

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For years, government web sites have avoided comments and third-party Web 2.0 tools for fear of confusing user contributed content with official content and violating various policy and compliance rules. What if a user comment posted dropped the f-bomb or stated inaccurate information about a government program? What if an embedded visualization did not conform to section 508 accessibility requirements?

Yesterday, in one small blog post for a web site, but one giant web page for .gov web sites, Change.gov demonstrated how government sites could begin to join the rest of Web 2.0-kind.

1. Blog.  Simple content management with many features baked-in.

2. RSS. An open standard for making a web page machine readable for easy syndication.

3. Call for participation. Asking people to contribute. This post is itself a response to 3,500 comments made on earlier blog post.

4. Embedded YouTube video. Free video services like YouTube are a part of the Web 2.0 infrastructure. Government should use this infrastructure freely in the same way it uses email, HTTP, and public highways.

5. Alternative media formats. Single vendor endorsements and platform exclusivity is easily addressed by links to the video available on alternative services and formats. It’s the web, people.

6. Wordle tag cloud. This beautiful data visualization of the top 100 most popular words in the 3,500+ user comments on healthcare is auto-generated by a third-party tool, probably Many Eyes. Also free.

7. User comments. First, it’s user comments. Second, it’s powered by a third-party service, IntenseDebate.com. Because one of IntenseDebate’s feature is the ability for the account owner to export all the comments, there are no lock-in or availability or document archival issues. In fact, the wordle tag cloud was probably generated by dumping the content and putting it copying and pasting it into the wordle generator.

8. RSS. For users to follow the comment thread when not at the web site. Follow the all comments, or just particular threads.

9. Identified users…with reputation points. It’s optional. And while many have been wringing their hands on how to perfectly do identity and reputation systems for interaction with citizens, choice of a third-party commenting system to removes any government involvement with identity–save existing subpoena authority–and leaves it to the market to sort the issue out.

10. Wisdom of the crowds. Participants vote comments up or down in order to help popular content rise to the top and off-topic stupidity sink to the bottom.

11. Group monitoring. Trust participants to flag content for inappropriateness. Errors will happen, but the vast majority of the crowd means well and will sort out bad apples quickly.

12. Simple, threaded discussion. Adds a minimal but important organizing principle to thousands of comments. (Obviously, managing comments requires new techniques, but that will come, too.)

13. Ajax-based threading. Out with Web 1.0 clumsiness and in with Web 2.0 rich interaction without page reloading.

14. Submit a comment. It’s right there, for anyone to use. Three simple fields. Obviously, people have figured out how to use it.

15. OpenID. An embrace of another open standard, this one for identity management, where users ultimately control portable identities online allowing people to use the same identity on different .gov sites regardless of vendor.

16. Comment Policy. Change.gov’s comment policy is half a page: stay focused, be respectful, tell the truth, no spam. “We retain the discretion to determine which comments violate our comment policy. We also reserve the right to remove violations. We expect all contributors to be respectful.”

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