TITLE II - Enhancing Public Access to the Work of Congressional Committees, Legislative Information, and Votes

Sec. 203. Posting of other committee information. (7 Comments) subscribe to the comments feed

Members rely on myriad information when they deliberate over legislative proposals. Transcripts, reports prepared by federal agencies, and other such resources should be available on committee Web sites.

  1. Each standing and special committee of the Senate and House and each joint committee of the Congress, shall provide access via the Internet to publicly-available committee information, documents, and proceedings, including bills, reports, and official transcripts of committee meetings that are open to the public.

  2. The Clerk of the House and the Secretary of the Senate shall provide in a structured data format a complete list of all public committee proceedings.

7 comments on Sec. 203. Posting of other committee information.

  • For part a, also committee and subcommittee membership. That's hard enough to get in a nice database. And listing markups explicitly might be good too. (Or maybe that's what you mean by bills? We already get actual bills through THOMAS though.)

    For part b, also posting of all three of text, audio, and video of meetings in a timely fashion.

    posted by Joshua Tauberer, GovTrack.us at March 27, 2008

  • Josh is right about Part B. The Minnesota House already posts its committee activities in multiple formats: http://www.house.leg.state.mn.us. The future is being able to watch testimony and, while testimony is going on, look at the major supporters of the candidates or committee members, check out the contributions of the person offering testimony, and see the latest lobbyist contacts with committee members and correlated issues, such as contracts or earmarks.

    posted by Edwin Bender, FollowTheMoney.org at March 27, 2008

  • I would also suggest written testimony (that is submitted in advance).

    posted by ds at March 28, 2008

  • Are you talking about making documents available for download? Should you include guidelines for format - pdf, word doc, html, etc? Also, do you need to anticipate Windows, Linux, Mac OS and future innovations in the bill?

    posted by TValley at March 31, 2008

  • There should be no reason that only lobbyists can get rush transcripts of hearings. Unofficial transcripts of hearings (such as the ones Congressional Quarterly provides) should be made available as soon as they are available.

    That "structured data format" requirement needs to be other places.

    posted by The Cunctator, Hill Heat at March 31, 2008

  • I think there are some very helpful suggestions in here, some of which could be incorporated into legislative language, including providing information on committee and subcommittee membership, and making text, audio and video available. I would love your input as to where else the bill should include "structured data format."

    posted by Lisa Rosenberg, The Sunlight Foundation at April 2, 2008

  • Having rush transcripts available would be great for the public, and is something that congressional staff want access to as well. Offices are looking for audio to text conversion software for the unofficial transcripts, but we have not yet found a high quality package that we can afford. Even if the software was available, there isn't enough video equipment (yet) to record every hearing.

    The House is working on getting more video equipment, and hopefully we'll see rush transcripts publicly available in the near future.

    posted by Rob Pierson at April 4, 2008

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