House of Representatives

Congress weighs deep cuts to funding for federal open government data platforms

Several core pillars of federal open government initiatives brought online by the Obama administration may be shuttered by proposed Congressional budget cuts. Data.gov, IT.USASpending.gov, and other five other websites that offer platforms for open government transparency are facing imminent closure. A comprehensive report filed by Jason Miller, executive editor of Federal News Radio, confirmed that [...]

    Improving open government oversight through FOIA reform

    The Freedom of Information Act is one of the primary levers by which journalists, government watchdogs and other organizations can hold the United States government accountable. Today in Washington, the U.S. House of Representatives Committee on Oversight and Government Reform held a hearing on “The Freedom of Information Act: Crowd-Sourcing Government Oversight. The testimony of [...]

      Pew: More than half of US adults went online to get election news in 2010

      The Pew Internet and Life Project released new research today on the Internet and Campaign 2010 that 73% of adult internet users went online to get news, information or otherwise be involved in last year’s elections. That represents some 54% of all US adults, or a majority of the population, now are turning to the Internet [...]

        Open government scrutinized before the House Oversight Committee

        This morning, the Oversight Committee in the United States House of Representatives held a hearing on the Obama administration’s open government efforts. The “Transparency Through Technology: Evaluating Federal Open-Government Initiatives hearing was streamed live online at oversight.house.gov. House Oversight Chairman Darrell Issa (R-CA) asked his Twitter followers before the hearing a simple question “Have you tried [...]

          USA.gov adds 1.USA.gov URL shortener for civilian use

          Last year, the United States General Services Administration (GSA) launched the Go.USA.gov URL shortener at the Gov 2.0 Expo in Washington, D.C. Today, USA.gov soft-launched a way for citizens to create shortened USA.gov URLs as well. Whenever someone uses Bit.ly (or any service that uses Bit.ly, like Tweetdeck or the Twitter app for iPhone) to [...]

            Congress faces challenges in identifying constituents using social media

            Citizens are becoming more influential through social networks and influencing their peers. Research from the The Pew Research Center’s Internet & American Life Project suggests that government 2.0 an important trend, with respect to our understanding of what it means to be a citizen and how our actions influence those of our fellow citizens. The role of the [...]

              Building open source platforms for open government

              As reported in Radar yesterday, Phase2 Consulting acquired two more Drupal distributions. With the acquisition of Open Atrium and Managing News, Phase2 now has the top four Drupal distributions in use in government and the media. It already hosted the OpenPublic and OpenPublish distributions, both of which are used by government and publishing clients. AfghanistanElectionData.org was using Managing [...]

                Malamud: add bulk open government data access to Thomas.gov

                Open government advocate Carl Malamud made a succinct recommendation for improving the United States House of Representatives on January 24th: “Open it up. Bulk access, developer day, an API, long-term open source model. People’s house.” Malamud linked to a letter at House.Resource.org to Representative Eric Cantor (R-VI), House Majority Leader in which he made the [...]

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

                  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 [...]

                    Clay Johnson on key trends for Gov 2.0 and open government in 2011

                    As dozens of freshmen Representatives move into their second week of work as legislators here in the District of Columbia, they’re going to come up against a key truth that White House officials have long since discovered since the heady days of 2008: governing requires different strategies, skills and approaches than campaigning. “House 2.0” may [...]

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