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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."
While "common sense" is terribly rare in government, "exceptions" are never in short supply.
You keep using that word. I do not think it means what you think it means.
If you were blocking sigs, you wouldn't have to read this.
HTML would be logical, so it'll probably be PDF; governments seem to love PDF, not realizing that it's meant for printing, not reading.
Free Martian Whores!
Some other countries have had laws like this for awhile. It's a kind of bill that I can't imagine either party or any politician disliking out of principle.
For every problem, there is at least one solution that is simple, neat, and wrong.
It's a great idea but I find it a bit funny that the legislative branch is not included in this bill.
I went to eat some animal crackers and the box said, "Do not eat if seal is broken." I opened the box and sure enough..
I don't know that we have such a law in Ireland despite a *lot* of online information. Some Irish examples:
Irish Statute Book: http://www.irishstatutebook.ie/
Oireachtas (Houses of Parliament): http://www.oireachtas.ie/ (including all past parliamentary debates)
Citizens Information: http://www.citizensinformation.ie/
All very useful for both everyday use (particularly the latter) and political research (although it would seem our journalists aren't that interested in searching the parliamentary debates to dredge up interesting material - there's a *lot* there but it doesn't appear in the media!)
I can see how the proposed US legislation if properly implemented might help (but might be completely unworkable). In the Irish case, those three websites are the tip of the iceberg as there are a plethora of official sites (even if for example citizensinformation collates and presents much of the pertinent information in one place). Most or all government departments for a start have their own sites. For a lot of government services, people have to act through their local county council - each of these has its own website (some are very proper and comprehensive, others are less so).
Examples of the 36 or so council websites (you might check these e.g. for waste/recycling facilities, contact details for water or local road problems):
Dublin City: http://www.dublincitycouncil.ie/
Cork City: http://www.corkcity.ie/
County Cork (rural south): http://www.corkcoco.ie/
County Mayo (rural west): http://www.mayococo.ie/
County Meath (Dublin commuter/eastern): http://www.meath.ie/
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Rush Limbaugh sayz: "Government loves PDFs because they aren't searchable".
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What exactly is going to be disclosed that isn't already being disclosed? Personally, I'm more interested in what Congress (and the lobbyists) are doing than I am in the President, since the Legislative is the branch that actually creates laws.
Rush Limbaugh: Democrats "have reformatted the [economic recovery] bill -- they've made it a PDF file when they posted it. ... And, so, you can read every page, but you cannot keyword search it. It's not a text file as legislation normally is as posted on these public websites. They don't want anybody knowing what's in this."
http://mediamatters.org/research/200902130016
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if this had been in effect.
Cough-cough, cough-cough, cough-cough...
Why do all these transparency things only apply to the executive branch of government?
I think it should be just as important to the public to know who lobbied which congressman and how as it is to know who talked to the White House about energy policy or heath care.
How about emails? Is there any rational arguments why rules about email archiving and disclosure are different for the different banches.
I'm afraid that the real answer to my question is that Congress always exempts itself from any kind of onerous rule. Just think how angry the public would be if they could read all those blackberry messages sent between members of the same party.
The judicial branch may have better arguments for secrecy, but even there the default rule ought to be openness. Let them argue case by case to exempt different classes of records.
All three branches would argue that public disclosure puts a chilling effect on honest deliberations. True, but all three branches need to deliberate to make decisions. Again, there's no reason to give different treatment to any of the branches.
PDF seems to be the format of choice for this sort of thing. Indeed, in addition the Adobe's own reader, free ones like kpdf exist too and, for some reason, politicians care to preserve the exact formatting of the pages. (Yes, I know, lawyers need that, but they could — and do — just as easily refer to the sections and paragraphs...)
But the format could be perfectly evil by, for example, prohibiting printing of the viewed document... For example, the New Jersey Fire Prevention Code are deliberately non-printable — and even kpdf obeys that restriction (you can still print it by running it through pdf2ps first, but try to teach your mother that).
On top of that, it is also too easy to just scan a printed page into a PDF — as a monolithic (and thus not searchable) bitmap.
Is the law being discussed smart enough to address these two problems? I don't think so...
In Soviet Washington the swamp drains you.
That brings up a good question: how are the documents (especially bills and amendments) created, internally? Do they just have interns punching away at Word documents or have they commissioned some sort of specialized collaboration software?
Your mention of "wiki-style" gets my mind whirling with cool concepts for ways of making bills easier to share between congressmen and more open to the public.
They should make a law that requires transcripts of all discussions with lobbyists to be published.
And define a lobbyist as "anyone who claims to represent the opinions of anyone else".
- The Sigless Wonder
That sounds like a nasty cough.
You should see a doctor.
Brain surgery - it's not rocket science!
Aren't most printed documents meant for reading?
Generating a (generally) fixed representation document in electronic format that matches almost exactly what will be printed, still preserves searchable text, and uses an Open Standard is now a problem?
The Federal government is almost exclusively Microsoft office product dominated. Should publishing the .doc file be preferable? or MS's 'save as HTML' format? I believe Google has adequately demonstrated that PDF is easily searchable/indexable. Conversion software is free. (Ghostscript/viewer is installed by default on many government PC's). I'd say, stick with it.
There is actually a lot of public information "on-line", but it is rendered almost useless because many .gov websites ban spiders from crawling through them and Google (and I assume others) obey this ban. I have actually found some information that was very valuable to me, but only because I found and followed the right links. These pages on a public website under the .gov tld were never indexed and could not be found easily as a result.
I would suggest that the law require that spiders not be banned from open public sites, otherwise it is a sham. I would also suggest that Google considers who really owns the information on .gov sites and considers programming its spiders to not obey such a bogus instruction.
I'm an American. I love this country and the freedoms that we used to have.
Gates or Clinton?
Or (Heaven forfend) O'Reilly?
-dZ.
Carol vs. Ghost
Yes, some PDFs are unsearchable, but the PDF (which Limbaugh was specifically talking about) wasn't one of them. Limbaugh was in error. I posted the direct quote of Limbaugh from Media Matters, because: (1) I know some people don't like MM, so that you wouldn't have to click the link. (2) It was the first result from google. I'm lazy. You're free to google the quote for another source if you care that much. I think I've done everything I possibly can to reasonably accommodate your sensitivities.
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Besides the well-known bitmap that looks like a bad fax there is also an option to purposely make a PDF unsearchable. The text is normally encoded twice, once as the actual shapes in PostScript format and another time as plaintext metadata. I've seen PDFs that were not searchable because this metadata had been disabled, but the text was a real vector and not a bitmap scan.
On the other hand I also have a lot of scanned PDFs that had automatic OCR done by the scanning software, and these are in fact searchable (and the text is selectable although a little off-target sometimes)... So both vector and bitmap encoded PDFs can optionally contain the plaintext required for searching, but this is in no way mandated by the format. So I guess both were right and wrong, and would know that this is not inherent to PDF if they looked a little further...
Yes sir, all relevant information to be published online.
With regards to "Yes Minister".
MMO Quests are like orgasms:
You may solo them, I prefer them in a group.
You're not interested in what Medicare is doing? NASA? The VA? FEMA?
The executive branch is the one that actually spends this country's money (for the most part). It would be nice to see how they're doing what Congress funded them to do.
in three months or so eh?