Bill Would Require Public Information To Be Online

Andurin writes "A bill that was introduced in the US House of Representatives last week would require all Executive Branch agencies to publish public information on the Internet in a timely fashion and in user-friendly formats. The Public Online Information Act would also establish an advisory committee to help craft Internet publication policies for the entire US government, including Congress and the Supreme Court. Citizens would have a limited, private right of action to compel the government to release public information online, though common sense exceptions (similar to those for FOIA) would remain in place."

Comments

Re:One place where they could mess up...

[mi]

The Left-fringe link you posted blasts Rush Limbaugh for "lying" about the posted bill being unsearchable. What they don't seem to allow for, however, is that the file could've been posted the way Rush describes it initially, and then — perhaps even in response to Rush's criticism — replaced by a properly searchable file.

I, for one, have seen many PDF-files, which were simply scans of printed documents — unsearchable bitmaps...

Re:Funny thing about "common-sense exceptions"...

[Bigjeff5]

A wonderful example of this is the public school system in America.

On average the government spends about $6k per student per year. Private school tuition, however, averages about $3k per student (that's factoring the super-expensive schools, most are cheaper), and you would have a very difficult time arguing that private school students are less educated than their public school counterparts.

So where does that $3k per student go, if not to educate the kids?

One word: Administration.

In a private school, generally the only people above a principal is some sort of board of directors or an owner. Public, however, has an entire management infrastructure above the principal, and in fact the principal of a public school would be considered lower-middle management.

It's the same story with all government programs, and it's the reason they -always- cost significantly more than their private counterpart. Where a private charity can spend 75 cents on the dollar toward whatever charitable issue they are attempting to promote, government programs spend more like 40-50 cents on the dollar. All government programs have significantly more layers than even the worst private programs, and it's simply because it is all run out of a single organization, and so requires a massive administration to manage.