Writing in the Boston Globe, David Weil and Archon Fung dive into the new world of transparency and examine “a new idea of what public access to information really means.” While Weil and Fung don’t directly approach the topic of political information disclosure their analysis still resonates with the ongoing debate over transparency in Congress and in our political system.

Transparency policies are intended to create greater choice among consumers by providing the right kind of information in the right kind of format. The nutritional label on your can of soda gives you a good indication of what you’re putting in your body. A newer form of disclosure that provides important and digestible information is the voluntary disclosure of a product’s carbon footprint. One of the keys to these policies is the accessibility of the information; it’s right there on the box or the can. Not all transparency policies are as clear as these two and often the choices involved are much more complicated than the number of carbs you want to ingest.

Weil and Fung detail three ways in which disclosure policies can be applied to better communicate with consumers (in politics: constituents).

• Upgrade to the technology that already exists. “[I]ndividually customized information is well within reach.”

• If the information is not easy to understand or is hidden in technical databases or government files then it is not worthwhile. “Access means starting with how people make choices and providing information then and there.”

• Move towards a system of collaborative disclosure. “Why wait for reluctant companies to report problems to the government when individual patients, customers, and parents can share their experiences with one another right away.”

The Open House Project currently is working towards reporting to the House a number of recommendations that fall along these lines. Congress is way behind the curve in making their information accessible and so we really have to start at the first step here, and that is freeing the information from indecipherable databases and from file cabinets in remote Capitol Hill offices.

Take the personal financial disclosure forms that Members of Congress are required to file. These forms are not put online and, if you look at them, contain incomplete information formatted in an undesirable way. This does no service to constituents trying to make an educated choice on who they want to vote for.

What may be the biggest problem in political transparency are the disparate locations of all the varying forms of disclosed information. To actually follow what your representative is doing or who they are connected to you have connect pieces that often don’t fit together. It can sometimes be like connecting Legos to Lincoln Logs. When Weil and Fung say, “It’s the government’s responsibility to provide the information in a way that is useful for all of us,” the same should go for information about the government.

To Weil and Fung, collaborative disclosure is an essential element of this "new idea of public disclosure of information." Ultimately, transparency policies require that "the customer must be king." While there are already some collaborative transparency efforts surrounding congressional and government information already (Congressional Committee Transparency, Congressional Website Investigation, Exposing Earmarks, and the Justice Department document dumps) the only way that citizens can get directly involved in collaborative transparency is when all the information is provided succinctly in one place for them to digest. Think of it as a Total Information Awareness of Government for citizens. Without sufficient information the ability of citizen’s to collaborate on transparency projects is limited and thus is their ability to make informed choices regarding their individual political decisions. Repeating Weil and Fung, “Individuals can’t be blamed for failing to dig through reams of government reports to find out what they should know. It’s the government’s responsibility to provide that information in a way that is useful for us all.”

0 Comments

If you've got some time on your hands go and help TPM Muckraker comb through the 3,000 Justice Department and White House documents dumped on the Judiciary Committees last night. Head to TPM Muckraker's website to follow these instructions:

So here's what we're going to do. This comment thread will be our HQ for sorting through tonight's document dump.

And to make it efficient and comprehensible, we'll have a system. As you can see on the House Judiciary Committee's website, they've begun reproducing 50-page pdfs of the documents with a simple numbering system, 3-19-2007 DOJ-Released Documents 1-1, then 1-2, then 1-3, etc. So pick a pdf, any pdf and give it a look. If you find something interesting (or damning), then tell us about it in the comment thread below.

Please begin your comment with the pdf number and please provide the page number of the pdf.

0 Comments

And then there were none! Citizen journalists from 39 states and the District of Columbia have finished investigating the official, taxpayer-provided Web sites of members of Congress.

We’ll swing into action on the fact checking and follow ups…

0 Comments

With tenacity and doggedness, citizen journalists have now completed their investigations of the Web sites for some 334 members of Congress–leaving us with just over 200 to go!

The average score has crept up to 31.2679, while the average amount of time taken to complete an investigation holds steady at seven minutes.

Thanks to everyone who’s participated so far (if I’m reading the handy-dandy internal stats page correctly, there are 93 contributors), and thanks also to Kathy Gill, who gives us a nice plug while offering a very useful criticism.

0 Comments

You’ve passed the half way mark! Only 265 member Web sites left to investigate!

Of those finished, the average score has crept up to 31.3755…

0 Comments

Roughly 143 hours after releasing our latest citizen journalism project, we’re approaching the half way mark: 265 members have been investigated by citizen journalists, 271 remain to be done. The average score has crept up over to a hair over 31 (the precise figure is 31.0471), while the average time to complete an investigation is remaining steady at seven minutes. Of the various citizen journalism projects we’ve launched, this one seems to require a little more patience and effort on the part of researchers, and I think I can safely say that I speak for all my colleagues here when I thank everyone who’s taken on part of this project. We greatly appreciate your efforts.

I should also thank Pamela Drew at Newsvine, Marty Kearns at Network Centric Advocacy, Ross Karchner at Ross Notes and Craig Newmark for their kind words and pointers to the project.

0 Comments

We’ve crossed the 200 barrier–200 member Web sites investigated, and 335 (actually, 336 now that we’ve added D.C. delegate Eleanor Holmes Norton to the list) to go. Some interesting stats–the average time for completion is 7 minutes, the average score remains a hair under 30 (29.9319 for those who prefer precise numbers). Some 65 unique users have taken part so far, and 89 of the 200 completed investigations were submitted anonymously.

As of this writing, a citizen journalists have begun (but not yet finished) three investigations, including one of the Web site of Rep. Mary Bono. Just a footnote–when we were developing this project, I spent a little time looking at several members’ sites, including hers. And after looking at it, I toyed with the idea of including a section on “unintended transparency.”

Like many members, Bono offers photo albums — here’s one of a few of her office meetings, with the likes of the Indigo Girls, Aerosmith’s Steven Tyler, the Cowboy Junkies and Gloria Estefan. And here are some D.C. events she’s attended–including photos of her accepting a “GRAMMY” award at the Recording Academy’s “GRAMMY’s [sic] on the Hill event,” which, the site tells us, she won “for her work in pursuing strong copyright protection in Congress.”

Of course, the Recording Academy is an organization that lobbies Congress over, among other things, copyright protection (it also lobbies under the name National Academy of Recording Arts and Sciences). And Rep. Bono has a personal stake in copyright protection–her largest asset being the Bono Collection Trust, which pays royalties for her late husband’s songwriting.

It’s not particularly hard to find this information out–indeed, as the last link above shows, it’s already been reported. But if our protection as constituents and citizens against conflicts of interest by members of Congress is public disclosure, shouldn’t that public disclosure be available on the Web sites that we as citizens and taxpayers are funding?

0 Comments

Some 148 congressional Web sites have been researched in the first 28 hours or so since we launched our latest citizen journalism project (which needs a much snappier title than I’ve given it — how about “Investigating Congress’s Internet,” or “How Open is Congress Online,” or even, “Mirror mirror on the wall, whose congressional Web site is the most transparent of them all?”). The average score for members’ Web sites is just under 30–which is actually a little bit higher than I would have guessed, although lower than some of my colleagues expected (and less, obviously, than a passing grade).

Some citizen journalists wrote in with comments about the Web sites they frequent that suggest that members of Congress have a long way to go in offering online accountability when it comes to their sites. For example, Dale L. Sadler writes:

I visit J. Randy Forbes website regularly and can tell you that he does send out a report on voting records and upcoming votes regularly (though strangely omitting certain votes for which he may lose popularity). For instance he reported voting for the ‘alternative fuels’ act, yet it was omitted that he voted against collecting the taxes on the profits of big oil. Seems like he is into the pockets of big oil, yet there is nowhere on his website to get that information. Also there is barely a mention of the upcoming debate and vote on the antiescalation resolution.

A. J. Freeman writes,

http://www.house.gov/cubin/index.shtml”>[Barbara] Cubin’s site conceals her agenda, shows little or nothing of the votes she has taken, only highlights so-called “events” she has either attended or sponsored (usually meetings with people with no legislative effect) and generally obfuscates what she is about. It mentions nothing about who contributes to her (namely big oil, natural gas, and coal). There is lots of info, but very little of interest to those seeking to find out what she has done for me/us, the constituent. It is a squishy-feely site with lots of links to irrelevant and “voter interest” stuff; “no, i am not looking for a switchboard to send me off to other ‘lovely’ Internet sites…”. Her “calendar” lists “events,” not votes or positions or actual lawmakers she will conference with… All in all, i’d give it a D perhaps D- (she is actually there and she does update it “often” - maybe a D+)

I should probably point out that members aren’t allowed to mention or link to campaign finance information (the idea being that they can’t use the official site to raise money, just as they can’t use their offices or staff working on the public’s dime to work on their campaigns).

Steve Ellis of Taxpayers for Common Sense wrote in to share this info:

Best offices for disclosure on earmark requests are John Culberson (pdfs of actual request letters) and Jim Cooper (summary of requests and the ones that he was asked to request earmarks for but declined).

Who else uses your tax dollars to inform you of what they’re really up to in Congress? Click here to find out!

0 Comments

What are you finding in the search for Member page transparency? Give a spin around and you're bound to find something interesting. We all now know about Rep. Kirsten Gillibrand and Sen. Jon Tester posting their daily schedule on the web but we haven’t seen too much from other Members. This post highlights some things Members are doing that you might run across while undertaking our new citizen journalist assignment.

Posting a schedule is an innovative way to provide constituents with more information and provide them with a better feel for what a Member of Congress does. While Gillibrand and Tester are at the forefront of a new kind of schedule transparency they were not the first to post some form of personal schedule online. Rep. Michael Capuano (D-MA) has been posting a schedule on his site for years now, although the schedule does not list more than one thing for each day. Sen. Larry Craig (R-ID) also posts a schedule on his website that does provide a bit more information than Capuano’s schedule.

Rep. Lynn Woolsey (D-CA) also posts a schedule on her site. Her schedule has to be both the best and one of the worst of all those who post schedules. While Woolsey does not take advantage of it, the tool she is using for her schedule is pretty awesome (for something on a Member website). You can search by meetings, hearings, and district events and there is a visual element to it. Unfortunately, she does not offer up any information regarding what the meetings or hearings were about or who they were with. There’s a lot of potential in Woolsey’s schedule for constituents. If only she’d actually use it.

There are a few other members who post, or pretend to post, a personal schedule to their website. Sen. Byron Dorgan (D-ND) is probably the best of these others as he actually puts some information up. Dorgan’s Daily News Brief is not archived unfortunately.

Rep. Mike Ross (D-AR) and Rep. Adam Schiff (D-CA) have pages (Ross’ page and Schiff’s page) masquerading as schedules. These could easily be turned into useful pages for constituents.

Rep. Randy Kuhl (R-NY) uses his website to give an explanation for each of his votes. Each explanation is essentially a press release but it combines two things that constituents want: a vote history for the Member and an explanation of those votes.

Rep. Carolyn Maloney (R-NY) is not afraid to tell you the appropriations, or earmarks, that she has won for her district.

Rep. Pete Stark (D-CA) has a pretty great list of all the legislation that he sponsored that provides, with each vote, all the links to the bill text, his statements and press releases, along with other endorsements of each piece of legislation.

And in the spirit of providing more information to the public Rep. Henry Waxman (D-CA) has a list of links to CRS reports on a variety of subjects and bills.

Now, I’ve only looked over a few of these so there are probably a number of interesting ways that Members disclose information through their website. Most, if not all, of these methods need some improvement (a lot of improvement in many cases). But they are a start. What have you found in your search?

0 Comments

We’re launching a new citizen journalism project to find out what members of Congress are doing with their taxpayer-funded, official Web sites. Are they using the sites to further transparency and be accountable to their constituents? Or are they using them to post press releases touting their actions or to highlight favorable stories from the press?

We’re asking you to dig through the official, taxpayer-funded Website of a member of Congress, and help determine those that act as genuine tools for transparency. We’re asking questions in three broad areas: do they provide access to basic information on what they do in Congress (the bills they sponsor, the committees they serve on); do they provide information from or access to any of the legally-required disclosures they have to file (on personal finances or junkets they take), and do they provide any additional information that furthers transparency (their daily schedule, lists of earmarks they’ve asked for or gotten).

Members of Congress provide all sorts of information they want us to know–press releases and favorable stories saying they’re off to a good start or helping to fight cancer or being honored for their work in Congress. Do they also provide access to the kinds of information that allow us, as constituents, to evaluate their work and exercise responsible citizen oversight? How much of their public record do they provide, online, to the public?

We’re asking you to help us determine which members use their Web sites is a tool for transparency. The findings will be used to highlight the best practices, and to develop a set of guidelines for sites of members to meet in the future.

To dig in, click here.

0 Comments