Keeping politicians' hands off the Net & everything else related to technology
The White House’s release of its “Open Government Action Plan” today is timely. I’ll be rolling out the product of several months’ work on government transparency Friday at a Cato Institute event called “Publication Practices for Transparent Government: Rating the Congress.” The paper we’ll release commences as follows: Government transparency is a widely agreed upon [...]
So I say in Politico today. Highlights: During his first two years in office, the president generated a lot of heat in the transparency area — but little sunlight. House Republicans can quickly outshine Obama and the Democratic Senate. It all depends on how they implement the watch phrase of their amendment package: “publicly available [...]
Taxpayers Against Earmarks is a new effort to rid the federal legislative process of some of its most acute horse-trading: earmarks. Find it at the cleverly named URL, EndingSpending.com. My project WashingtonWatch.com has worked to generate earmark transparency. Here’s the earmarks main page, and you should expect to see FY 2011 earmarks there soon. There’s [...]
The Obama administration seems to be working to pull defeat from the jaws of victory on the president’s “Sunlight Before Signing” campaign promise. Whitehouse.gov sometimes posts bills as “pending” before they get out of Congress, when it’s premature to ask the public for a final review. The problem is particularly acute today, as I note [...]
I’ll present a short paper and lead some discussion on federal spending transparency tomorrow at an OMB Watch conference entitled “Strengthening Federal Spending Transparency: A Working Conference to Develop a Plan of Action.” My paper is called “Federal Spending Transparency: Unlocking the Power of Abstraction.” It builds on lessons I learned from developing the Earmarkdata.org [...]
A bill introduced in the Senate yesterday would require Congress to bring earmarks out of the shadows, producing earmark data in a format that the public can easily use. S. 3335 calls for a “unified and searchable database on a public website for congressional earmarks.” This is something President Obama called for in his 2010 State [...]
The potential of streaming video from the House of Representatives is so great that my first impression of the House’s new video offering, HouseLive.gov, has been disappointment. There is much room to improve HouseLive.gov, and I hope it will improve. At first, I couldn’t find any video that was actually live. (That would inject a [...]
As required by rules instituted last year, members of Congress are posting their earmark requests online. And in a small improvement over past practice, the House Appropriations Committee is posting links to all those pages (in alphabetical order and by state). The Senate Appropriations Committee is doing the same. So, great. You can go [...]
Over on the WashingtonWatch.com blog, I’ve laid out in the simplest terms I could what’s going on in terms of procedure with health care overhaul legislation. The post, called “What is Deeming, Anyway?“, comes in at a mere 900 words… If you’re a real public policy junkie, you might like it. But what about the [...]
What struck me most about the executive summary of the FCC’s “National Broadband Plan” is that they published it in one of the most opaque formats going: It’s a PDF scan of a printed document. This means you can’t cut and paste the bullet point that says: Increase civic engagement by making government more open [...]
February 14, 2012
The Technology Liberation Front is the tech policy blog dedicated to keeping politicians' hands off the 'net and everything else related to technology.
