Tag Archives: House of Representatives

Question Time 2.0: GOP Leader on Quora, Rep. John Garamendi on Reddit

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Last month, Matt Lira, a member of House GOP Leader Eric Cantor’s staff, asked how the United States Congress should use social media to enhance the legislative process on Quora, the hot question and answer website of the moment. To date, he’s received 19 answers, many quite substantive.

Today, Representative John Garamendi (D-CA) asked the Reddit community for “as many questions as he could get through” when he returned to the page at 8 PM tonight.

My name is John Garamendi, and I am a Member of Congress representing the 10th Congressional District in Northern California. Ask Me Anything. I will be back at 8 PM EST/5 PM PST today (Wednesday, March 2) to answer as many questions as I can get through.

I previously served as California Lieutenant Governor, California Insurance Commissioner, Deputy Secretary of the U.S. Interior Department under President Clinton, a state legislator, and a Returned Peace Corps Volunteer.

Garameni offered his House.gov website, YouTube channel and @RepGaramendi Twitter handle and Facebook page for Redditors to find him. When a member of the community expressed skepticism that it was “really him,” he tweeted that “Today I will join @reddit at 8PM EST for an #AMA Ask Me Anything. Thread will appear here: http://www.reddit.com/r/IAmA.”

As of 6:40 PM EST, there were more than 1400 comments on the thread, with many substantive questions voted to the top. The online public will see how frank he’s willing to be in that context.

Whether this is a success or not, it’s good to see representatives exploring new platforms for participatory democracy. They may be far from perfect but the moderation mechanisms on Reddit and Quora, along with their associated communities, hint at the ways that the next generation of e-democracy platforms will evolve. Tune in at 8 PM EST to see if Representative Garamendi takes the top questions on the forum.

UPDATE: The Congressman did, in fact, log in to Reddit and answered questions for nearly an hour. Here’s the the top-voted question, by “anexanhume”:

John,
I am curious as to whether or not you believe that it is possible to be a politician that reaches any major political office (say for instance, state legislator or large city mayor as the least important office) without owing either a person, political organization or corporation some sort of favor for reaching your office. Moreover, is it ever actually possible to vote on your principles consistently without the fear of losing reelection or angering someone who helped you get where you are?

Representative Garamendi answered:

Thank you for the question. It’s a good one. I believe I vote consistently with my principles. Obviously there are some political interests who align with me more than others, and that will be somewhat reflected in whom they choose to support. And like everyone, there are personal opinions about individuals that I sometimes keep to myself for the sake of congeniality and relationships.

So the answer to your question is I honestly don’t think I “owe” any group my allegiance. I’ve been in public policy enough that I doubt there’s a single group left in America that has given me a 100% report card every year I’ve been in office.
Ultimately, public policy is about choices and compromise. When I’m on the House floor, after all the debate is done, after all the deals have been struck, I’m left with a choice: Yes or No. This means I’ve voted for bills that had elements I didn’t like (I was disappointed the public option wasn’t in the Patient’s Bill of Rights for example) and voted against bills that had some good policy (I voted against tax cuts for millionaires and billionaires even though the bill contained an important extension of assistance for people looking for work). It’s clichéd at this point, but we shouldn’t let the perfect be the enemy of the good.

He answered two anonymous questions as well: Do you think a representative is elected to execute his own moral compass? Do you think a representative is elected to reflect the opinion of the constituency?

Good questions without an easy answer, but I’ll try. I fight tirelessly for the people of the 10th Congressional District, and luckily, priorities like transportation investments, job creation, Delta protection, health care access, fighting for veterans, ending the war in Afghanistan, and equal rights are both popular in the district and at the core of my policy goals.

My constituents have chosen me to be their voice in Washington, and that literally means making hundreds of decisions every week. I don’t expect anyone to agree with every decision, and there are times when I have access to more information than the public. Have I taken positions that a majority of my constituents disagree with at one point or another? Probably, but that’s the beauty of democracy. Every two years, the people have a chance to reevaluate who they’ve chosen to represent them.

There’s more on the Reddit thread, including answers on the budget, unions, entitlement reform, the financial crisis and more.

House 2.0: Building out the House.gov platform with Drupal and social media

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As I reported for the O’Reilly Radar yesterday, when the House chose Drupal as the preferred web content management system for House.gov, it made the “People’s House” one of the largest government institutions to move to the open source web content management platform.

The House.gov platform is moving to Drupal but House.gov itself is not on Drupal quite yet. That will probably happen in the next several months, according to Dan Weiser, communications director of the Office of the Chief Administrative Officer in the United States House of Representatives.

In the meantime, the incoming Congressmen and Congresswomen do appear to have adopted Drupal as the platform for their official websites. For instance, Congresswoman Colleen Hanabusa‘s site, below, uses one of several templates on the Drupal platform. Notably, each of the new sites includes default modules for the leaders in the respective verticals in the social media world: Flickr, YouTube, Twitter and Facebook.

Some questions remain about the cost and choices that representatives have as they choose their online Web presences. As NextGov reported today, while House websites can move to the open source platform – they don’t have to do so.

Given the context of citizens turning to the Internet for government information, data and services in increasing numbers, however, a well-designed Congressional website with clear connections to the various digital outposts has moved from a “nice to have” to a “must have” in the eyes of the digitally connected. (For citizens on the other side of the digital divide, the House switchboards are still available via phone call at (202) 224-3121 or TTY: (202) 225-1904).

If that’s a given, then the question is then why Drupal is now the preferred web hosting environment for the House. On that count, “Drupal was chosen because it is open source and widely accepted, therefore allows Members to leverage a large community of programmers which gives them more choices and innovation,” wrote Weiser in an email. “It should also be noted that Members still will have the option to use other platforms.”

Weiser told NextGov that, because, Drupal developers are in every member’s district, “that hopefully means expanded choice and more innovation for our members.”

The current content management system limits the choice of site programmer as well as innovation, said Dan Weiser, communications director for the chief administrative officer, in an e-mail. Drupal, which uses a common framework and code that can be customized, will allow members to leverage a large community of programmers, providing more opportunities for innovation, he added.

The House expects to save some money with the transition to Drupal, since the chief administrative officer will manage the infrastructure and members pay vendors only for development time, Weiser said.

The inclusion of social media is also no longer a novelty in the beginning of 2011. “We expected there would be interest by the incoming freshmen to have social media on their sites; it just seemed natural to offer the option,” wrote Weiser.

[Disclosure: One of the vendors involved in the House’s Drupal effort is Acquia. O’Reilly AlphaTech Ventures is an investor in Acquia.]

House 2.0: A Congressional transition is livestreamed, tweeted and Facebooked

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From my National Journal article today on the GOP transition in the House:

Today is the first day of the 112th Congress of the United States of America. One way that the incoming Republican majority will embrace innovation and transparency in the legislative process will be increased use of video and new media. As Marshall Kirkpatrick wrote at ReadWriteWeb, commenting on CNN’s report yesterday, Facebook will livestream the opening day of Congress.

In a post on Speaker.gov, the incoming speaker invited people to visit the “Pledge to America” Facebook page to view the transition to a GOP-controlled House and comment on the feed.

Key detail: you don’t have to be on Facebook to watch. You can see it right here. As Nick Schaper, the speaker’s director of new media, explained, the speaker’s staff is using the LiveStream.com plugin, available on Facebook, with the standard House of Representatives floor feed available on Capitol Hill to put the feed online. Notably, that also means that citizens and other interested parties don’t have to join Facebook, log in or “Like” the page to watch the transition. The feed at Livestream.com/SpeakerBoehner is available on the open Web and can be embedded on any blog or article.

Livestream.com and Facebook won’t be the only options used by the new speaker’s office either, according to Schaper. When asked whether the speaker would use Current.tv or UStream or YouTube, Schaper said that “we’ve never limited ourselves or worked exclusively with any technology partners on efforts such as this. We’ve used all of the above and I look forward to finding more new tools that can help our members more efficiently connect with those they represent.”

UPDATE: Notably, the new speaker’s remarks were livetweeted in sync with his speech by the new @SpeakerBoehner account on Twitter. It’s safe to say that, at least at this moment, Boehner was not tweeting himself.

new TWTR.Widget({
version: 2,
type: ‘profile’,
rpp: 5,
interval: 6000,
width: 600,
height: 300,
theme: {
shell: {
background: ‘#1d0087’,
color: ‘#ff0a0a’
},
tweets: {
background: ‘#fcfcff’,
color: ‘#a60c13’,
links: ‘#303df0’
}
},
features: {
scrollbar: false,
loop: false,
live: false,
hashtags: true,
timestamp: true,
avatars: false,
behavior: ‘all’
}
}).render().setUser(‘speakerboehner’).start();

For more on social media, transparency and the 112 Congress, click on over the full article at National Journal.