In a world where corruption and maladministration allow injustice, tolerate criminality, or even lead to avoidable deaths, what public officials do on social media can fly under the radar as a matter deserving public attention. And yet, the United States … Continue reading
On June 7, the Transparency Caucus of the U.S. House of Representatives hosted a remarkable forum inside of the United States Capitol that featured ten presentations from government officials and members of civil society on innovative tools and technologies. Following … Continue reading
On May 10, the Select Committee on the Modernization of Congress in the United States House of Representatives held a hearing on “opening up the process,” at which 4 different experts talked with Congress about making legislative information more transparent,” from ongoing efforts to proposed reforms to the effect of sunshine laws passed decades ago.
If you’re not up to speed on this committee, it was established on January 4, 2019 the House voted in favor of establishing the Select Committee by an overwhelming margin (418-12) by adopting of Title II of H.Res.6, the Rules of the House of Representatives for the One Hundred Sixteenth Congress, with a sole authority of investigating, studying, holding public hearings, making finding, and developing recommendations to modernize Congress – but no legislative jurisdiction nor ability to take legislative action. The committee has has been fairly described by IssueOne as “the best opportunity in decades” for Congress to improve itself, by looking inward.
The two hours of discussion on May 10 mostly added up to good news for good government, with useful summaries of progress opening up Congress to date from the deputy clerk of the House, proposed recommendations and reforms from GovTrack founder Josh Tauberer and DemandProgress policy director Daniel Schuman that would build on that progress, and some skepticism of sunshine in the legislative process from University of Maryland professor Frances Lee.
I attended the hearing and tweeted from it, as has been my practice for nearly a decade in DC:
The thread of tweets above, however is not meant to be comprehensive, nor could it be fully contextualized in the moment. For that, watch the hearing on YouTube, in the video embedded below:
…and read a summary of the hearing from the Congressional Institute, reporting from Federal Computer Week on “transparency through technology” and Roll Call on ongoing development of an “artificial intelligence engine” (applying machine-learning to structured legislative data), and the latest edition of Demand Progress’ First Branch Forecast, in which Schuman summarizes his testimony and aspects of the hearing.
He and Tauberer recommended from appointing a legislative branch Chief Data Officer, releasing structured data that would feed into the clerk’s tool to show how proposed amendments would change bills, and enact a mandate and open standards for a unique identifier for lobbyists across the U.S. government. Whether those ideas make it into the committee’s recommendations remains to be seen, but they’re worth weighing – along with further studying of the value or risk of increasing or decreasing public access to various aspects of the deliberative processes that constitute legislative and oversight activities.
On a meta note, the process on display at this forum was notable for comity between witnesses and members, openness to the public and press, and engagement online.
The medium is still the message, when it comes showing (not telling) how open a given institution is.
While paying attention to the digital component has become downright mundane in 2019, the Committee demonstrated admirable competence, streaming the hearing online at YouTube, publicized it on social media prior to the event, engaged with the public during the hearing, and published testimony on its website afterwards. (Unfortunately, there’s no text transcription of the hearing on the hearing page. Given the committee’s acknowledgement of the importance of accessibility, it should make sure to get transcripts online.)
As at the most recent “Congressional hackathons,” Members of Congress were able to show good government, ethics and transparency, far away from partisan rancor over white hot political issues or Congressional attempts to conduct constitutional oversight of a corrupt administration.
If you’re interested in following the activities of the committee or providing feedback, visit Modernizecongress.House.gov and scrub in: the People’s House will only be as open, accessible, accountable, and effective as we make it – or demand it to be. There’s no one else coming to help.
Celebrating Sunshine Week is off to a good start in the nation’s capitol, but not without some shadows along the way.
Good morning from DC! #SunshineWeek is here, & I’m headed into a National Freedom of Information Day Conference. https://t.co/HTrKUjgoTo It will be the last #FOIDay at this @Newseum location. #FOIAFriday #opengov pic.twitter.com/gBokeFjHxH
— Alex Howard (@digiphile) March 8, 2019
So far, the public has heard robust defenses of the role of access to information and journalists in our democracy on a national Freedom of Information Day conference at the Newseum, and a forum on open government at the National Archives that included reflections from all three branches. I attended both events in person. I didn’t go over to the Justice Department, where Principal Deputy Associate Attorney General Jesse Panuccio gave a speech at the agency’s Sunshine Week kick-off, but I did hear that he criticized unnamed groups whose requests are “straining the system.”
“Some groups have turned FOIA into a means of generating attorneys’ fees or of attempting to shut down policymaking,” he said. ”Immediate litigation has become a feature of FOIA administration rather than a last resort, and the result is often that large and complex requests by institutional actors are moved, by court order, ahead of requests by average citizens.”
Panuccio said that he sent a a memorandum to all agency General Counsels and Chief FOIA Officers stressing that “improving FOIA performance requires the active participation of agency Chief FOIA Officers.” The Department of Justice has not disclosed the memorandum yet.
Here’s else what I saw, heard, and learned so far on Sunshine Week in 2019.
Good morning from DC! #SunshineWeek is here, & I’m headed into a National Freedom of Information Day Conference. https://t.co/HTrKUjgoTo It will be the last #FOIDay at this @Newseum location. #FOIAFriday #opengov pic.twitter.com/gBokeFjHxH
— Alex Howard (@digiphile) March 8, 2019
Embedded above is a Twitter thread on Freedom of Information Day thread on Freedom of Information Day, which included an impassioned speech celebrating the press by House Oversight Committee Chairman Elijah Cummings and encouragement to journalists.
In an age where far too many politicians are attacking the press, it was a powerful benediction from a preacher’s son. The following text is a rough paraphrase of Cummings’ remarks, not an official transcript. You can watch video of the entire event, including his speech, on CSPAN, which is in of itself a great example of government transparency.
200 years from now, people will be reading about this period in history.
They will ask: when you saw the press being suppressed, a White House that blocked info from getting to people’s reps, a President who sent memos to career employees telling them they could not be whistleblowers, they’re going to ask what did you do? What did you do? Did you stand on the sidelines? Did you say it was someone else’s business? Did you write the story? Did you take a moment to write the editorial? Did you become fearful?
I view an attack on our press as an attack on all of us, and I will fight with everything I’ve got. And I want you to understand that I’ve got your back. I am the son of 2 Pentecostal ministers. In my house, a lie was a lie and the truth was the truth. We cannot allow fake information to become the norm. And you are the guardians of our freedom of the press. You are the ones who are in guerrilla warfare trying to get info out.
That’s why it’s so critical for Congress to protect your rights and people throughout the nation to get information through FOIA. People want to hold Trump accountable, but how can you hold him accountable if you don’t have information? If you have a secret meeting with Putin & no one knows about it?
Come on now: We’re better than that. If you block information, it’s impossible to have accountability. FOIA is critical to help the American people understand the decisions being made by their government. It is also crucial to understanding who is making those decisions and how they will affect their daily lives.
One of our top priorities this Congress is to investigate agency compliance with FOIA & evaluate how we can improve the law. “Never mistake a comma for a period.”
Things can always be improved upon. I hope Republicans will work with us in a bipartisan manner. It took us 3 years of hard work, with the help of many, & I thank you, & negotiation, & then with the help of Senator John Cornyn and Senator Leahy, we got it over the finish line. The FOIA Improvement Act is a prime example of how Congress can work together.
This week’s Freedom of Information hearing will have the EPA, Department of the Interior and The Justice Department. I invited The Justice Department because they’re in charge of ensuring compliance with the FOIA. In my opinion, they must do a much, much, much better job. At EPA, FOIA requests sent through political appointees and “Deep 6’ed.” Certain FOIA requests were deliberately delayed. That’s why Congress needs to conduct oversight, to shed a light. Secretary Ross will be coming before House Oversight to testify about how citizenship question was added to the 2020 Census.
As Oversight Chairman, my immediate responsibility is to do this kind of oversight. That work helps us to develop reforms for the future. You are so important. You are more important than you know.
I beg you to tear down any walls that might block you from getting info to the American people that they need to know. Stand up for strong FOIA law. Work with us. Don’t be silent.
I want our grandchildren to know that we stood up for this democracy. That we, all of us, had great respect for the people who created the Constitution. That we decided to be about freedom of the press & getting the information out. We are at a critical moment in our country’s history. I am so glad that you have been called to this moment to be the guardians of our information and the flow of our information.
Embedded below is a tweeted thread from the National Archives Sunshine Week event, including Judge Howell, discussion with federal FOIA ombudsman staff, and a livetweet of Senator Patrick Leahy’s comments. Video of the entire event is embedded above.
For anyone watching the @USNatArchives #SunshineWeek event, the US District Court for DC website is https://t.co/RKKtza9Oub. Here’s an interesting decision by Judge Howell, who’s speaking now: https://t.co/H2ODAtXL50 #opengov pic.twitter.com/raUfNBE5pY
— Alex Howard (@digiphile) March 11, 2019
The National Archives subsequently wrote about celebrating Sunshine Week on its website.
Leahy, who subsequently tweeted out a transcript of his remarks, observed that ”the list of threats to transparency under the Trump administration goes on, and expands far beyond just FOIA itself.”
“President Trump’s ongoing, opaque ties to his business organization make it impossible to know whether foreign governments and corporations are able to curry favor with him by spending money on his business,” the senator said. “The Trump administration has also issued an unprecedented number of lobbyist waivers to its appointees in secret – preventing the public from knowing whether Trump agency officials are simply continuing their advocacy on behalf of special interests in their official capacities.”
Senator Cornyn, a former judge and Texas attorney general, also spoke to the value of open government but not posted a transcript yet. He did tweet about his visit, stating that “Government transparency is the cornerstone of democracy. I’m proud to have passed the #FOIA Improvement Act and will continue to push for policies that ensure our government remains accountable to we the people.
As I tweeted from the event, I learned the FOIA was amended in 1974 to include sanctions against individual federal agency employees, as noted in this 2013 paper on enforcing the public’s right to access information, after Ralph Nader suggested it:
Fun facts I learned during #SunshineWeek:
1) FOIA was amended in 1974 to include sanctions against individual federal agency employees https://t.co/S4HcnQlvSM
2) @RalphNader suggested it
3) @TheJusticeDept @FOIAPost hasn’t ever sanctioned anyone#opengov https://t.co/zNjhvMlzwW— Alex Howard (@digiphile) March 11, 2019
I also confirmed that the Justice Department hasn’t ever sanctioned any U.S. government officials or staff for violating FOIA under the amended statute. The fact that sanctions for violating government access laws are almost never applied at any level of government might shed some sunlight on why the state of compliance with public records laws not just in the US government but around the USA.
If FOIA officers and appointees faced fines or even jail time for obstructing disclosures under the law, we might see more of a normative shift towards the “openness by default” described in the FOIA statute. Unfortunately, the Department of Justice’s Office of Information Policy does not show any inclination to do more than encourage agencies to comply and praise those that do.
Earlier today, the Oversight Committee released a fact sheet that documents various aspects of the Trump administration record of secrecy.
Tomorrow morning, the public will see what Sunshine Week looks like in the House of Representatives, when the Oversight Committee holds a hearing on FOIA and transparency, followed by a hearing with Commerce Secretary Wilbur Ross on Thursday “to determine why he and other Trump Administration officials gave misleading testimony about how the citizenship question was added to the Census, which has been deemed ‘unconstitutional and a violation of federal statute‘ by two federal judges.”
Whether more sunshine disinfects secrecy and corruption remains to be seen, but more public information about how public power is being wielded will inform both the public and their representatives in Congress. On Sunshine Week, that’s a good start.atch
In general, connecting more citizens with their legislators and create more resources for Congress to understand where their constituents and tech community stands on proposed legislation is a good thing. Last year’s Congressional hearings on the Stop Online Piracy Act … Continue reading
Last week, the Library of Congress launched Congress.gov in beta, its vision of the next generation of THOMAS, the online repository of the nation’s legislative data. The site features a “most viewed bills” list that lets visitors to the site see at a glance what laws or proposals are gathering interest the site.
The most viewed bills there, however, may not match up to the most popular bills elsewhere online. POPVOX**, a civic startup that is trying to bring the voice of the People into Congress, has posted the top 50 bills on its site for the 112th Congress, in terms of activity.
That the top bill is the Stop Online Piracy Act — and that the PROTECT IP Act is also in the top 5 — is unlikely to be a surprise to observers. The other bills at the top of the list — HR3035 Mobile Informational Call Act, HR2306 Ending Federal Marijuana Prohibition Act and S3240 Agriculture Reform, Food, and Jobs Act – may be more unfamiliar to many people. The complete list is in the infographic below, including whether POPVOX’s userbase supported or opposed them.
Marci Harris, the co-founder and CEO of POPVOX, wrote in via email to note that, as the 112th Congress comes to a close, the sequestration issue is starting to pop.
**DISCLAIMER: Tim O’Reilly, my publisher, provided angel funding for POPVOX last year. He calls it “a kind of Google Analytics service for politics, bringing visibility and actionable insight to both Congressional staffers and advocacy organizations.”
Data from a new study on the use of Twitter by U.S. Senator and Representatives by public relations giant Edelman strongly suggests that the Grand Old Party has opened up a grand old lead in its use of the popular microblogging platform in just about every metric.
On Twitter’s 6th birthday, there’s more political speech flowing through tweets than ever. Twitter data from the study, as provided by Simply Measured, showed that on Twitter, Republican lawmakers are mentioned more, reply more often, are retweeted more, share more links to rich content and webpages, and reference specific bills much more often. Republicans tweet about legislation 3.5 times more than Democrats.
There are also more Republicans on Twitter: while the 89 U.S. Senators who tweet are evenly split, with one more Republican Senator tipping the balance, in the U.S. House there are 67 more Republican Representatives expressing themselves in 140 characters or less.
At this point, it’s worth noting that one of Twitter’s government leads in DC estimated earlier this year that only 15-20% of Congressional Twitter accounts are actually being updated by the Congressmen themselves, but the imbalance stands.
While Edelman DC was quite tactful about what its study on the yeas and nays of the Congressional Twitterverse revealed, the lead Congressional Republicans hold on Twitter has been well documented since 2010, when a study on Twitter in Congress asserted that Democrats use Twitter for transparency, while Republicans use it for outreach. A 2011 survey of social media use in Congress by the Associated Press found that the Republicans similarly “out tweeting” Democrats on Twitter.
While the ways that governments deal with social media cannot be measured by one platform alone nor the activity upon it, the data in the embedded study below be of interest to many, particularly as the window for Congress to pass meaningful legislation narrows as the full election season looms this summer.
In the context of social media and election 2012, how well a Representative or Senator is tweeting could be assessed by whether they can use Twitter to build awareness of political platforms, respond to opposing campaign or, perhaps importantly for the purposes of the election, reach potential voters, help get them registered, and bring them to the polls
Capitol Tweets: Yeas and Nays of the Congressional Twitterverse
Nathan Eung, one of the authors of the study cited above, wrote at Govfresh about how the reasons for using Twitter may be different across party lines
Outreach and transparency are both valuable to a healthy democracy, and to some extent, it is re-assuring that Twitter use is motivated by both reasons. An interesting counter-factual situation would be if the Republicans were the majority party. We may therefore ask in that situation: Is the desire to reach out to (opposing) voters strongest for “losing” parties? Our study certainly hints that Republicans are not only motivated to use Twitter as a means to reach out to their own followers, but also to Democrats, as they are more likely to use Twitter in cases where their district was overwhelmingly in favor President Barack Obama.
All-in-all, it would seem like Twitter is good for the whole Gov 2.0 idea. If Republicans are using Twitter as a means for outreach, then more bills may be passed (note: this has yet to be tested empirically, and still remains an open question for researchers). If Democrats are using Twitter as a means for transparency, then the public benefits from the stronger sense of accountability.
Capitol Tweets: New Edelman Study Looks at U.S. Congressional Performance on Twitter
Yesterday, the Office of House Majority Leader Eric Cantor (R-VI) launched a new Facebook application, “Citizen Co-sponsor.” Rep. Cantor introduces it in the video below:
Since its introduction, I’ve been mulling over what to write about the new app. Here’s what I’ve read to date:
First, excellent reporting from TechPresident, where Sara Lai Stirland writes that the new Facebook open graph app makes lawmaking social:
The app enables people to use Facebook to track the progress of House legislation as it makes its way through the chamber, but also provides the majority leader’s office with an interesting new grassroots marketing tool for the Republican party’s ideas.
The new app makes use of Facebook’s Open Graph protocol, which means that once installed, updates to legislation that a user has expressed support for can be automatically posted to their Facebook profiles. It also means that these updates show up in users’ timelines, newsfeeds and tickers, giving the legislation more exposure to users’ networks of friends.
For now, the list of legislation that citizens can choose to support is controlled, of course, by Cantor’s office and is listed on a section of his web site. Citizens can click to “co-sponsor” legislation that they support, and see all the other citizen co-sponsors who’ve expressed their support. Each widget for each piece of legislation also shows a visual storyline of that legislation’s progress through the House.
Second, a post by Alex Fitzpatrick at Mashable on the Facebook citizen cosponsor app , in which he interviewed Matt Lira, the director of digital for the House Majority Leader.
“We have a startup mentality to it,” says Lira. “When Twitter first started, it was just going to be for cell phones, now it is what it is today. It’s evolutionary, so you want to see how users use it and if the engagement justifies it, we’ll expand it out.”
The new media team at Cantor’s office is drawing inspiration from both sides of the aisle. Lira says he’s a fan of Rep. Issa’s (R-Calif.) Madison Project as well as the White House’s “We the People” online petitions. He talked about online bill markups, hearings and expert roundtables as possibilites for ways to expand the Citizen Cosponsor in the future.
“We want the program to give more to users than is asks of them,” says Lira. “The only way this stuff works is if you have a tolerance for experimentation and a certain level of patience. I’ve been impressed with We the People and that’s very experimental — it’s in the spirit of ‘let’s throw something out there and see if it works.’ Otherwise, there’s the alternative: a conference room of ideas that never happen.”
Over at the Huffington Post, POPVOX founder Marci Harris published a long post with substantive concerns about the citizens cosponsors app. (Disclosure: Tim O’Reilly was an early angel investor in POPVOX.) Harris wanted to know more about who the sponsors of the app are (it’s funded by the Office of the Majority Leader), whether feedback will go to a citizen’s Member of Congress, whether “updates” will be neutral or partisan, who will have access to the list of constituents that is generated by the app, the capability to only express support for a bill, versus opposition, and the privacy policy.
In late 2007 when I, as a staffer, shopped an idea around within Congress to create a public platform for constituent engagement, I discovered that it was nearly impossible to build something like that within the institution of Congress outside of the partisan caucus system. You could either build a Democratic-sponsored tool or a Republican-sponsored tool, but there was no structure for building a nonpartisan CONGRESSIONAL tool (and don’t even get me started on how impossible integration between House and Senate was/is.)* My experience does not mean that nonpartisan strides are impossible — just challenging, and that any effort should be viewed with a critical eye.
Dave Copeland published a more critical take on the enterprise this afternoon at ReadWriteWeb, writing that the House Majority leader missed the mark with the Facebook app, asking a key question:
…why not use the publicly available data on all pending legislation and allow citizens to “co-sponsor” any bill currently being weighed by the legislature?
No matter how we feel about Facebook’s privacy provisions, we’ll be the first to admit that it is the default way to connect with people these ways. We’re not poo-poohing any initiative that harnesses social media that makes it easier for people to get involved in the political process, and we’re not bashing this from a partisan point of view. We’re bashing it from a point of view that cares about transparency.
Cantor’s ploy reeks of partisanship disguised as bipartisanship (nowhere on the main page of the site are the words “Democrat” or “Republican” used). And while the Cosponsor Project may be more participatory, it’s certainly not the “open, visible” platform he promises in his introduction.
That all adds up to a strong critique. As the app stands, however, it’s an important first step into the water for integration of Facebook’s social graph into legislation.
That said, there are some flaws, from an unclear Terms of Service to permissive data usage to a quite limited selection of bills that citizens can follow or support.
In addition, as a commenter on Mashable notes, “Unless there’s a way to show how many people are *against* proposed bills, this will not provide a clear picture as to the support they actually have. You might have a significant number of citizen cosponsors (say 25k), but that number loses its significance if the number of people against is, say 125k. You need both measures in order to get an idea as to whether or not a proposed bill is truly supported.”
I’ve asked Lira a number of followup questions and will file something for Radar if he responds. In the meantime, what do you think of the app and the initiative? Please let us know in the comments, keeping the following perspective from Harris in mind:
As with any startup, the first iteration is never perfect. Reid Hoffman, the founder of LinkedIn, famously said, “if you are not embarrassed by your first release, you’ve launched too late.” In that sense, maybe the Majority Leader is learning from the startup world. In an email response to my questions, Matt Lira, Director of New Media for Majority Leader Cantor, seemed to indicate that there were iterations to come: “As was the case when I publicly defended We the People, this is an evolutionary step – there will be continual progress, as with all these things, towards the desired end of a modernized Congress.”
Update: “We’ve always characterized both MADISON and Citizen CoSponsors as digital experiments that we are both admittedly excited about and that I personally believe have great potential to grow,” responded Matt Lira, director of digital for the House Majority Leader’s office, via email.
“These are the type of projects that will modernize our country’s legislative institutions for the social media age,” he wrote. “We are trying really new things like MADISON and Citizens. We are successfully driving institutional reforms on a structural basis. We are the same people who created docs.House.gov, require a public posting period for legislation, and established a machine-readable document standard. In short, people who have done more to open the House of Representatives than anyone in history.”
With respect to “e-partisanship,” Lira noted that “from the moment it launched, the app included a bill sponsored by a Democratic Representative. Some of the other bills – like the JOBS Act – have widespread support on both sides. I launched with six bills, because I wanted to see how the app works in the field, before making any choices about its wider deployment, should that even be justified.”
This post has updated to include a disclosure about Tim O’Reilly’s early investment in POPVOX.
Last week was “Social Media Week” here in DC. The week featured speakers, panels, workshops, events, and parties all across the District, celebrating tech and social media in the nation’s Capital, including a special edition of the DC Tech Meetup. I moderated four panels, participated in a fifth and attended what I could otherwise. I found the occasion to be a great way to meet new people around the District. Following is a storify of some of my personal highlights, as told in tweets and photographs. This is by no means representative of everyone’s experiences, which are as varied as the attendees. It’s solely what I saw and what lingered from the social media week that was.
http://storify.com/digiphile/selected-highlights-of-my-2012-social-media-week-i.js[View the story “Selected Highlights of my 2012 Social Media Week in DC” on Storify]
E Pluribus Unum 