I’m down in D.C. today for an #opengov event on the Hill, feat. short (two-min.) slide presentations: Kickstarting the 113th Congress.
Updates to come after 2pm ET on micropublishing service – maybe a hashtag will surface to follow along – subscribe to my #opengov Twtr list for starters, if you’re so inclined – but my context here is as follows: with Congress’ historically low popularity and historically high degree of partisan gridlock, what’s needed is comprehensive electoral reforms to restore public trust in the federal legislative process. This would certainly start with full public financing of elections to mitigate systemic corruption of public policy and improve our status quo of rampant regulatory capture (see: big banks, telcos, media giants – cf. first chapter of ToTE - etc.).
Opening up government data (e.g. THOMAS info) to bulk access, strong-as-possible ethics reforms, significant Senate filibuster reform, and immediate public disclosure of lobbying & campaign donations would be a *bare minimum* floor. Anything less than that in 2013 should be responded to with another broad, stop-SOPA style campaign by the networked public sphere & open Web advocates to demand a more accountable, digitally-accessible federal government. As steps towards that, PPF invites our #opengov allies (see the footer of our homepage, for starters) to help us build new free & open-source tools for #GitLaw and more distributed online campaigns to affect the legislative process – before, during, and after crisis points like #SOPA.