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.)
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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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Privately paid travel may have fallen over the past year, and more precisely since 2005, but some lawmakers are still taking lavish trips to exotic locales. And some of them might be breaking the new ethics rules that Majority Leader Steny Hoyer stated there would be a “zero tolerance” policy. The New York Post has an exposé on a privately paid trip (not everyone stopped taking them) to the Caribbean island of St. Maarten taken by six members of the Congressional Black Caucus. The Post accuses the lawmakers of accepting travel from an entity that employs a lobbyist, going on a trip that included lobbyists, and failing to properly file their disclosures.

Officially the trip was sponsored by the Carib News Foundation for a conference in St. Maarten. The Foundation, however, accepts contributions from corporate sponsors, some just for the Foundation’s operations and others specifically for the conference. These corporate sponsors included Citigroup, AT&T, Verizon, Pfizer, Macy’s, and American Airlines. Since, ethics rules forbid the acceptance of travel from an entity that employs a lobbyist, and all of these companies employ lobbyists, the question is whether a sponsor of the Carib News Foundation and their conference needs to be listed as a sponsor of the trip. This is the primary question at the center of possible ethics violations.

According to the Post, the Foundation, in filling out the proper disclosure forms, checked the box, “I represent that the trip sponsor(s) has not accepted from any other source funds earmarked directly or indirectly to finance any aspect of the trip.” This statement is not properly backed up by statements made by Carib News Foundation CEO Karl Rodney and representatives of the corporate sponsors:

[I]n his opening remarks in St. Maarten, Rodney, who has organized 13 annual conferences, thanked all of the corporate sponsors by name.

He expressed gratitude to AT&T for its sponsorship at all prior conferences and singled out Citigroup as being the biggest conference sponsor this year.

“And so we want to say thanks to Citi,” said Rodney. “It’s a great team to have working, and great partners.”

Citigroup Vice President Michael Flanigan, who attended the St. Maarten event and is listed as a member of the conference planning committee, didn’t try to hide his company’s association with the event during a speech he gave to attendees.

“This year was significant for Citi,” Flanigan said, speaking to a half-full room. “For the first time we are the lead sponsor of this premier event.”

The House Committee on Standards of Official Conduct states that:

…when a nonprofit organization pays for travel with donations that were earmarked, either formally or informally, for the trip, each such donor is deemed a “private source” for the trip and (1) must be publicly disclosed as a trip sponsor on the applicable travel forms and (2) must itself be required to satisfy the above standards on proper sources of travel expenses.

It appears, through the indirect admission of Rodney and corporate representatives, that corporate funds were used to finance the conference. The question remains as to whether the conference counts as part of “the trip.” Rodney states that the Foundation funds 50% of the conference, and it is possible that all the funds earmarked for the lawmaker trips came from the Foundation’s coffers. The Committee has further rules relating to the involvement of corporate sponsors:

[I]n order for a Member or staff person to receive Committee approval to accept officially-connected travel from a private source, the source must certify to the Committee that it has not accepted from any other source funds earmarked directly or indirectly to finance any aspect of the trip

“[A]ny aspect of the trip” certainly sounds as though the conference would count as part of the trip. Looking at the definitions in another disputed matter of ethics violations in the Post story puts doubt into what could define a “trip” or “aspect of [a] trip”.

The Post also points out that the presence of lobbyists at the conference may violate the rules banning lawmakers from accepting travel in which lobbyists accompany them. The use of simple language is where legal loopholes are born. And this is no exception:

In addition to prohibiting Members and staff from accepting officially-connected travel from a private source that retains or employs lobbyists or agents of a foreign principal, for most trips the travel provisions of the gift rule prohibit Members and staff from accepting travel from a private source if the official will be accompanied by a lobbyist or agent of a foreign principal on “any segment” of the trip (House Rule 25, clause 5(c)(1)(A)). The term “segment” means any part(s) of the travel to and from the destination, rather than the event itself or location being visited that is the purpose of the trip. Whether a lobbyist may be involved in planning, organizing, requesting, or arranging a trip also depends on the source of the travel expenses.

So there you go. A “segment” does not include the segment of the trip that includes the purpose of the trip. If a “segment” of a trip is only defined by the coming and going part of “trip,” does this extend to “any aspect” of said trip? Doubtfully, considering the sponsor, the Foundation, is paying not just for airfare, but for food and lodging.

This trip is certainly a case of questionable twisting of ethics rules, if not an outright violation. The loopholes evident make the restrictions placed on privately paid travel easy to circumnavigate, and thus ought to addressed.

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Our own Party Time site is the proud winner of the “best English weblog” BOB award from Deutsche Welle, Germany’s international public broadcaster. The BOB, or “Best of the blogs” awards, now in their fifth year, the contest considers blogs from all over the world. A jury of international journalists and bloggers decided.

Our company is quite impressive. This year’s top prize went to Generación Y, a Cuban blog written by Yoani Sanchez. According to the BOBs award site, “Sanchez can’t even post her own entries to the blog. Despite the challenges she has to overcome, she’s managed to keep in contact with her readers and create a huge international community around her work.”

The BOB “Reporters Without Borders” award went to two blogs. The first is written by Zeng Jinyan, the wife of an imprisoned Chinese human rights activist Hu Jia. The second is 4equality, a Persian blog that fights for women’s rights in Iran.

You can read more about the BOBs  here. The Sunlight Foundation was proud to win the the top BOB prize back in 2006.

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