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Every Bill Coming Before the House Should Soon Be Available Online in Machine-Readable Format

BY Miranda Neubauer | Tuesday, January 17 2012

As of late last week, the House of Representatives began publishing some key legislative documents in machine-readable format at http://docs.house.gov, fulfilling a promise that had been announced last year. Going forward, the site will host a machine-readable version of every bill coming before the House, and currently hosts another structured set of data on all the bills coming before the House in a given week. Read More

Twitter Tiff Stalls Hearings on Stop Online Piracy Act

BY Nick Judd | Thursday, December 15 2011

Rep. Steve King (R-Iowa) said on Twitter that Rep. Sheila Jackson-Lee (D-Texas) was "boring" during markup of the Stop Online Piracy Act in the House Judiciary Committee. Later, Jackson-Lee responded in person by calling his words "offensive." Their offline-offline tiff brought committee proceedings to a grinding halt for several minutes. Read More

The Floor of the U.S. House in the Palm of Your Hand

BY Nick Judd | Tuesday, October 11 2011

Houselive.gov The office of the clerk of the Republican-controlled House of Representatives has released the House's own tablet-friendly website for watching live, streaming video of floor proceedings. Taking a page from ... Read More

Lieberman Introduces Bill to Open Up Congressional Reports

BY Nick Judd | Friday, July 29 2011

While everyone is going nuts over an impending end to the United States' credit line, Sen. Joe Lieberman, independent of Connecticut, and Republican Senators Susan Collins and Tom Coburn, have introduced a bill that ... Read More

Proposed House Rules for the 112th Embrace Functional Transparency

BY Nancy Scola | Wednesday, December 22 2010

The leadership of every new congress gets a chance to shape the institution in their image and likeness, and this incoming Republican majority has, as we've discussed, put a big emphasis on making the body more open to ... Read More

Orientation Week

BY Nancy Scola | Monday, November 15 2010

Photo credit: TalkMediaNews Read More

News Briefs

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Summer Olympics to Stream Live From the UK — For Some

The BBC announced its plans yesterday to broadcast its live Olympics coverage of London's Summer games to PCs, mobile-devices and Internet-connected televisions, Reuters reported.

With a free Olympics application for Apple and Android phones, the BBC says it will be offering up to 24 live streams and video highlights clips, and plans for over 2,500 hours of live programming ... that is only available to viewers in the UK. NBC also plans to stream online, but the majority of free viewing of the Olympics will only be available to existing cable TV subscribers.

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CNN's "Erin Burnett OutFront" Will Have Some Tech-Politics Commentators

This should be interesting: CNN nightly news program Erin Burnett OutFront is out with its list of political commentators for the general election. Some of the names are familiar in Internet-politics-land. The gang includes Upworthy's Maegan Carberry, who was previously director of communications at Rock The Vote; Sasha Issenberg, who ventures into our corner of the political world frequently while documenting the new science of political campaigns for Slate; and Ben Smith, veteran political blogger turned BuzzFeed's top politics editor.

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Copyright Fights Heat Up Again Around Trans-Pacific Partnership Agreement

Rep. Darrell Issa (R-Calif.) today re-released part of a previously leaked February 2011 draft of the U.S. proposal for the Trans-Pacific Partnership pact on his KeepTheWebOPEN website, as he joined calls by advocacy groups to make the currently ongoing deliberations about the treaty more open.

The United States, Australia, Brunei, Chile, Malaysia, New Zealand, Peru, Singapore and Vietnam are all involved in negotiating the agreement, which include provisions about intellectual property and copyright that will play a role in the developing global online economy. A 12th round of negotiations on the deal is now under way in Dallas, Texas. Issa is encouraging users to use his MADISON platform to comment on the document, which the website Knowledge Economy International obtained and released in March 2011.

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House Republicans Relaunch Speaker.gov

House Speaker John A. Boehner's office on Tuesday pulled the wraps off of the Speaker's overhauled web site just in time for a major policy speech about House Republicans' stance on any debt limit negotiations in the coming year. GO

We're All Journalists, Indeed: Obama Campaign Guests Checked Mobile Phones at the Door

Zeke Miller at Buzzfeed, studiously reading pool reports from President Barack Obama's recent campaign fundraisers, catches something: the Obama campaign, per Washington Post pooler David Nakamura, appears to be collecting mobile phones from event attendees at the door, and storing them in plastic bags. At least, that was the case at a Monday event in New York City.

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Americans Don't Elect to Use Americans Elect; 3rd Party Hits Wall?

Is Americans Elect, the third ballot line cum party that hoped to use the Internet to nominate a centrist ticket for president in 2012 dead? It certainly looks that way. But before anyone starts writing the post-mortem, remember that it has ballot lines in half the states--and those could be used by renegade factions in 2012, or possibly in 2014 to run candidates for Congress. GO

Lori Compas, Netroots Challenger to Wisconsin Senate Republican Scott Fitzgerald, Posts Irreverent YouTube Riposte, And It Takes Off

Lori Compas, a Democrat who's challenging Wisconsin state Senate Leader Scott Fitzgerald (R-Juneau) in the state's June 5 recall election, had a rather unusual Mother's Day this year: She spent at least part of the day making a YouTube video with her family. GO

Romney Campaign Targets Obama's Barnard Commencement Speech With Google Ads

New York City area web users looking for details about Barnard College's Commencement Ceremony, where President Barack Obama gave the Commencement Address earlier this afternoon, are also likely to have encountered a targeted ad calling out "Obama's Wasteful Spending" on Mitt Romney's website, as Emily Schultheis from Politico first reported. While she suggested it was targeted at only the zip code where the college is located on Manhattan's Upper West Side, it also showed up on a search for a zip code located in Queens, while accessing the Internet from Lower Manhattan. But it did not show up for an Internet user located outside the New York area. GO

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