As promised, here’s video of Lessig’s Sunshine Week lecture, sponsored by Sunlight and Omidyar Network:

Official Footage from National Press Club:


Sunlight Footage:

Audio from the Change Congress lecture (mp3, 34mb)

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If you could treat information about your work the way information about Congress is treated, it would be the equivalent of going into a job interview with a nearly blank resume. A resume is information that a potential employer uses to hire you for a job. And because members of Congress work for us, how can we evaluate their job performance if we don’t have meaningful access to information about what they do and who they do it for?

Congress should put information, which relates to the business of lawmaking, online in real time. All their required filings (such as reports about their personal financial investments and their campaign finance reports) should be posted on the Internet in real time and in a way that people can easily search them. The legislation that lawmakers are going to vote on should be posted online three days before the vote so ordinary people can read and evaluate it. The correspondence between Congress and the executive branch should be put online. Congressional earmarks in both the Senate and the House should be fully disclosed with the who, what, where, and why before they are decided on. (For more information click here.)

These measures - and there are no doubt others — can help create a more open and accountable Congress. The purpose of Sunshine Week is to partake in dialogue about what it means to have an open government and how we can achieve it. The events of the past week are a call to lawmakers to be more transparent and accountable. The image that this week provides is of a united citizenry asking government to be more open so we can trust them again. Let us in because we can help each other run a great nation.

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Steven Colbert’s nascent presidential campaign came up against reality last night when he interviewed Massie Ritsch, the communications director for the Center for Responsive Politics. Ritsch gave Colbert the one-two of how he could legally finance his presidential run, which, at one point stunned Colbert into silence. Enjoy the whole encounter.

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TechPresident is continuing its mission to create new innovative ways to communicate and interact with presidential candidates by launching 10 Questions. Here’s how it works: you submit a question via YouTube or other video services and tag it 10questions. Then, your video will be loaded to the 10 Questions site where it will be voted on by others in the online community. The top 10 questions will be submitted to the candidates, who will then answer the questions on their campaign sites. Citizens can then vote on whether the candidates actually answered the questions. This experiment in people-powered online democracy allows regular citizens to submit questions and, more importantly, to determine which questions the candidates should answer instead of a debate moderator.

Below is our question. Don’t forget to submit one and don’t forget to vote.

Disclaimer: Micah Sifry and Andrew Rasiej are consultants for the Sunlight Foundation.

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It looks like C-SPAN is now publishing a new index of its House and Senate floor proceedings — The C-SPAN Congressional Chronicle. According to them the video recordings are matched with the text of the Congressional Record as soon as the Record is available. It only includes members who appeared on the floor to deliver or insert their remarks. The text included is what the member submitted. Each appearance has a video link where users can watch and listen to the actual statements. This is great progress!

We asked our grantee, Metavid, to check it out and tell us how far C-SPAN’s new index advances the transparency of what happens on the floor and they reported back that this is a big step, providing a slew of additional timed "metadata" (bill data, index to congressional record) that they can use to enrich their archive. The C-SPAN site is using the Congressional Record with archivists manually syncing up the record with the daily proceeding at per speaker granularity.[1] The closed caption based search which Metavid uses allows people to zero in on matching sections of video quicker but the official record is generally more accurate. Using both should greatly enhance the Metavid search functionality and may help illuminate the revision and extension of remarks that lawmakers are always taking about.

But the video C-SPAN is providing doesn’t currently integrate well into the blogging conversation — there doesn’t appear to be any way to embed it into a blog post. While the footage quality is a big step up from the 120×160 used on the main C-SPAN site, there doesn’t appear to be any broadcast resolution footage immediately available (except if you pay through the nose that their archive/store). Also it seems C-SPAN is in the early stages of populating their content as not all the video is available online yet. The metadata on Congressional Chronicle does not currently appear to be made available in a easily [re]usable format. We’d like C-SPAN to directly make it available in XML, but if nothing else the data can be scraped from the current site and then secondarily made available in XML.

This is a very exciting step from C-SPAN. We hope this progress will continue with C-SPAN making all their government coverage source mpeg2 files directly available like the mpeg2s Metavid has been posting to archive.org. And we hope they expand the Congressional Chronicle archive to include all of the committee video and metadata. This will allow Metavid and other video projects to focus more on high level functionality such as tagging, collaborative video remixing, advanced search, representative/issue syndication etc.

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