Save the Date: BDTF Meeting on July 9

The Next Bulk Data Task Force will be on Tuesday, July 9, from 11:00 – 12:00, in Cannon B03 Cannon. If you cannot make it in person, it is possible to join remotely via a Zoom conference. (Contact the Clerk to make arrangements).

On the agenda:
1. Introductions/ BDTF Background
2. Project Updates
• GPO
• LOC – Congress.gov
• Clerk – Comparative print / New Clerk website / HouseLive
3. 2019 Data Transparency Conference
4. Questions/ Discussion

The last meeting was in late October, 2018, and there was a lot of news.

More information on the BDTF can be found on the Legislative Information Resource Hub, and don’t miss the recent Congressional Transparency Caucus event that featured 10 technology tools for legislating and oversight.

Transparency Caucus: innovative tools and technologies for Congress

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 is a run down of who spoke and the services, tools and projects they shared:

Video from the event is available below.

What You Need to Know About the November 2018 Bulk Data Task Force Meeting

This past Thursday’s Bulk Data Task Force meeting had a ton of info about technology in Congress. Here are some highlights:

Info about newly elected members of the House will be online in a structured data format from the House Clerk’s office by Nov. 13, and updated weekly thereafter, an amazing turnaround for data that historically has been hard to come by until January.

The Library is behind on publishing CRS reports. All “R series” reports should be up by the end of April, with the remaining reports expected by Sept. 30th. The statutory deadline was this past Sept. 18th. As of Sunday, CRSReports.Congress.gov had 1,251 reports. In the meantime, you can read all the current reports at EveryCRSReport.com.

A consolidated calendar for House and Senate meetings won’t be launched by the Library for the December 21st deadline, but a first phase will be completed in the first quarter (i.e. by Friday, March 29); it is expected to include information about all congressional proceedings. Integration of links to videos of proceedings may take longer. In the meantime, use GovTrack’s congressional committee calendar.

The refresh of Bioguide.Congress.gov — the website containing the names, photos, and biographies of every member of Congress — is on track. By the end of the March 2019, the information will be published as structured data and put on a secure (HTTPS) website. The long term goal is to create a publicly available API.

The House’s Truth in Testimony forms will become webforms. For now, they’ll generate PDFs that the committees will post individually to their webpages, but the long term goal is for the data to go into a central repository for publication, making it possible to track people as they testify before multiple committees.

GPO released an initial set of 40 Statute Compilations as a pilot on govinfo last week. More is coming. The compilation includes public laws that either do not appear in the U.S. Code or that have been classified to a title of the U.S. Code that has not been enacted into positive law.

Want to see how a draft bill would change the law in real time? The House is still working on it. The target date for making that tool available to Congressional staff is the end of 2019. And to the public? No date is set.

A few quick resources :

— GPO’s Developer Hub is a great resource for data stored on govinfo.gov.

— The Leg Branch Innovation Hub highlights tech-friendly leg branch activities. It includes info on bulk data task force meetings.

— Interested as Congress.gov rolls out new features? They’ve got a listserv for that.

We should note that five of the projects described above were required either in the FY 2017 or FY 2018 legislative branch appropriations bills. When the video from the proceedings are available, we will include it below.

Recap of the 2018 Legislative Data and Transparency Conference

Congress held its sixth annual Legislative Data and Transparency Conference this past week.

Lest we forget, these conference are extraordinary. Hosted by the House of Representatives Committee on House Administration, it pulls together the vast majority of the internal and external Congressional stakeholders to talk in detail about the House and Senate’s operations. It provides a forum for candid questions and conversations with the people who are the decision-makers and the implementers, and changes are often made in response to the conversations.

Unlike prior years, I’m reluctant to do this write up because so much has happened and I’m sure I will leave out important items. I’m publishing my real-time notes here, and I hope that you’ll forgive the impressionistic nature of this write-up.

Legislative Branch Innovation Hub

GPO has launched a legislative branch innovation hub website, built on GitHub, that “seeks to highlight Legislative branch activities that use technology to cultivate collaboration, foster data standardization, and increase transparency.” Wow, right?

GPO is encouraging the public to file pull requests and otherwise to use this as a platform to communicate with Congress about technology and transparency. But even more than that, the website crosses silos and will be used by multiple stakeholders inside Congress. For example, It seems to encompass the Clerk’s vision of a resource for where to find legislative branch data.

Comparative Prints Projects

The House Clerk is continuing its efforts to provide real-time comparison between documents. Its long term version is to deploy platforms to all House staff and others to create, on demand, visuals of changes in important documents. This includes changes between bill proposals and current law; and also how an amendment would change a bill. Here’s an example of a comparative print.

Updated Clerk’s website

The Clerk of the House is continuing to modernize its website, which can be viewed in alpha at Clerkpreview.house.gov. By end of 2018, the Clerk intends to update the help and resources, member election stats, disclosures, and notes there’s a new version of HouseLive.

API for GovInfo

GPO has launched an API for most of the information contained on GovInfo, its gigantic website of government reports and documents. This is a big deal, as the API will provide an incredible useful complement to bulk access. At the moment not included are the documents published in bulk, like legislation, but they are taking requests for additional items to make available through the API.

Senate website

The Senate’s website is now mobile friendly and they’ve completely redesigned the information architecture behind that site.

Ask Alexa

The Clerk’s office came up with a clever project to integrate their data holdings with Alexa, the web app for Amazon’s echo. You can ask whether the House is in session, who your representative is, and what meetings are happening today. Submit ideas for other questions Alexa should answer here.

USLM

A lot of what makes it possible to put legislative information to use is having it generated in a structured data format. The Congress has been working hard to make its information available in the United States Legislative Model (USLM).

The Congress has developed a new USLM schema (version 2.0) and are asking for feedback. They’re also currently working on moving public bills and statutes into USLM, which will empower many of the new tools they wish to develop (such as important updates to legislative drafting).

Congress.gov

The Library of Congress is continuing to make welcome incremental improvements in Congress.gov, such as efforts to track committee names as they’ve changed over time and improve saved alerts. (See their enhancements timeline.)

The Library didn’t answer address questions about integration of CRS reports onto the Library’s website, although they showed a few images and suggested a September 18, 2018 implementation date. (Their implementation plan suggests non-compliance with both the requirements of the law and best practices for creating web resources.) They didn’t get into the joint House/Senate committee calendar, which will shortly be required by law. They did give a presentation on their app challenge, won by a high school student for a neat visualization of treaty info, and some of the experiments being conducted by LC Labs.

Other Presentations

The conference featured a number of great presentations, by Ed Walters’ presentation on “9 ways the government can work with private publishers on public access” stood out. It’s worth watching it on video.

Additional Resources

For more, the conference agenda is here; video of the conference is here; and my recap of prior conferences are here.

House Legislative Data and Transparency Conference Announced

The House will be holding its sixth annual Legislative Data and Transparency Conference. If you haven’t been before, the conference focuses on the Congress’s efforts to make legislative information available to the public as data, and provides an opportunity to hear from and meet with the people working on making it happen.

To RSVP for the July 12, 2018 event, please go here, and for more information about the Conference, visit the Committee on House Administration’s website.

You can find recaps of prior conferences and links to video from the conferences here:

House Passes the Best Leg Branch Approps Bill in 8 Years

On Friday, the House of Representatives passed the best legislative branch appropriations bill since Republicans took power in 2010. Unlike many prior appropriations bills, which often undermined the House’s capacity to govern through deep budget cuts, this legislation contained provisions to strengthen the House and set the stage for further improvements. In addition, it was created in a bipartisan manner, drawing on the hard work of Reps. Kevin Yoder and Tim Ryan and their staff.

Greater transparency

The House included provisions to improve the transparency of its operations. (For more on these items, read the testimony of the Congressional Data Coalition.)

It required the Library of Congress to publish a unified calendar for hearings and markups. This will make it possible — at long last — for the general public to have a central place where it can see all the committee proceedings in one place.

In addition, the House will make committee witness disclosure forms available online. These witness disclosure forms were initially created to track the activities by lobbyists, but the way they are gathered and published makes them unsuitable for that purpose. A central repository of electronic data about witnesses will help bring this disclosure provision to life.

The House will also begin to publish bioguide information as structured data, which will support civil society and others in tracking the work of members of Congress.

The bill also directs GPO to explore the costs of publishing the Statutes at Large in a digital format. These documents are all the bills enacted by Congress. Demand Progress/The Congressional Data Coalition was the first entity to publish a comprehensive set of the law online; and the Library of Congress belatedly followed. But the text of the laws aren’t available as data, which we would need to be able to show how the laws have changed over time, or how a bill would change a law. (For more, read this primer from the Data Coalition).

Capacity to Govern

The appropriations bill also sets the stage for the House to work better.

The House will commission a study on congressional staff pay and retention, including a comparison of congressional staff pay against the executive branch as well as its inquiry into whether staff are receiving equal pay for equal work. This look at the staff who work in the House is timely because it will help ensure that Congress has the staff necessary to do its job, and that some of the problems raised by the #metoo movement are appropriately ventilated and addressed. It should hopefully set the stage to address the House’s undercapacity and diversity problems. (For more, please read our testimony.)

The bill also includes a study by CRS on establishing a technology assistance office and identifying the resources available to members of Congress on science and technology. This change is sorely needed and long overdue, as the recent hearing on Facebook demonstrated. While the House did not include an amendment to restore $2.5 million in funding for the Office of Technology Assistance, the margin in favor improved, and had bipartisan support. (For more, read the testimony of the R Street Institute.)

Similarly, the GAO will conduct a study on avenues for whistleblowers to connect to the proper congressional offices. This could potentially lead to significant cost savings, as improved communications will help root out waste, fraud, abuse, and malfeasance. Ultimately, we believe the House should establish an office that provides internal support and external guidance for whistleblowers. (For more, read the testimony of the Government Accountability Project.)

Funding

In this bill, the House began to reinvest in its staff after a generation’s worth of harmful cutting. The very modest 1.7% increase in the Member Representational Account and the slightly larger increase in the account for House Salaries, Officers, and Employees is essential to the House fulfilling its duties, especially considering overall funding for the House of Representatives is down by 10% since FY 2010. This essential funding for the legislative branch is tiny compared to the enormous amounts spent by the executive branch — 0.1% of the total federal budget — and this legislation will begin to restore a little balance to the branches.

What’s Missing

We are impressed by all that was packed into the legislative branch appropriations bill, but we should note a few items that we would have like to have seen included:

  • Providing select staff with appropriate clearances to support congressional oversight of the intelligence community. (For more, see the testimony of Mandy Smithberger.)
  • Strengthening GAO’s hand when it comes to reviewing waste, fraud, and abuse in the Intelligence Community. (For more, see the testimony of Kel McClanahan.)
  • Improving lobbying disclosure by fixing how data is released to the public. (For more, see the testimony of Sheila Krumholz.)

What’s Next

This upcoming week, Senate Legislative Branch appropriators will consider their own appropriations bill. Demand Progress Action’s written testimony requests that they address the following items:

  • Just as the House has done, the Senate should review Legislative Branch salaries for parity with the executive branch as well as examine internal pay disparities by gender and race.
  • Publish the Senate’s Official Personnel and Official Expense Account Report as data, not just a PDF, as the House does with its Member Representation Account information. This will make it possible to easily follow how the Senate spends money on its self.
  • Create a website for the Legal Treatise known as the Constitution Annotated. The Constitution Annotated explains the US Constitution as it has been interpreted by the Supreme Court, but the way it is currently released to the public online makes that document virtually unreadable.
  • Create a Chief Data Officer for the legislative branch, to help facilitate the publication of Congressional information, provide support to offices, and serve as a point of contact for the public.

In addition, we join R Street’s call for a study into creating a technology assessment office in Congress. And, as a member of the Congressional Data Coalition, we strongly support its call for the Library of Congress to establish a Public Information Advisory Committee that would facilitate the Library working with public stakeholders on how it makes information available to the public.

This has been a remarkably productive subcommittee from a transparency perspective. Just last year it required the Library of Congress to publish CRS reports online, which is something we continue to monitor closely. With the departure of Rep. Yoder to another subcommittee, we will see what the 116th Congress will bring on the House side, and of course will be keeping an eye on the Senate.

Resources

(cross posted)

Save the Date: Bulk Data Task Force Meeting February 8

The House of Representatives will hold its next Bulk Data Task Force meeting February 8 from 10:30-12. More information to come.

What should be included in a GPO (Title 44) Reform Bill

The Committee on House Administration is working on legislation to reauthorize and reform the Government Publishing Office, holding four hearing on “Transforming the GPO for the 21st Century” over the past year. (1, 2, 3, 4). It would not be surprising if a reform bill were to be introduced soon.

The Congressional Data Coalition has not been part of the review process, although some of our members may have been engaged.

I want to share my personal suggestions for items to be included in reform legislation, although I do not claim to speak for anyone else and I have not read any draft legislation.Continue Reading

Recap of the Third Congressional Hackathon

On Thursday the House held its third Congressional hackathon–and it was an even bigger success than last time. (See our recap of #1 and #2.) The hackathon cemented the bipartisan nature of using technology to open up Congress (with opening speeches by Majority Leader Kevin McCarthy and Democratic Whip Steny Hoyer); included the participation of many members of Congress, staff from support offices and agencies, and the general public (including civil society and companies); and featured a dozen demos in addition to break-out sessions.

The following are my notes from the day. Highlights in include the various new tools demonstrated and the work of the modern hearings break-out group. Continue Reading

Congressional Hackathon Set for Nov. 30

House Majority Leader Kevin McCarthy and House Democratic Whip Steny Hoyer are hosting the Third Congressional Hackathon on Thursday, Nov. 30 from 2-6 pm in the U.S. Capitol Building. RSVP here.

The event will bring together a bipartisan group of Members of Congress, Congressional staff, Legislative Branch agency staff, open government and transparency advocates, civic hackers, and developers from digital companies to explore the role of digital platforms in the legislative process. Discussions will range from data transparency, constituent services, public correspondence, social media, committee hearings and the broader legislative process.

They ask everyone submit ideas to be covered in the Hackathon by 6pm Monday concerning (1) existing projects worth sharing (on stage), and (2) projects/problems worth hacking in breakout sessions. For existing projects, individuals will be invited on stage to give quick pitches on projects they’ve been working on that are Congress-related and technologically innovative. For problems worth hacking, participants will break out into groups to work through problems that people suggest in advance.

Once you RSVP, they’ll send more logistical information. There also will be a happy hour the day before co-hosted by Google, the OpenGov Foundation, the R Street Institute, and Demand Progress. RSVP here.

The hackathons are well worth attending and are an excellent example of bipartisan cooperation inside Congress focused on making it a better institution. Here are our write-ups of the first and second hackathons. Also notable was the Congressional hackathon hosted by the OpenGov Foundation and the 2016 legislative data and transparency conference. (I still have to write up my notes from the 2017 conference, but it was great.)

If you’re looking for a list of neat tools for opening up Congress, here’s a 2014 roundup up a congressional toolbox,  a list of sources of structured data about Congress, a list of legislative tools, and a wishlist for new tools.