Blog - Articles Tagged 'THOMAS'

It's 2012 - we don't have hover skateboards, and we don't have #opengov. We could have the latter, at least, in the here and now, benefiting every American, if the systemically corrupt U.S. Congress was capable of reforming itself (which it is currently, unfortunately, not). (Right, '80's movie art, w/ connotations of liberation by force and yet a certain datedness... it's past time.) 

I'm writing this on the train from NYC to D.C., en route to the Conference on Legislative Data & Transparency to be held Thursday, Feb. 2nd, 9am - 5pm ET - agenda here, webcast live here, micro-publishing updates here.

This shouldn't be a negotiation - rather, I'm here to call for liberation of public legislative data via bulk access and moving towards an open API for THOMAS. Then proceeding aggressively to API enhancements for Congressional offices to continually engage with constituent communications - for a living, breathing deliberative democracy - aided by open technology.

Important blog post just published by our colleague John Wonderlich over on our partners the Sunlight Foundation: House Speaker Boehner & Majority Leader Cantor have sent a letter instructing the House Clerk to work towards "publicly releasing the House's legislative data in machine-readable formats". This is just a very first baby step towards comprehensive #opengovdata in the legislative branch and federal government in general, and is just the start of a more transparent & deliberative democratic process, and will require much public watchdogging & accountability to the #opengov community, but amounts to a solidly encouraging step.