Top 5 Federal OpenGov Efforts

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 making major strides.

5. Innovative uses of technology

When you think of how the government uses technology, innovation often is not the word that comes to mind. More often it’s thought of as clunky, slow, out-of-date, insecure and expensive. But the executive branch has taken a step towards addressing these issues by creating 18F.

18F bills itself as “building the 21st century digital government.” It is an inside-government consultancy that builds technology for government on a cost-recovery basis. Housed at the General Services Administration, 18F addresses the twin problems of outside contractors who build cruddy tools that cost a ton of money as well as underfunded government developers who must use inadequate tools in unfriendly environments. Private sector developers are brought into government in the equivalent of a technology startup to help agencies build new tools and change the way they engage with technology. Most importantly, they work to change the culture around government information technology.

18F connects to opengov because many of its projects are opengov-related and the tools it builds are developed in the open. Projects include cleaning up Federal Election Commission data, a consolidated FOIA request hub, making federal spending transparent and rethinking the portal MyUSA. 18F is changing the way government uses technology, which often results in better, faster disclosure of government information.

4. Open courts

Unfortunately, federal courts are awful about opengov. But I did not want to let the opportunity to praise some great work being done on the federal civil society side, notably Courtlistener, Oyez, ScotusBlogand Cornell’s Legal Information Institute. Respectively, they provide alerts for and deep content regarding federal court decisions; publish audio and transcripts of Supreme Court decisions from 1955 forward; provide real-time reporting and context for current Supreme Court activities; and provide access to many Supreme Court opinions.

3. Improved efforts to provide access to executive branch information

Over the last six years, both Congress and the executive branch have made serious efforts in proactively and responsively releasing information to the public, at least in some (non-national security) arenas.

The most notable effort has been in legislation to fix the Freedom of Information Act. Significant FOIA legislation passed the House and Senatelast Congress, but in slightly different forms so it has yet to be signed into law. The Obama administration, most notably the Department of Justice and financial regulatory agencies, fought against much-needed efforts to improve FOIA because it dared codify a presumption of openness and would require the public’s interest be weighed when evaluating whether to release information the executive branch deemed privileged. The legislation slowly is moving towards passage this Congress.

Other notable efforts ongoing on the FOIA front include the establishment of a FOIA advisory committee, an effort to unify FOIA regulations across all agencies and the construction of a central online FOIA request portal.

On the proactive disclosure side, the Obama administration conducted a survey of all the datasets it held, and — after a FOIA lawsuit — has agreed to release the inventory to the public. It also continues to publish a log of many of the visitors to the White House. And the administration is engaging in a biannual open government planning process, where many agencies publish a plan for releasing information to the public and follow through on some of their commitments; there’s also an international process around domestic transparency commitments. The Data.gov website, which publishes some federal datasets, also is of some value.

Still, there is a long way to go.

Congress has considered (and in a few instances passed) other notable legislation, including the DATA Act discussed below. Also on the docket is a bill — the Access to Congressionally Mandated Reports Act — that would require all agency reports to Congress be published online. The Presidential Library Donations Reform Act, which requires disclosure of donations to presidential libraries, is poised for consideration by the full House and Senate. There are other smart bills being drafted and considered as well.

2. Publishing federal spending information

Last Congress, the DATA Act was signed into law. This bipartisan measure would make much federal spending information available to the public, and would have gone further if not for strong oppositionfrom the Office of Management and Budget. The regulation governing the law currently is jointly being written by OMB and Treasury. By incorporating unique identifiers, following federal spending at a great level of detail and pushing information into a central repository, the DATA Act holds out the promise of transforming our understanding of federal spending. New legislation to extend the DATA Act also has been introduced.

Federal responding requirements like the DATA Act can be transformative. Whatever the merits of the2009 economic stimulus bill, the transparency requirements around the $787 billion legislation have had surprising results: “spending transparency became institutionalized in some states.” In some cases, the availability of Recovery Act data marked the first time officials were able to monitor performance trends for federal contracts, grants and loans across all state agencies. If properly implemented, the DATA Act can have similar follow-on benefits.

1. Open legislative information

By far the most remarkable transformation has been in public access to legislative information. The work to make congressional information available to the public in a structured data format and in bulk has been transformative, and the House literally has changed the way it operates to make this happen. We are here only because of a bipartisan commitment by House leadership who have labored without great acclaim against high bureaucratic barriers to modernize congressional operations.

There’s too much to point out all of the changes, but here are the highlights.

The House put in its rules a requirement that legislative information be maximally available to the public online.
It created a bulk data task force that continues to meet to discuss how to better release data to the public, bringing all internal stakeholders together for the first time and engaging with the public as well.
It built a House-side congressional documents repository.
It publishes all bills and amendments to be considered on the floor.
The U.S. Code is now available online in a continuously updated structured data format.
A project is underway to show in real time how an amendment would change a bill and a bill would change the law.
There are quarterly public meetings at which inside stakeholders meet with the public to discuss projects and ideas, follow up on commitments, and address public feedback.
There’s an annual Legislative Data and Transparency Conference that brings together all stakeholders (including the public) to discuss legislative information.
The House and Senate (and their legislative support agencies) will shortly be publishing bill text, summaries and status information online in bulk and in structured data formats.
The House permits the use of open source software.

This is no less than a revolution in how Congress makes information available to the public. In turn, it has empowered a huge federal civic technology community that transforms the new data and tools into new ways to communicate with Congress, analyze information and make government more efficient and effective. Literally millions of people each month are directly or indirectly accessing federal legislative information because of this process. The Senate is not as far down the path as the House, and the Library of Congress is notable for its foot-dragging, but we have seen real, tangible, important progress.

Concluding thoughts

What makes all this progress even remarkable is that advocates for opengov at the federal level, especially when it comes to legislative information, have received much less attention recently than advocates at other levels of government. A lot is happening at the federal level, and if we keep working at it the possibilities are endless.

Cross-posted at the Sunlight Foundation blog.

{ Liked this? You may also like There Oughta Be a Law }

— Written by Daniel Schuman

Learning from #Hack4Congress

3134249877_7c867107cc_o — Photo credit: Yum9me

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 three members of Congress, a bipartisan array of senior congressional staff, and a packed gallery filled with journalists, advocates, staff, academics, and others.

More than 620 people and 16 members of Congress participated over the course of the hackathons, events where policy wonks and technologists who had not previously met developed web tools to address perceived problems with the way Congress works. Participants were challenged to address problems — and were provided suggested topics by members of Congress and non-governmental groups like us — in one of the following five categories.

Improving the Lawmaking Process
Facilitating Cross-Partisan Dialogue
Modernizing Congressional Participation
Closing the Representation and Trust Gaps
Reforming Campaign Finance

Each of the three winning projects performed an extraordinary amount of work over a short period of time. It is worth checking out the presentations from the winning teams — CDash, CoalitionBuilder, CongressConnect — which are summarized here. To see a demonstration of the projects, watch this video from the awards ceremony.

• • •

Several themes emerged from the regional hackathons and awards ceremony.

First, the hackathons illustrated the significant public enthusiasm for using technology to make Congress work better. This enthusiasm for the development of congressional civictech, to use the in-vogue buzzword, should be no surprise to anyone who watches this space closely. The unique levels of complexity and institutional challenges that arise in the federal legislature have long served as a crucible for development of new technologies inside and outside government. Over the last half-decade in particular, the House of Representatives has leaped forward, and the Senate and legislative support agencies have followed, in efforts to make more data available in civic friendly formats, prompted in part by the work of our coalition.

Second, while there’s a lot of talk about state and local governments as civictech innovators, the greatest improvements in public access to information still arise from work done at the federal level. The 2009 Stimulus Act forced the states for the first time to track federal spending, which was then reported on a federal website. Federal civictech websites like GovTrack have served as a model for the updates to THOMAS (now Congress.gov) and the development of legislative information websites in the various states and around the world. The DATA Act will cause the creation of unique identifiers to track the flow of nearly all federal funds. And funding for the Government Publishing Office and its primary website FdSys effects local access to information held at federal depository libraries and online.

Third, even with all the enthusiasm, it was apparent that many people still do not know where to find federal legislative information. That’s no surprise. Publishing of congressional information developed organically, in fits and starts, in different places through the bureaucracy. It was not systematic because it had never been done before. Only in the last few years with the development of docs.house.gov,rules.house.gov, and non-governmental sites like the GitHub United States projectpage, has there been some effort to catalog and publish data in a few central locations. Most people, however, are unaware of these publishing efforts, and more needs to be done to help civic technologists find and make sense of this data.

Finally, civic technologists would benefit from guidance. Many technologists want to build things are useful, but are not sure what that is. Or they don’t understand how Congress works at a significant level of detail. Or they want to build something but don’t realize it already exists. This is where our community can help. We can connect policy experts with civic developers. We can build online resource that identify thetools that exist and data sources, list ideas for what should be built, and help people get connected into the broader community.

The OpenGov Foundation, the Ash Center at Harvard, and their civic tech partners should be applauded for hosting an incredibly successful series of events. They dovetail perfectly with the great work the House of Representatives is doing, as showcased at the recent Legislative Data and Transparency Conference. We hope there will be another formal #Hack4Congress next year and we look forward to participating.

{ Liked this? You may also like Legislative Project Ideas for Coders and Non-Coders and Electronic Toolbox for Congress }

— Written by Daniel Schuman

Legislative Project Ideas for Coders and Non-Coders

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 bunch more ideas are available here.}

Requiring tech savvy

A robust roll-call vote comparison tool (more: see vote comparison tool)
An easy-but-smart search of the Congressional Record for member statements on a topic (more: see congressional record search)
A customizable daily or weekly email with all congressional hearings and floor votes, including committees and subcommittees, which at a click of a button would be added to your calendar (more: see open up draft legislation; also GovTrack’s webpage)
Congressional Research Service: CRS Report freshness ratings (more)
Congressional Research Service: One-stop source for Congressional Research Service reports (portal to search web) (more)
Congressional Research Service: Build a tool that allows congressional offices to receive requests to publish CRS reports and to host the publication of those reports; bonus if it allows the Member office to publish a list of all reports that a constituent/the public could request
A means to transform draft (pre-introduction) bills from PDF to a format that supports easy comparison, markup, and public discussion (more: see open up draft legislation)
A user-friendly webpage for the federal law website LegisLink (more: see federal law online)
Build a dashboard that reports on all House and Senate personal and committee websites that indicates whether they are SSL (HTTPS) compliant
Expand Capitol Bells to the Senate (see: Ted Henderson about Capitol Bells)
Build a Congressional Correspondence Tracker that allows Member offices to track all communications, automatically publish and thread letters and responses to the public (with redactions as appropriate)
Transform the Congressional Record into structured data
Transform the Constitution Annotated into structured data (pull it out of PDFs) (more: see public the Constitution Annotated as data)
Transform the entirety of House and Senate expenditure reports into structured data (CSVs) (more: see Sunlight blogpost and 1-pager)

For everyone (coders and non-coders)

Transform the Rules of the House of Representatives from PDF to TXT (or DOCX); ideally set up to reflect the organization of the document (e.g. indentations) (more: House Rules)
Transform the Rules of the Senate from HTML to something with proper indentations
Transform House and Senate Committee Rules from PDFs to TXT (or DOCX); ideally set up to reflect the organization of the document (e.g. indentations) (see: Rules of the Senate)
Build a wiki that links to or contains all the non-PDF versions of Chamber and Committee Rules (more: House committees; Senate committees)
Check House and Senate Committee websites to see if they work as HTTPS and compile as a list on a wiki (make a table)

{ Liked this? You may also like Learning from #Hack4Congress and Electronic Toolbox for Congress }

— Written by Daniel Schuman

Electronic Toolbox for Congress

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.)

{ Update: A more complete list of tools is here }

Committee Meeting Calendar

While you could pay $1000 annually to subscribe to a daily calendar of committee hearings, GovTrack publishes an automatically-updated calendarthat lists all hearings and meetings in the House in Senate at no cost to you. Alternatively, subscribe to GovTrack’s alerts, which tracks particular committees and bills.

Follow House Floor Action

The app Capitol Bells tells you whenever there is a House floor vote and provides essential context (such as what the vote is on). Used by more than half the Members of the House, it’s an essential tool to keep an eye on the floor.

Google Alerts for Government (but not Google)

The Sunlight Foundation’s alert tool Scout is the most powerful way to be alerted to government actions. It sends email alerts based on your keywords for federal and state legislation, federal regulations, floor speeches, GAO Reports, IG reports, and some federal court opinions. It’s like having a staff of well-payed research assistants constantly hitting refresh on dozens of congressional websites.

Collaboratively Write the Bill

Public input on legislation is often useful but only with the recent launch of Madison is there a free tool that allows broad public engagement while retaining control of the document. Built by the OpenGov Foundation, it is open source and used by Congress and the White House.

Read the Bill

While Congress’ redesign of its legislative information system has brought many needed improvements, it still lacks a lot of important contextual information. GovTrack has provided legislative information for a decade and should be your first stop. If you’re interested in the cost of legislation, Jim Harper’s WashingtonWatch is the place to go.

Read the Law

Until this past year, there was no single free online source for all bills signed into law. But now you can look up and read public laws to your heart’s content by going to Legislink. Of course, if you want to read the US Code, there’s the Office of Law Revision Counsel’s official website as well as the longstanding champion of public access to legal information, Cornell’s LII. (Cornell has a ton of other stuff, having been in the business of free online access to law since the early 90s, before everyone else).

Congressional Staff Directory

You might guess Congress publishes a staff directory with the names of staffers and their areas of responsibility, but only private sector sources are available. Fortunately, thanks to the hard work of the Sunlight Foundation, the website FindTheBest has a searchable directory of House and Senate staffers. It’s not perfect, but it’s pretty good (especially since it’s free). Sunlight has a downloadable version of the House information, too.

Inspector General Reports

Until very recently, it was impossible to find all the publicly available IG reports in one place. Thanks to the hard work of many volunteers, you can search IG reports from 65 offices at oversight.io.

Searchable Press Releases

Still a work in progress, Statementer pulls many congressional press releases into a central website searchable by the title of the release.

House Activities

While not third party apps, two congressional websites are worth their weight in gold. First, docs.house.gov the website docs.house.gov is a powerful source of information about House floor and committee activities. Second, the rules committee website in invaluable to see when a bill is ready to go to the floor (3 legislative days in advance), including any amendments that are offered.

A Few More Tricks

While these technically are not legislative-focused websites, they can be useful in monitoring/accessing information that is not user friendly.

ChangeDetection will send you an alert for whenever a webpage has changed. Certain committees have such awful websites that the only way to know what’s new is to get an alert when the page itself changes.
The Wayback Machine may be named after a cartoon time machine, but it allows you to see how websites appeared in the past. This is particularly helpful if a site has gone down or its content has changed.
Congress has a bad habit of purging congressional websites. But the web harvest, hosted by the Center for Legislative Archives, allows you to see congressional websites going back to 2006.

Final Thoughts

These websites are pretty cool, but there should be more of them. Even with recent progress, Congress and its legislative support agencies need to publish more information and do so in more useful formats. Congress also should enact legislation like the Access to Congressionally Mandated Reports Act, which will make additional troves of information publicly available. There also has to be further developments in how Congress collaborates with the public, whether through hackathons or the use of open source technology, but that is a discussion for another time.

{ Liked this? You may also like Learning from #Hack4Congress and Legislative Project Ideas for Coders and Non-Coders }

— Written by Daniel Schuman

When It Comes to Pay, All Feds Aren’t Created Equal

It comes as little surprise to hill watchers that House staff are underpaid compared to their Senate equivalents, let alone executive branch and private sector staff, but we decided to dig a bit deeper. Just in time for the holidays (and those non-existent public sector bonuses) here’s a comparison of key positions in the House, Senate, and executive branch. We admit that the data is a bit old, like the Ghost of the War on Christmas Past, but it’s the best we can do with what’s available.

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The shaded areas in the bars for the executive branch staff show a range of potential pay.

To rub it in, chiefs of staff might earn some $141,000 in the House, but they could rake in $164,000 in the same position in the Senate. In an equivalent position in the executive branch, people with experience as a chief of staff could make anywhere from $119,000 — $198,000. (We had to use a range, but with enough time in government, those step increases add up quickly.) They could make even more in the private sector, depending on their experience, education, and connections. And as lobbyists? Well, connections do count for more than expertise. Continue reading “When It Comes to Pay, All Feds Aren’t Created Equal” →

Keeping Congress Competent: The Senate’s Brain Drain

One of the foundations of democracy is a legislature that functions well. The ability to assess whether a legislature is functioning properly depends on the public’s ability to see what it is doing. Observing what the U.S. Senate is doing, unfortunately, is a difficult task, and one that is unnecessarily hard. Have special interests become increasingly powerful in the Senate because the upper chamber has diminished its capacity to legislate? To evaluate this question, we gathered data about congressional staff numbers, pay, and retention from a number of difficult-to-access (and often non-public) sources.

While the U.S. Senate is often seen as the wiser and more seasoned counterpart to the House, we believe it is suffering from the same affliction that has robbed the lower chamber of some of its ability to engage in reasoned decision making, placing it at the mercy of special interests. Over the past thirty years, the Senate weakened its institutional knowledge base and diminished its capacity to understand current events through a dramatic reduction of one of its most valuable resources: experienced staff.

Despite the explosion of new issues senators must master and an ever-increasing population they must serve, the Senate has roughly the same total number of staff in 2005 as it had in 1979 — around 5,100. While much substantive work is performed in committee, committee staff has been cut by one-third. Similarly, the number of personal office staff in a policymaking role has declined by 14 percent. And staff pay has mostly stagnated between 1991 and 2005. It’s no wonder that a recent Congressional Management Foundation report found staff feeling as if they don’t have enough time to do everything they need to do, and they said resource constraints cause the quality of their work to suffer.

1_gP7CNUE7lHnQUqEMe5I82w Continue reading “Keeping Congress Competent: The Senate’s Brain Drain” →

Keeping Congress Competent: Staff Pay, Turnover, And What It Means for Democracy

Incoming Speaker Boehner recently vowed to tighten the House of Representative’s collective belt through a 5 percent budget reduction. Congressional staff are the most likely target. An in-depth look at Congressional staff employment trends raises questions about whether Congress has the support necessary to do its job. After reviewing a quarter century of staff salary and retention data, we found:

A pay gap between Washington-based House personal office staff earnings and people doing equivalent work in the DC metropolitan area.
A decrease in the total number of hill staff over the last two decades.
Fewer staff engaged in policy-making roles.
Average salaries for most Washington-based House personal staff have not increased in two decades, and may have decreased for many.

Who is picking up the slack? One clue could lie in the nearly 12,500 federally registered lobbyists, and countless others, who provide information and exert influence in the halls of Congress; by contrast there’s around 7–8,000 House personal office, leadership, and committee staff. Put a different way, $2.6 billion was spent on lobbying in Washington in 2010, versus $1.37 billion for the House of Representatives in FY 2010. Have we privatized Congress? Continue reading “Keeping Congress Competent: Staff Pay, Turnover, And What It Means for Democracy” →

House Passes the Best Leg Branch Approps Bill in 8 Years

On Friday, the House of Representatives passed the best legislative branch appropriations bill since Republicans took power in 2010. Unlike many prior appropriations bills, which often undermined the House’s capacity to govern through deep budget cuts, this legislation contained provisions to strengthen the House and set the stage for further improvements. In addition, it was created in a bipartisan manner, drawing on the hard work of Reps. Kevin Yoder and Tim Ryan and their staff. Continue reading “House Passes the Best Leg Branch Approps Bill in 8 Years” →