2012-04-23T16:29:12Z opencongress.org 2012-04-23T16:29:12Z I am writing as your constituent in the 9th Congressional district of California. I am writing as your constituent in the 9th Congressional district of California. I am writing to ask you to pass legislation requiring all public legislative databases to be published online and in bulk. Congress is lagging far behind current standards on data transparency, and I believe this lack of transparency makes corruption easier, public participation more difficult, and generally limits accountability for the people we elect to make our laws. Specifically, I'm asking for all the data that is published on THOMAS to be made available for download so that citizens and web developers looking to use this public information can do so without having to visit thousands of individual websites. This simple improvement in how Congress handles its data is necessary if progress is to be made on using the web to improve the democratic process in America. The potential for positive social change in open government data can hardly be overestimated. This is one of the key structural, democratic reforms of our time, and handling data that belongs to the public according to the standards of the most ubiquitous public communications platform (i.e. the internet) is just the proper thing for our public officials to do. Please work to ensure that language mandating the Library of Congress to publish the legislative data on THOMAS in bulk is included in the 2013 Legislative Appropriations bill. Sincerely, Daniel Newman 2008-01-28T09:53:21Z View <a href="http://www.opencongress.org/users/MSifry/profile">MSifry&#x27;s Profile</a> 2008-01-16T11:22:52Z View <a href="http://www.opencongress.org/users/donnyshaw/profile">donnyshaw&#x27;s Profile</a>